The historical person I chose to use in this exercise of applying human development theories is Abraham Lincoln. He was born in 1809 and died in 1865 when he was assassinated. To begin this exercise I will describe what Mr. Lincoln’s life was like and influences that helped to create the person that he became. The study of how people change from birth to old age is called developmental psychology. Because everything about a person changes over the life span, developmental psychology includes all the other topics that psychologists study, such as thinking language, intelligence, emotions, and social behavior.
But developmental psychologists focus only on a certain aspects of these topics and that is how and why changes in them occur as people grew older. I will be focusing on his early childhood development. In trying to understand both the “what” and the “why” of human development, psychologists focus on three of the major themes. The first is individual characteristics versus shared human traits. While there are many common patterns to human development, each person’s development is also in some ways unique.
Abraham Lincoln’s life progressed through the stages of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. He married had children, worked and became president of the United States. Even though his developments were common milestones, in other ways Mr. Lincoln’s development was not like everyone else’s. During that period in time he was born into a very hard life. His father was a farmer and at the age of 9 his mother died of milk sickness, a common frontier disease caused by drinking milk from cows poisoned by snakeroot. His father married again giving him 3 step-sisters.
His new mother was said to have brought order into the household and it was her influence that made Abraham and his older sister attending schools. He was an avid reader that gave him his future opportunity. Abraham worked steady and at first was a wood chopper and rail splitter at the age of 22. This combination of shared and distinctive elements is characteristic of all human development. We all take essentially the same developmental journey, but each of us travels somewhat different roads and experience events in different ways (Howells, 1960). The second theme in the study of human development is stability versus change.
Development is characterized by both major life transitions and continuities with the past. Mr. Lincoln’s life is an excellent example. The death of his mother and the blending of two families were major turning points in his development. His leaving home at age 22 to settle in New Salem, an industrial village on the banks of the Sangamon River yet even through these changes these transitions brought, he is still the person he had been. His insatiable thirst for knowledge and shyness followed him all the way until his death by the hands of John Wilkes Booth.
The last of the themes deals with hereditary versus environment is center to developmental psychology. Human development can be explained by a combination of biological forces and environmental experiences. These two constantly interact to shape how people grow. If Mr. Lincoln had been born into a family of prestige or had chosen to not run for office he would have been someone quite possibly I would not be using as a reference for a project (Lerner, 2002). To begin prenatal development, the stage of development from conception to birth, is the same with every human being.
The only differences would be if his mother would ingest anything that could have damaged the fetus, such as drugs or alcohol, poor diet or physical injury. Genetic factors can play important parts in the development of infants and in recent times this study has been revolutionary. Research has disproved the old idea that neonates, or newborn babies do nothing but eat, sleep and cry, while remaining oblivious to the world. They are much more aware and competent of the world than what was first thought. Newborns are born with reflexes such as those that control breathing and some even enable babies to nurse.
The grasping reflex causes newborns to cling vigorously to an adult’s finger, the stepping reflex cause’s very young babies to take what looks like walking steps. Very young babies are also capable of a surprisingly complex kind of behavior: imitating the facial expressions of adults. Almost all newborns respond to the human face, the human voice, and the human touch. Temperament is what makes babies individual. Some cry much more than others, some are more active. Some babies love to be cuddled, while others seem to wriggle uncomfortably when held.
In Lincoln’s biography he was known as a cranky baby that loved to be held (Cohen, 2002 & Lerner, 2002). During the first dozen or so years of life, a helpless baby becomes a competent member of society. Many important kinds of developments occur during these early years. Among them are physical and motor changes as well as cognitive and social ones. In the first year of life the average baby grows 10 inches and gains 15 pounds. By 4 months birth weight has doubled, and by 1 year it has tripled. During the second year physical growth slows considerably.
Rapid increases in height and weight will not occur again until early adolescence. An infant’s growth does not occur in the smooth, continuous fashion as depicted by growth charts. Mr. Lincoln was said to take spurts in growth that made him taller than most kids and probably contributed to his shyness. Motor development refers to the acquisition of skills involving movement, such as grasping, crawling and walking. During infancy these skills are acquired in fairly predictable ways. Much early development consists of substituting voluntary actions for reflexes.
Maturation refers to the biological processes that unfold as a person grows older and contributes to orderly sequences of developmental changes, such as the progression from crawling to toddling to walking (Lorant, 1976 & Lerner, 2002). Early cognitive development consists partly of changes in how children think about the world. The most influential theorist in this area was the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1896-1980). Piaget became interested in cognitive development while working as a research assistant in the laboratory of Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon, creators of the first standard intelligence test for children.
Piaget becomes intrigued by the reasons young children gave for answering certain questions incorrectly. Piaget believed that cognitive development is a way of adapting to the environment. Unlike other animals human children do not have many built in responses. This gives them more flexibility to adapt their thinking and behavior to fit the world as they experience it at a particular age. He created the four basic stages of cognitive development. Sensory-motor stage, the first 2 years of a person’s life.
Preoperational stage that is from the age of 2-7, their thoughts are tightly bound to their physical and perceptual experiences. Concrete-operational stage is from 7 to 11 and children become able to consider more than one dimension of a problem at a time and to look at a situation from someone else’s point of view. The last is formal-operational stage that is reached during adolescence and when a person begins to think in abstract terms and can formulate hypothesis (Lerner, 2002). One of the important changes in thinking that occurs during childhood and adolescence is the development of moral reasoning.
In Mr. Lincoln’s biography he mentioned many times how his step-mother was responsible for his morals and intelligence. Lawrence Kohlberg, a psychologist, theorized that moral reasoning develops in stages much like Piaget’s account of cognitive development. Pre-adolescent children are at what Kohlberg called the preconventional level of moral reasoning. This means that individuals interpret behavior in terms of it concrete consequences. Younger children at this level base their judgments of right and wrong behavior on whether it is rewarded or punished.
Somewhat older children, still at this level, guide their moral choices on the basis of what satisfies needs, particularly their own. The conventional level puts the adolescent in the position to define right behavior as that which pleases or helps others and is approved by them. Postconventional level requires more abstract forms of thought. This level is marked by an emphasis on abstract principles such as justice, liberty, and equality. All of these traits Abraham held dearly and with passion, so it was during his adolescence he gained this which formed his future. Mr.
Lincoln stated that his law partners had helped this part of development giving him the decision to go onto law and taught him to understand the human nature (Cohn, 2002 & Lerner, 2002). One of the central aspects of human development is the process a child learns to interact with other people. Early in life children’s most important relationships are with their parents and other caregivers. By the time they are 3 their important relationships have usually expanded to include siblings, playmates, and adults outside the family. When they start school, their social world expands even further.
This was obvious while reading about Mr. Lincoln’s life. His leaving home when he was 22 opened a whole new world that he saw injustices that he wanted to change. He later went on to change a society as well as a nation.
Reference: Cohn, A. L. (2002) Abraham Lincoln. New York: Scholastic Press. Howells, W. D. (1960) Life of Abraham Lincoln. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lerner, R. M. (2002) Concepts and Theories of Human Development. Mahwah, N. J. : Erbaum. Lorant, S. (1976) The Life of Abraham Lincoln: A Short, Illustrated Biography. New York: Bantam Books.