Cognitive Development.

 
The idea of identical babies with blank slates for minds had been under attack for some time. The idea was plainly unacceptable for animals. How could you explain the bee dance and the homing ability of pigeons, among many other behaviours? The idea that the human mind was something special and apart from the animals was fading rapidly. Gynecologists were asserting that every new baby has a unique little personality of its own. It might have been a subjective judgement, but it carried weight. The action of a new born baby in searching for its mother's breast and, having been guided to it, being able to suckle, was a major stumbling block. If it was simply a learned response, it was an exceedingly complex one. Even though a baby's throat is structurally different from when it is older, it still requires the co-ordinated movement of a number of muscles.

Social learning theory was all very well, but more and more psychologists were becoming dissatisfied with its simplistic approach. How could it explain the constancy of certain human behaviours across every culture of the world? From the mid-thirties, working in the psychoanalytic tradition, Bowlby ⁽¹⁾ had asserted the importance to every child of a maternal bond.

The inspiration for this was the work of Lorenz in what is known as filial imprinting in young animals. This is, by now, a fairly familiar phenomenon. At some time after hatching, a duckling forms a bond with its mother. In the absence of a mother, it will bond, or imprint on, another object, such as the researcher him, or her, self. Bowlby saw this as a protective phenomenon, by which, in case of danger, the youngster would be quickly able to find a place of safety. Whether such a bond is formed between the human baby and its mother, and to what extent, remains controversial.⁽²⁾

However, though this was qualified to conceive of what was called a 'primary attachment figure' which might be a nanny, father or nurse, the distress that infants show, when parted from their carer was demonstrated in almost every culture in the world, both traditional and modern.⁽³⁾ Only in Japan were there problems, it is said - the infants' distress was so acute that the study had to be terminated.

A landmark study showed the behaviour of very small children on entering hospital⁽⁴⁾, which led to parents being allowed to stay with them, while others showed the effects of total deprivation. Studies of children on being reunited with their care-giver showed that there are consistent behaviours found in children all over the world.

These studies would seem to show that infants have behaviours in common, regardless of their culture or their learning experience.

We have already referred to cross-cultural studies in the work by Bowlby and his successors on maternal attachment. A central theory in child development is that by Piaget. Successful adaptation involves the ability to deal with a wider environment. Animals tend to deal with things close to them, and according to Donaldson,⁽⁵⁾ this is true of children also. Development consists of gradually learning to handle a widening spatial and social environment.

Following Piaget's schema, Kohlberg⁽⁶⁾ suggested that a two-or three year-old learns that there are two kinds of person and that he, or she, belongs to one of them. Thus the child may be able to tell you that it is a boy or girl, but it doesn't mean very much. A boy believes he could become a girl if he wanted to by playing girls games or wearing dresses or growing hair long, and vice versa. Later on it can classify people on the basis of their genitals. (Though, as suggested earlier, this might be unlikely in Victorian England)

Some time between four and six years, comes what Kohlberg called gender stability, the understanding one stays in the same gender throughout life. As an example, he suggested that the child can answer questions like "When you were a little baby, were you a boy or a girl?"

It seems that, between the ages of three and about six, there is a period of experimentation, as a child sets out to find out what the gender-concept means. Nursery nurses often speak of little boys who select little girls' clothes in dressing-up games.

For most, it simply experimentation. For a few boys, there is a persistent preference for female stereotyped toys and behaviour. Most such children will become gay, but there are some few children who can never adapt themselves to their assigned role and become transsexuals. Similarly for girls, though it seems that cross-gender stereotyped behaviour is more tolerated in girls than in boys,

Kohlberg's age of gender constancy begins at age of six or seven years, and coincides with Piaget's concrete operational period, where the child can manipulate objects in its mind in a complex way, but visualises them in concrete terms. For Kohlberg, the child finally grasps the idea that gender stays the same with time and across situations. It learns that gender does not change with age or size, or by wearing clothes or having a different hairstyle.

Many transvestites say they started 'dressing' around the age of seven, or in puberty. Both of these ages, in everyone, seems to coincide with some sort of life change, both social and in the body chemistry.

There are problems for Kohlberg's theory. Older children seem to be more imitative of same sex models. Whereas Kohlberg believed that gender was the cause of imitation, rather than the result of it, it has been shown that most children prefer the toys of a particular sex long before they copy same (or opposite) sex models.

Money's claim⁽⁷⁾ that gender reassignment is possible before three, and difficult afterwards is a problem for Kohlberg's schema, since the latter is saying that the child does not attain a stable sense of gender until later. On the other hand, even Money has his critics, since it has also been shown three year-olds have already started to prefer same-sex toys and playmates. In fact, though the supposed critical age was later reduced to two, there is evidence that even this age is too high and we will returning to this topic later.

Bibliography and good reading.

1. Bowlby J, (1953) Child Care and the Growth of Love, Harmondsworth: Penguin. (bookshelf)
2. Hrdy, S.B., (2000) Mother Nature London: Vintage
3. Ainsworth, M., Blehar, M., Waters, E., Wall, S., (1978) Patterns of Attachment, Hove: Erlbaum.
4. Robertson and Robertson (1971) uncited reference in Gross.R.D., (1987) Psychology: The Science of Mind and Behaviour,(p466-468) Hodder and Stoughton.
5. Donaldson, M., (1978) Children's Minds, Glasgow: Harper Collins. (bookshelf)
6. Kohlberg (1966) summarised in Gross.R.D., (1987) Psychology: The Science of Mind and Behaviour, Hodder and Stoughton.
7. Money. T., Ehrhardt, A., (1972) Man and Woman, Boy and Girl, The differentiation and dimorphism of gender identity from conception to maturity, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. (Now in reprint by Aronson)