Human Development and Family Studies
Human Development and Family Studies tests change and continuity across the lifespan and how family contexts shape development. Expect developmental domains, stage theories, parenting styles, attachment and family life-cycle concepts.
Core rules and concepts
- Development is multidimensional: physical, cognitive, language and social-emotional. It is lifelong and influenced by both heredity and environment.
- Piaget's stages: sensorimotor (birth–2 years), preoperational (2–7), concrete operational (7–11) and formal operational (11+). Concrete operational children conserve and classify but reason mainly about concrete situations.
- Erikson's psychosocial tasks include trust versus mistrust in infancy, industry versus inferiority in middle childhood and identity versus role confusion in adolescence.
- Attachment patterns include secure, insecure-avoidant, insecure-ambivalent/resistant and disorganized. Sensitive, consistent caregiving supports secure attachment.
- Parenting styles: authoritative (high warmth, high expectations), authoritarian (low warmth, high expectations), permissive (high warmth, low expectations) and uninvolved (low both).
Worked example
A 7-year-old insists that a tall thin glass holds more juice than a short wide glass, although both hold the same amount. This is failure of conservation, typical of preoperational thinking. By roughly 7–11 years, concrete operational thinking usually allows conservation when the child can mentally reverse the pouring. The reasoning uses stage expectations rather than treating the answer as a measure of intelligence alone.
Traps that cost marks
Do not treat stage ages as rigid cutoffs; milestones occur within ranges. Assimilation fits new information into an existing schema; accommodation changes the schema. Authoritative parenting is not authoritarian parenting. Attachment is not the same as simple bonding and is not judged from one brief separation.