Become a Child Worker and Advance Your Career
Working with kids is a fantastic experience. We change more during childhood than at any other point in our life. People who have the good fortune to work with children can observe these changes, and those who are knowledgeable about child psychology can forecast how children of various ages will behave as well as how their present behaviour and circumstances may affect their future development.
Why Should I Study Child Psychology?
One of the pillars of psychology is child psychology. Numerous different areas of research in the study of psychology are informed by knowledge of child psychology. The optimal starting point for further psychology studies is consequently an understanding of child psychology, making it one of the greatest study options if you wish to work with children as a vocation.
Learn the answers to questions like “How do parenting styles influence childhood behaviour?,” “When can I expect a child to speak?,” “Why do children form attachments with their mothers?,” “How much of a child’s behaviour is due to genetics?,” and “How do children learn” by enrolling in our Child Psychology course.
This course will train you to think critically, observe behaviour, and analyse data in ways that will inspire you to approach your studies from the perspective of a social scientist.
The significance of early affects on later adult behaviour will be better understood by counselling or psychology students who incorporate this course as part of their education.
ACS student opinions: “It’s really fascinating. I’ve always found children’s behaviour to be fascinating. Having a clear knowledge of my children’s nature and nurture aids in my work and interactions with them. I made the best decision possible when selecting my course. The ACS deserves the praise.” Judy Augustine, childcare worker; Australian course in child psychology.
Lesson Structure
There are 12 lessons in this course:
- Introduction to Child Psychology
- Levels of development, nature or nurture, isolating hereditary characteristics, cause versus correlation, continuity versus discontinuity, cross sectional and longitudinal studies, reliability of verbal reports
- The Newborn Infant
- The interactionist approach, range of reaction, niche picking, temperament, stimulus seeking, emotional disturbances during pregnancy
- States and Senses of the Infant
- Sensory discrimination, infant states (sleep, inactivity, waking, crying, etc.), why psychologists are concerned with defining and describing infant states, habituation, soothing a distressed baby, sensory discrimination, depth perception, oral sensitivity
- Learning
- Habituation, vicarious learning, classical conditioning, operant conditioning, reinforcement, the importance of learning control, etc.
- Emotions and Socialisation
- Producing and recognising emotional expression, smiling, biological explanation, perceptual recognition, mother-child attachments, Freudian approach, Bowlby’s approach, social learning approach, Harlow’s approach, role of cognition in attachment formation, day care
- Cognitive Development
- Developing the ability to reason
- Language Development
- Is language ability learned or innate? Social learning approach, hypothesis testing approach, under-extending and over-extending
- Intelligence
- Measuring intelligence, cultural bias, IQ, testing intelligence as a tool
- Socialisation … Part A
- Social cognition, self-awareness, awareness of others, development of empathy, taking turns, having a point of view/perspective, social scripts, pretend play
- Morality
- Moral development, aggression and altruism, Freud, Piaget and Kohlberg on moral development
- Sexuality
- Freud’s psychosexual stages of development (oral phase, anal phase, phallic phase, latent phase, genital phase), gender and role identity, psychosocial development
- Socialisation … Part B
- Family influence, discipline, siblings, family structures, school influence, peer influence, acceptance and rejection, modelling, reinforcement.
Each lesson culminates in an assignment which is submitted to the school, marked by the school’s tutors and returned to you with any relevant suggestions, comments, and if necessary, extra reading.
Aims
- Determine the social and environmental components that make up the optimum environment for a developing youngster.
- Describe how the interaction of hereditary and environmental factors affects the development of the child’s personality.
- Provide evidence that a certain personality trait might be influenced by genetics.
- Describe how the interaction of hereditary and environmental factors affects the development of the child’s personality.
- Provide an example of the sort of learning in which a stimulus that typically elicits an unconditioned response is changed to elicit a conditioned response.
- Describe in detail how you would use operant conditioning to motivate a child to interact with others.
- Use the perceptual recognition theory to explain newborns’ smiling and dread.
- Analyze the differences between Freud’s, Harlow’s, and Bowlby’s theories on how mother-child relationships develop.
- Describe reflection-impulsivity and the role it plays in brain development.
- Describe the advantages and disadvantages of the social learning hypothesis for understanding language acquisition.
- Describe your reasoning for believing that intellect is generally genetically determined or not.
Concerning Child Psychology
The study of children’s psychology is quite interesting. In fact, for a while now, it has routinely ranked as one of the most sought-after research topics at colleges and institutions throughout the globe. This is possibly due to the fact that understanding children’s behaviour can also help us better understand ourselves. We were all children once, after all.
The study of child psychology focuses on how kids change and grow from infancy to puberty. While some of these changes are related to physiological adjustments, others are the result of experiences and outside factors. Despite the fact that every child is different, research has enabled us to identify developmental pathways that affect every child.
You will study typical patterns of early development and how they relate to things like language development, learning, and cognitive development in this course. You’ll come across the theories of some of the greatest minds who have contributed to this discipline, including Bowlby, Piaget, and Freud. After finishing, you will have a far greater knowledge of why children of various ages behave in particular ways and how you would anticipate them to act.
It is common practise to distinguish between the cognitive, emotional, and social facets of behaviour for practical reasons. The purpose of this differentiation is merely to aid our understanding and learning. In actuality, there is interaction between the various reasons of behaviour. Whenever time an issue arises in a development region, it typically spreads quickly to neighbouring places as well. Finding these connections is one of the main goals of child psychology research.
Child psychology has an impact on many different professionals’ daily job, as well as anybody who has children or who looks after them, not just psychologists. Many people encounter circumstances where they would benefit from a deeper comprehension of children’s thoughts and behaviours in order to better support them.
The study of children’s psychology is a dynamic, multifaceted field.
Nature vs. Nurture in Temperament
The impact of “nature” and/or “nurture” on development has been a topic of discussion in the field of psychology for many years.
The majority of adults have seen firsthand the vast variances in temperament between various newborn babies. Some infants appear to cry or become agitated at the smallest provocation, leaving parents with many restless nights. Some appear to be much friendlier; they never stop grinning and hardly ever cry. You will hear from many mothers who have raised both kinds. Is this proof of a personality trait that is inherited or is it just a coincidence?
It is frequently believed that such personality traits are inherited if they are stable, or remain constant throughout the child’s growth. Studies have shown that 70% of individuals with behaviour disorders had parents who thought they were challenging infants. There are two ways to view this:
- It is inherited to have a challenging temperament, which persists throughout life and finally results in behavioural issues (nature).
- Challenging newborns are handled differently by their parents, who may provoke negative reactions. As a result, these youngsters may experience social challenges in the future. The subsequent behavioural illnesses are a reaction to harmful interventions, which in turn came about as a result of the trouble they produced as infants.
It has been discovered that moms do not typically raise challenging infants very differently from others, but as kids become older, parents do tend to react more negatively, especially if these issues remain. Under pacifying parental care and circumstances, it has been discovered that the temperament of challenging babies is relatively simple to change. Also, it has been observed that children’s temperaments frequently alter significantly in their early years. Conclusion: Despite possible inherited influences, temperament is easily changed by external conditions.
Nonetheless, there is evidence to suggest that hereditary factors may play a significant role in the influence of some personality traits. They include exercise, sensory seeking, and socialisation.
The advantages of taking this course
Understanding child psychology can help you understand how children’s minds grow from infancy through adolescence and what influences their behaviour and thought processes, including learning, parenting styles, reinforcement, and genetics.
If you deal with kids, you’ll learn a lot about how they behave and be able to use that information in practical settings.
Career Routes
Careers in psychology, counselling, and teaching are most relevant to understanding child psychology. On the other hand, specialists in a wide range of other fields gain from a deeper comprehension of childhood development.
The following professions, or those who wish to work in them, are the target audience for the child psychology course:
youth work
Counseling for children and adolescents
educational counselling
Teachers, teacher’s aids, and other school personnel
Pediatric psychology
social service
kid care
services for kids
healthcare and medical careers
The Child Psychology course can be utilised for personal growth, as well as a foundation for further education and certification.
This course might also be a helpful starting point for people who are thinking about pursuing a career in child care, whether it be as a first job or a change of direction. You might get the head start you need and the inspiration you want to move through with your plans by taking this course.
