Child development: Gesell

Arnold Gesell (1880-1961) studied children to observe and record their growth and development. He divided normative development into 10 areas, named gradients of growth. He was a maturationist, so ignored outside influences although he understood the conflict between nature and nurture, and identified the developmental milestones which are widely used today.

He categorised development into 10 areas.

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Child development: Bowlby

John Bowlby (1907-1990) was a psychoanalyst best known for his work on attachment. He thought that many mental health and behavioural problems stemmed from the first years of life, and that babies are born with an inbuilt need to form an attachment to one figure – usually the mother. This primary bond was the most important attachment and formed the pattern for all other relationships in a person’s life. Children should be cared for by this person up until the age of 2, ideally the age of 5, and any disruption avoided. Short term separation, he thought, led to distress which was separated into 3 stages.

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Child development: Erik Erikson

Erik Erikson (1902-1994) was a psychoanalyst who was particularly interested in the way that a child’s personality develops. He divided development into 8 ‘ages’ or stages that children need to progress through to become self-fulfilled adults. Like many other theorists Erikson defined each stage by a conflict that need to be resolved. Erikson’s theory focuses on conflict between a positive and a negative emotion and lasted from birth right through to the end of life. His theory also put society and a person’s relationships with others at the centre of their development.

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How to poach-proof your nanny relationship

A good nanny is a prize, one that other families may stoop low enough to try to steal from you. Nanny poaching can happen anywhere from the school gate to your own garden gate and it can be anyone including your next door neighbour or anyone close friend.

Some will say that a nanny who allows herself to be poached wasn’t happy in her job anyway. After all when you’re in a content and committed relationship you’re not casting around for a better partner! If you do sweep the room occasionally it’s just eye candy, and while your nanny might periodically flick through job ads it isn’t necessarily a sign of discontent. Poaching is more dangerous. Poaching is the equivalent of someone coming up to you in a bar, buying you a drink or six while whispering sweet nothings in your ear and ultimately enticing you to come home with them.

You can’t stop someone coming up to your nanny and buying them that drink, but you can make sure their sweet nothings fall on deaf ears and here’s how…

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Child development: Piaget

Jean Piaget (1896-1902) focused on a child’s cognitive development and was the first psychologist to study cognitive development closely. He used the term Schema to explain how a child learns to understand the world around them. What a child does influences how they think about the world, and the new information they gain from redoing the activity changes how they think, modifying or extending the schema. Development is a process of reorganising these schemas and allowing a child to progress to the next stage of development.

When a child is in a state of equilibrium their schemata can explain the world around them. Children have to have assimilate, or gather, information about the world to explain what is happening around them according to their existing schemata. As they experience new things they cannot explain using their existing schemata Piaget felt they were in disequilibrium and needed to modify their schemata to create equilibrium, a leap in development. The process of modifying schemata and finding equilibrium is called accommodation.

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Child development: Freud

One of the first child development theorists was Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). Freud believed that all children had innate, basic aggressive and sexual desires, and the way that parents and other adults dealt with these desires would determine a child’s personality when they were grown up.

According to Freud babies are born with a selfish ‘ID’ which only cares about gratification of selfish urges. Later a child develops an ‘EGO’ as they learn that not all of their wants and desires can be fulfilled. The Ego is more realistic than the Id but still self-centred. Last to develop is the ‘SUPER-EGO’ which works with the Ego to control the Id and represents moral values. The Super-Ego is capable of acting altruistically and suppressing the desires of the Id and Ego which are self-serving.

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Bath Times and Nursery Rhymes

Ever wondered what NNEB training was like 50 years ago? A far cry from now, Pam Weaver’s memoirs talk about her first job as a nursery assistant in a children’s home, her training and post-qualifying experience as a nursery nurse there and then her time as a private nanny, stints as a maternity nurse and her training on a neonatal unit.

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What would Fiona do?

We were kindly sent a copy of Fiona Cooke’s ‘What would Fiona do?’ to review. Written by a practising maternity nurse, Fiona combines her midwifery training and years of experience with a gentle and compassionate tone to inform and guide new parents (and childcarers) through the first few months.

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