Social Development

Paper Summary:

This paper studies social development, which is the process that enables people to form friendships and intimate relationships, to get married and to build families. According to this paper, social development begins in infancy and continues through late adulthood, with marked changes occurring at each stage. The paper traces social development through each of the following stages:Iinfancy and toddlerhood, early childhood, middle childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, middle adulthood and late adulthood. For each stage, the paper defines and notes the dominant characteristics of development, offers the author's personal observations as it relates to these characteristics, and cites relevant research.

From the Paper:

"In early childhood, children become more social and interact more with other children in the form of play. As a child develops, the way the play changes as they become more and more social. The first stage is nonsocial activity, where children play on their own. This changes and becomes partly social children begin parallel play. This means that they play near other children and often play in similar ways, but do not actually interact with the other child. The next stage is associative play, where children begin to interact by swapping toys and talking to each other about their play, but still do not actually play together. The final stage is cooperative play, where children share playing. For example, they might build something with blocks together. I have observed this in children and have seen how younger children will watch each other and copy each other, but will not actually play together. I have also noticed that young children often don't seem able to manage playing with other children. For example, I have seen an older child try to join in with a younger child and help them build a castle with blocks. The younger child didn't seem to understand this and became upset. It seemed that the younger child assumed that the older one was taking their game away from them. Another way that social development changes in early childhood is that the child begins to form friendships. As Berk (251) notes, "As yet, friendship does not have a long-term, enduring quality based on mutual trust." Instead, a friend is just someone you play with, share with, and spend time with. Berk does note that early friendships provide social support to children and helps them to fit in."

More papers on Social Development :

• Book Review # 103718 : "Social Development"
• Term Paper # 6411 : "Social Development of Children with Bipolar Disorder"
• Research Paper # 59626 : "Social Development"
• Comparison Essay # 45363 : "Smith and Marx's Theories of Social Development"

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