Human Growth and Development
Concepts of Human Growth and Development
School is the setting in which cognitive development takes centre stage; teaching is about helping children to process and interpret information and to develop reasoning and problem-solving skills (see Chapter 4, HGD: 83). However, there is a close connection between cognitive and emotional development (HGD: 84), and Penny understands this very well in Caitlin’s case as she notices the anxiety and lack of confidence that is holding her back, and sees how she is more easily able to learn in the context of a supportive one-to-one relationship.
Attachment theory tells us that children with a secure attachment will be confident to explore new experiences and learning, safe in the knowledge that they have a secure base to which to return (HGD: 89). Caitlin’s anxiety is a product of her very different life experience; a disrupted attachment history, the trauma of witnessing domestic violence and her current situation in a household where she is receiving constant messages from Lee about her worthlessness.
She is likely to believe that the family’s problems are her fault, and that her bedwetting is a cause of her mother’s and sisters’ unhappiness. Lee’s messages will have been reinforced by the kind of magical thinking that is characteristic of children in Piaget’s pre-operational stage of cognitive development (HGD: 90) where they can only see things from their own point of view and cannot yet conceptualise different aspects of a situation. It is common for children at this stage to feel responsible for things that are not their fault, like their parents’ unhappiness. In terms of cognitive development, Caitlin at the age of 8 should now be making the transition to the concrete operations stage, but the emotional aspects of the pre-operational stage will remain with her, reinforced by the scapegoating process in her family.
She is also receiving strongly gendered messages (see Case Study G) about her lack of worth compared with her younger brother Josh, and this combined with the bullying she experiences from him at home, is likely to be one factor (there may be others) making her anxious around the boys in her class, so that she withdraws from contact with them.
Caitlin’s social isolation at home and at school is one of the factors that is affecting her learning. Vygotsky’s view of cognitive development (HGD: 95), unlike Piaget’s better-known theory, emphasises the importance of social interaction and co-operation in learning, as adults, but also more advanced peers, provide the scaffolding (HGD: 96) that enables a child to progress to the next level of understanding. More one-to-one support in the classroom could help with Caitlin’s learning, and with the social integration that would facilitate it.
We noted in the discussion of the Dudley family that Caitlin may be becoming a scapegoat in the family, being blamed for all its problems. This pattern is part of the family system (HGD: Chapter 10), and meets a need for the family as a whole, and not just Caitlin. It is in danger of being repeated in the classroom, as it will be a familiar role for Caitlin, and maybe that is what is going on when her classmates complain about her sexualised talk, in which they could have been just as involved as her.
Caitlin has learned in her family that anything she does which attracts attention is likely to lead to harsh criticism or bullying. This explains her reluctance to risk making mistakes in her school work; her safest course is to keep her head down and do nothing. In the context of learning theory this kind of behaviour is known as learned helplessness (HGD: 114). But in spite of this, she does attract a lot of negative attention in her family through her bedwetting, something over which she has little control. This is not uncommon in 8-year-olds, and can have a number of physical causes. It can also be associated with emotional stress and family dysfunction, particularly if the child has previously been dry at night (Watson, 2010: 91). A study of children at the point of coming into local authority care found a much higher incidence of bedwetting than in the general population (Sempik et al., 2008: 227). Bedwetting responds well to treatment, but it may be that in the chaotic Dudley family, no one has thought to take her to the GP to initiate this. Family therapists using a family systems approach (HGD: 224), sometimes speculate that symptoms such as bedwetting serve a function for the whole family, perhaps by distracting family members from other problems.
References
Sempik, J., Ward, H. and Darker, I. (2008) ‘Emotional and behavioural difficulties of children and young people at entry into care.’ Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry 13 (2): 221–233.
Watson, L. (2010) ‘Enuresis’. InnovAit 3 (2): 91–94