Developmental Psychology Reflection Paper

Leading up into class I was both bit nervous and excited, since this was the first time in years that I haven’t taken a class outside of my particular major. As I was going through the course schedule, I had in my mind that I did not just want to take any old class just because I need it to graduate. So I came across developmental psychology and thought to myself that this would be a good fit because I enjoy learning about other people. Once class started, I was a little confused of how it the class was going to be because I already had the thought in my head that I was going to be learning about people older in age, rather than learning about how babies develop before they are born. After understanding more about what I was going to learn

There are two ways that cause use to develop, these are by maturity and learning experiences. Now someone that observes development psychology is considered a developmentalist. Describing, explaining, and optimizing development are three major goals a developmentalist must pursue to fully understand how someone develops. Describing involves understanding patterns in change, they are normative development and ideographic development. Normative development is a typical pattern of change and ideographic is a variation in the patterns. The second goal is explaining, this is asking the question why people develop the way they do and why some people may develop differently. Optimizing is the third goal, which is the more hands on approach by applying what they have just learned and trying to help people develop into a positive direction. The introduction to class was important to me for understanding how development works and how developmentalist may observe other

Survival reflexes are the basics like breathing or swallowing and primitive reflexes are more like stepping or swimming. Newborns also exhibit daily activities that are predictable and healthy for their development, this is call infant state. These can be anything from falling asleep during feeding or a baby moving quickly when wide awake. As an infant moves into childhood and a child moves into their adolescences you begin to see signs of physical growth, which effects their brain, body, motor skills, and sexual development. You will notice these changes by their height and weight, changes in body proportions, skeletal development, and their muscle development. An example of these changes would be a young teenage boy hitting puberty and hearing the change of deepness of his voice. There are many different changes that boys and girls both deal with when they are growing up, the fascinating part is being the parent that watches these kids