Smirnova e on the psychology of children's play. Child psychology. Textbook for universities. Childhood as a sociocultural phenomenon

Where to begin? 21.12.2020

The basic concepts, important theoretical provisions of modern child psychology are revealed, the patterns of development of the cognitive mental processes of the child from birth to the end of preschool childhood, the formation of the leading types of activity at each age stage are revealed. The characteristic of the problem of a child's readiness for school, which is a kind of result of the mental development of a preschooler, is given.
The development of a child is considered in the context of his communication with an adult, with a special emphasis on the role of an adult in each age period. The information contained in the book will help the reader to acquire the basic psychological knowledge necessary for understanding the child, teaching work and communicating with children.
For undergraduate students of pedagogical universities, schools and colleges, employees of preschool institutions who improve their skills, as well as for everyone who is concerned about the problems of the development and upbringing of children.

Growth and development concepts.
A specific feature of young children is that they change quickly, are in constant development. And than younger
the more the child is, the more intense the development process. The child not only grows, but also develops. Here we must distinguish between the two most important concepts of child psychology - the concept of growth and development.

Growth is a quantitative change or improvement of something that already exists in a small person - a particular function or quality. The child's weight and height increase, he acts better with objects, speaks, walks, etc. These are all phenomena of growth, ie. quantitative accumulation. If we consider a child as a small adult, then his entire life path will be reduced only to quantitative changes, i.e. to increase and strengthen what is initially present in it, and nothing fundamentally new is formed in this case.

In contrast, development is characterized primarily by qualitative changes, the emergence of mental neoplasms. For example, a week ago, a baby was not at all interested in toys and glanced at them indifferently, but today he reaches out to them and constantly demands new items. Or earlier he did not pay attention to the assessments of others, but now he takes offense at the comments and demands praise. This means that some qualitative changes took place in his mental life and in relation to the environment, something new arose, and the old receded into the background, i.e. the structure of his mental processes has changed.

Free download the e-book in a convenient format, watch and read:
Download the book Child psychology, Smirnova E.O., 2016 - fileskachat.com, fast and free download.

Download pdf
Below you can buy this book at the best discounted price with delivery throughout Russia.

Approved by the Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation as a textbook for students of higher pedagogical educational institutions studying in the specialty 030900 "Preschool Pedagogy and Psychology"

UDC 159.922.7 (075.8) ББК 88.8я73 С50

Reviewers:

doctor of Psychology, Professor,

head Department of Developmental Psychology, Moscow State Pedagogical University

T. D. Martsinkovskaya;

candidate of psychological sciences, head. chair

preschool pedagogy and psychology MGPPI

R.B.Sterkina;

department of Preschool Pedagogy and Psychology, Moscow State Pedagogical Institute

Smirnova E.O.

C50 Child psychology: Textbook. for stud. higher. ped. study.

institutions. - M .: Humanit. ed. center VLADOS, 2003 .-- 368 p. , ISBN 5-691-00893-5.

The textbook reveals the basic concepts, important theoretical provisions of modern child psychology, examines the patterns of development of the cognitive mental processes of the child, the formation of the leading types of activity at each age stage. The characteristic of the problem of a child's readiness for school, which is a kind of result of the mental development of a preschooler, is given.

The textbook is intended for students of pedagogical universities, schools and colleges, will be useful to everyone who is concerned about the problems of development and education of children.

UDC 159.922.7 (075.8) BBK88.8ya73

center "VLADOS", 2003 © Serial design of the cover.

Humanitarian publishing ISBN 5-691-00893-5 center "VLADOS", 2003

Part 1

BASIC CONCEPTS OF CHILD PSYCHOLOGY AND THEORY OF MENTAL DEVELOPMENT OF A CHILD

Chapter 1 SUBJECT AND OBJECTIVES

CHILD PSYCHOLOGY

Chapter 2 METHODS OF CHILD PSYCHOLOGY ........

Chapter 3 BASIC THEORIES

EXPLAINING CHILD MENTAL DEVELOPMENT.

Chapter 4 DRIVING FORCES

AND CONDITIONS OF MENTAL DEVELOPMENT OF A CHILD ...........

Chapter 1

SUBJECT AND TASKS OF CHILD PSYCHOLOGY

Child psychology -

the science of child mental development

Childhood is the period of the most rapid and intensive human development. At no other age does a person go through so many peculiar stages as in early and preschool childhood. During the first 5-6 years of life, he turns from a completely helpless baby into a sufficiently formed person with his own interests, character traits, habits, views. It is during these years that the child begins to walk, act with objects, speak, think, communicate, imagine, etc. This huge path of the child's mental development is the main subject of child psychology.

The speed at which new qualities of a child appear impresses adults. The child's constant movement forward, the emergence of more and more forms of his independence and self-activity are characterized by the facts inherent in child development. These facts are used by child psychology.

For a long time, the child was considered as a small adult: he does not know much, does not know how, does not understand. He cannot organize and control himself, cannot reason, fulfill his promises, etc. You can still enumerate for a long time what the child cannot. But if we consider a child as an unreasonable, underdeveloped adult, we will never understand where his abilities, qualities, and actions come from. There are many activities that children can do better than adults. They can spend hours drawing pictures, inventing imaginary situations and transforming into different characters, suffering for the fate of a homeless kitten, etc. All this is usually inaccessible to an adult. Therefore, it is important to look not for what children cannot yet, but for how they differ from adults, that is, the specifics of their inner mental life.

The main difficulty in studying the mental life of young children is that this life is in constant development, and the younger the child, the more intensively this development takes place. He not only grows, but also develops. The concepts of "growth" and "development" should be distinguished.

Growth -it is a quantitative change or improvement of a function. The child's weight and height increase, he acts better with objects, speaks, walks, etc. This is a quantitative accumulation. If we consider a child as an inferior adult, then his entire life path will be reduced only to quantitative changes - that is, to an increase and strengthening of what is initially present in him, and nothing fundamentally new is formed.

In contrast, developmentcharacterized primarily by qualitative changes, the emergence of mental neoplasms. For example, a week ago, a baby was not at all interested in toys, but today he is drawn to them and constantly demands them from an adult. Previously, he did not pay attention to the assessments of others, but now he takes offense at the comments and demands praise. This means that some qualitative changes occurred in his mental life, something new arose, and the old faded into the background, that is, the structure of his mental processes changed. Development is characterized by the unevenness of the emergence of different structures, when some of them "lag behind", while others "run ahead".

Despite the differences that certainly exist between children of the same age, each stage of childhood has its own specific characteristics. For example, at 3-4 months all babies are happy with an adult, about a year old children prefer to play with toys, and about two years old they start talking, etc. These changes are not accidental, but natural. If they occur differently in this or that child, we can talk about deviations in their mental development: lagging behind, outstripping or deforming, which always have their reasons. Clarification of the laws of development and its explanationreasons - the most important task child psychology.

All children go through certain stages or stages in their development, which are characterized by the specific features of their mental life. The study of the laws of the child's mental development is the main subject of child psychology. Its main task is describe and explain the features of the child's mental life at each age stage.

Specificity children'sdevelopment

It is clear that no scientist and no parent will allow such a risky experiment with a child. However, there have been such cases in the history of mankind. Children grew up outside human society, were raised by animals. They are called "children-Mowgli", by analogy with the hero of the famous novel by R. Kipling.

For example, at the beginning of the XX century. Indian scientist Reed Singh saw a she-wolf taking her cubs for a walk, among which there were two girls - one about eight, and the other one and a half years old. Singh took the girls with him and tried to educate them. It turned out that these children were deprived of all, without exception, specifically human forms of behavior. They walked on four limbs, ate raw meat, were nocturnal, howled at night, snapped at people and tried to hide. In a word, they were much more like wolf cubs than human children. The youngest of them, Amala, died a year later, unable to withstand the human conditions of life. The eldest, Kamala, lived to be 17 years old. For 9 years it was possible to teach her upright walking and some hygienic skills with great difficulty. However, full-fledged mental development was impossible for the girl. She was never able to think, feel and speak humanly, remaining a creature with typically wolfish habits.

Can a child develop in a human way, if not create human living conditions for him and not educate him in a human way? The answer to this question is given by observations of children who grew up in hospitalism. The phenomenon of hospitalism is characterized by the isolation of children from adults and the long stay of a young child alone. During the war, it happened that children were separated from their mothers and brought up in special orphanages.

Thus, the German psychologist R. Spitz described the children of one orphanage who had not seen their mothers from the age of 3 months. The care, food, hygiene conditions in this establishment were typical of satisfactorily functioning establishments of this kind. However, all children experienced a sharp delay in not only mental but also physical development. Within 2 years, about half of the children died. Those who survived at 3-4 years old were absolutely incapable of independent movement, could not sit without support, could not eat with a spoon and dress themselves, did not react to others.

So, children who were left in the first months of life without the attention of adults at all, despite normal nutrition and physical care, either simply do not survive or stop developing and remain in an embryonic state. This may indicate that the presence of a human brain is far from the main condition for human development. It is not enough to be born a human being to become one. The child absorbs in himself what is given by the conditions of life, education. And if these conditions are bestial - wolf, dog, monkey, the child grows up into an animal of the corresponding species. If a child is left alone with the outside world, he simply does not survive without a "nurturing" environment. anddoes not develop. The human psyche does not arise without human conditions of life. It is not in the brain or inthe child's body.

And at the same time, psychic, spiritual life is inherent only in man, and no animal can under any circumstances become a man.

In science, attempts have been made repeatedly to develop human qualities in animals. For example, the Soviet zoopsychologist N.N. Ladygina-Kots raised a little chimpanzee in her family from one and a half to four years. The monkey was taught to use things, play with toys, talk and treated her quite humanly. But the results were very modest. The chimpanzee learned with difficulty some human skills (holding a pencil or a broom, knocking with a hammer, etc.) But the meaning of human actions turned out to be completely inaccessible to him: while running a pencil on paper, he could not draw anything meaningful, "sweeping" the floor, he shifted rubbish from one place to another, etc. He did not have any tendency to master words, even with persistent special training. These data indicate that without the human brain, human qualities of the psyche cannot arise.

So what happens? It seems that a child does not have any natural prerequisites for human development, and at the same time, only a human child can become a human. This means that there is still something in the human body that allows it to so quickly and successfully assimilate all forms of human behavior, learn to think, experience, control itself.

Yes there is. Oddly enough, the main advantage of a child is his innate helplessness, his inability to any specific forms of behavior. The extraordinary plasticity of the human brain - one of its main features that provide mental development. In animals, most of the brain substance is already "occupied" by the time of birth - it contains innate forms of behavior - instincts. The child's brain is open to new experiences and is ready to accept what life and upbringing give him. Scientists have shown that in animals, the process of brain formation generally ends by the time of birth, while in humans this process continues for many years after birth and depends on the living conditions and upbringing of the child. These conditions not only fill the "blank pages" of the brain, but also affect its very structure. Therefore, the first, childhood years are so important, cardinal for the formation of a person.

The human brain has practically not changed since the time of our distant ancestors who lived several tens of thousands of years ago. At the same time, during this time, humanity has made a gigantic path in its development. This became possible because human development occurs in a fundamentally different way than development in the animal world. If in the animal world certain forms of behavior are inherited, just like the structure of the organism, or are acquired in the process of the individual experience of an individual, then in humans the forms of activity and mental qualities characteristic of him are transmitted in another way - through inheritance of cultural and historical experience. Each new generation "stands on the shoulders" of the entire previous history of mankind. It does not come to the natural world, but to the world of culture, in which there are already sciences, literature, music, houses, cars and much more. There are ideas about how children should develop and how they should become by adulthood. The child himself will never invent all this, but he must master it in the process of his human development. This is what cultural or social inheritance is all about. Therefore, the development of the child is determined not only and not so much by the maturation of the organism, but above all by the social and cultural conditions of the life and upbringing of the child in society. These conditions differ significantly in different cultures in different historical eras.

Childhood as a sociocultural phenomenon

One of the interesting signs of a changed attitude towards children is the appearance of new elements in children's clothing. In the Middle Ages, as soon as a child grew out of diapers, he was immediately dressed in an adult costume. Only in the XVI-XVII centuries. special children's clothing appears. Characteristically, boys and girls 2-4 years old were dressed in the same children's dresses. This type of children's costume existed until the beginning of the 20th century. It is characteristic that in those social classes where there is no big difference between the work of adults and children (as, for example, in peasant families before the revolution), children are dressed in adult clothes (of course, in smaller sizes).

F. Aries's research begins in the Middle Ages, since only at this time images of children appear in painting. However, taking care of children and their upbringing, of course, has always been. The descriptions of the way of life and life of primitive tribes that have survived to this day allow us to present the features of the upbringing of ancient peoples.

One such description is contained in the notes of Douglas Lockwood about his travels to the Gibson Desert (Western Australia) and about meetings with the aborigines of the Pin-Tubi tribe. Until 1957, most of the people of this tribe did not see a white man, their contacts with neighboring tribes were very limited, as a result of which the culture and way of life of the people of the Stone Age were largely preserved in this tribe. Their entire life is spent in the desert and is focused on finding water and food. The strong and resilient women of the Pintubi tribe participate in this quest on an equal basis with men. They can walk for hours in the desert with a heavy load on their heads. Children are given birth lying on the sand, helping each other. They do not have any idea about hygiene and do not even know the reasons for childbirth. They have no utensils other than the jugs they wear on their heads. When Lockwood offered them a mirror and a comb, they could not use them for their intended purpose, and the image in the mirror caused surprise and fear. Lockwood describes how a 2-3-year-old girl, while eating, thrust huge pieces of flatbread into her mouth, then pieces of meat of a small iguana, which she herself baked on the hot sand. Her younger sister sat next to her and straightened out a can of stew (from the expedition's reserves), pulling out the meat with her fingers. Another observation: a small girl who cannot walk made a separate fire for herself and, bending her head, fanned the coals so that the fire would kindle and warm her. She was naked and was probably cold, but she did not cry. Lockwood notes that although there were three small children at the camp, he never heard a baby cry.

Evidence of the early growing up of children can be found in many literary sources of the 19th century. Children sometimes started working at the age of 5, often at the age of 6, and almost all children of poor parents started working at the age of 8; the working day lasted 14-16 hours. Let us recall the well-known character of N. Nekrasov's poem "A Little Man with a Marigold", who at the age of 6 considers himself a full-fledged man.

These and many other materials allowed D. B. Elkonin to put forward the position of the historical conditionality of childhood. Childhood arises when the child cannot be directly included in the system of social reproduction, since he cannot yet master the tools of labor due to their complexity. If these tools are simple and primitive, the main methods of obtaining food are gathering and hunting, a child can very early join the work of adults, practically assimilating the ways of action of adults. Under such conditions, when the child is directly involved in the life of adults, there is no need for special preparation for future working life. The development of civilization inevitably led to the fact that the inclusion of children in the productive labor of adults turned out to be impossible and was postponed in time. Childhood lengthened with the development of humanity. This lengthening of childhood did not take place by building on new periods, but by a kind of "wedging in" a new period of development, Elkonin brilliantly revealed the nature of such a "wedging" of a new period on the example of the emergence of role-playing game, and with it a new stage of development psychology. named preschool.

Questions about the historical origin of periods of childhood, about the relationship between childhood history and the history of society are extremely important for understanding the psychology of a modern child. It should be remembered that the type of upbringing that we are observing at the present time is only one of the possible and far from the only one.

Child psychology in the system of sciences

The study of the mental development of a child is possible only with certain general ideas about what a person is and what his essential characteristics are. Such representations are given by philosophy. It may be recalled that psychology originally arose within the framework of philosophy and for a long time existed as its integral part. In the future, it stood out as an independent area of \u200b\u200bknowledge and itself was divided into many separate disciplines. But still, every scientist trying to study a person, whether he wants it or not, necessarily relies on a certain philosophical base, on a certain understanding of the essence of man. Therefore, philosophy, or philosophical anthropology, is the foundation of psychology in general and child psychology in particular. On the other hand, issues related to the origin of consciousness, activity, human personality, which are central to philosophers, are specifically and in detail developed in child psychology. Many famous philosophers (V.V. Ilyenkov, F.T.Mikhailov, and others) constantly turned to the materials of child psychology and in many respects built their philosophical concepts on them. Therefore, we can say that child psychology, on the one hand, relies on philosophy, and on the other, provides it with the necessary empirical material.

The psychology of a modern person, including a child, is fundamentally different from the psychology of a person in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance. However, the historical and cultural development of mankind, phylogenesis, other sciences are engaged - history, cultural studies, anthropology. The subject of child psychology is the individual development of a person, or ontogenesis,which always occurs in a certain historical and cultural situation, at a certain stage of phylogenesis. The child psychologist needs to take into account the historical and cultural background against which child development takes place. At the same time, ontogenetic development has its own deeply specific laws.

Qualitative changes in mental life, that is, development, occur not only in childhood, but also throughout ontogenesis. And in the life of an adult, qualitative changes in his views of the world, the emergence of new needs and new forms of activity are possible. All these changes have their own psychological mechanisms and patterns. They constitute the subject of a special scientific discipline - developmental psychology,or genetic psychology.Of course, child and genetic psychology have a lot in common, since the most intensive and effective human mental development occurs in childhood. Genetic psychology is mainly based on facts and patterns obtained in child psychology. In turn, child psychology uses the patterns of human mental development, discovered in developmental psychology. But child psychology is limited to early age (from 0 to 7 years) and seeks to describe as fully as possible the qualitative changes that occur with the child throughout childhood.

Child psychology relies on concepts and methodology general psychology.The isolation of such aspects of the child's mental life as activity, mental processes, personality, etc., became possible due to the fact that these aspects were identified and described in general psychology. At the same time, general psychology dealing with an adult cannot do without the facts of child psychology. The features of the mental life of an adult cannot be understood without an analysis of their origin. The psyche of an adult is very complex, there are many processes and tendencies in it at the same time in a reduced, compressed form, which cannot be studied and analyzed without referring to their genesis. Child psychology in this respect has an indisputable advantage: everything is just beginning here, and all the processes of the emergence of new forms of activity, consciousness, thinking can be traced in an open, expanded form. Therefore, child psychology can be considered as a kind of genetic methodgeneral psychology, which allows us to trace the formation of the most complex forms of the mental life of an adult.

At the same time, child psychology is an independent fundamental science that provides a scientific basis for such applied sciences as pedagogical psychologyand pedagogy.The subject of educational psychology is the development and substantiation of methods of teaching and upbringing of children at different ages. It is obvious that the development of methods for teaching and educating preschoolers is impossible without knowledge of the characteristics of the child's psyche in the early stages of ontogenesis, which is provided by child psychology. Only an understanding of the possibilities (and the limits of these possibilities) of the child at different stages of childhood allows the educational psychologist to develop methods of teaching and upbringing that are adequate and effective for each age. At the same time, educational psychology provides invaluable material for child psychology, since it allows one to find out the influence of various strategies of upbringing and teaching children on the characteristics of their mental development. The fundamental problem of the relationship between the mental development of a child and his education and upbringing lies in the plane of both child and educational psychology. Therefore, child and educational psychology are inextricably linked disciplines. The educational psychology of a preschooler can be viewed as a special area of \u200b\u200bchild psychology, associated with the development of applied issues related to the education and upbringing of children.

Knowledge of the basics of child psychology is necessary for practical work with children. The most important condition for the successful work of educators and teachers in nurseries, kindergartens, various educational centers is knowledge of the laws of the child's mental development, understanding the interests of each child, the characteristics of his thinking and emotional life. Knowledge of child psychology helps the educator to establish contact with children, timely identify and overcome deviations in their mental development, choose appropriate forms of communication and training for them.

Recently in our country the profession is becoming more widespread practical child psychologist.The task of this specialist includes diagnostics and correction of the mental development of children, as well as work with “difficult” children and their parents. Knowledge of child psychology is a necessary foundation for this profession. Only an understanding of age norms and patterns of mental development allows a practical psychologist to identify the individual characteristics of each child, their compliance with the age norm, diagnose deviations in the mental development of individual children and choose adequate and effective methods of correction.

RESULTS

Childhood is the period of the most intensive and effective human development.

Child psychology is a science that studies the features of the mental life of a child and the patterns of mental development in childhood. This development is carried out as a qualitative transformation in the child's psyche, a change in different, qualitatively unique age stages of mental life, each of which has its own specific characteristics. In contrast, the growth of a child is a process of quantitative accumulation, that is, an increase in the same quality.

The mental development of a child is carried out in a different way than the development of animals. It occurs not as the deployment of innate biological inclinations or the accumulation of individual experience, but through the appropriation of cultural and historical experience, the transformation of social values \u200b\u200band norms of activity into the child's own, individual abilities.

Child psychology as an independent, fundamental science has close and reciprocal ties with other disciplines. On the one hand, it relies on philosophy, cultural studies, developmental psychology and general psychology and provides empirical material for them, on the other, it is the scientific foundation for educational psychology, pedagogy and practical psychology.

Questions

1. What does child psychology study and what is its main subject?

2. What is the difference between childhood and other, later ages?

3. What does nature give a child? What is the main difference between the human brain and the animal brain?

4. What is the difference between a child's development and his height?

5. What is the main condition for human development?

6. What is the main difference in the development of a child and a young animal?

7. What sciences is child psychology associated with? What do philosophy, developmental psychology and general psychology give her?

8. Why does an educator or practical psychologist need to know child psychology?

Child psychology - the science of the mental development of a child

Childhood is the period of the most rapid and intensive human development. At no other age does a person go through so many peculiar stages as in early and preschool childhood. In the first 5–6 years of life, he turns from a completely helpless baby into a sufficiently formed person with his own interests, character traits, habits, and views. It is during these years that the child begins to walk, act with objects, speak, think, communicate, imagine, etc. This huge path of the child's mental development is the main subject of child psychology.
The speed at which new qualities of a child appear impresses adults. The child's constant movement forward, the emergence of more and more forms of his independence and self-activity are characterized by facts inherent in child development. These facts are used by child psychology.
For a long time, the child was considered as a small adult: he does not know much, does not know how, does not understand. He cannot organize and control himself, cannot reason, fulfill his promises, etc. You can still enumerate for a long time what the child cannot. But if we consider a child as an unreasonable, underdeveloped adult, we will never understand where his abilities, qualities, and actions come from. There are many activities that children can do better than adults. They can spend hours drawing pictures, inventing imaginary situations and transforming into different characters, suffering for the fate of a homeless kitten, etc. All this is usually inaccessible to an adult. Therefore, it is important to look not for what children cannot yet, but for how they differ from adults, that is, the specifics of their inner mental life.
The main difficulty in studying the mental life of young children is that this life is in constant development, and the younger the child, the more intensively this development takes place. It not only grows, but also develops. The concepts of "growth" and "development" should be distinguished.
Growth Is a quantitative change or improvement of a function. The child's weight and height increase, he acts better with objects, speaks, walks, etc. This is a quantitative accumulation. If we consider a child as an inferior adult, then his entire life path will be reduced only to quantitative changes - that is, to an increase and strengthening of what is initially present in him, and nothing fundamentally new is formed.
In contrast, development characterized primarily by qualitative changes, the emergence of mental neoplasms. For example, a week ago, a baby was not at all interested in toys, but today he is drawn to them and constantly demands them from an adult. Previously, he did not pay attention to the assessments of others, but now he takes offense at the comments and demands praise. This means that some qualitative changes occurred in his mental life, something new arose, and the old faded into the background, that is, the structure of his mental processes changed. Development is characterized by the unevenness of the emergence of different structures, when some of them "lag behind", while others "run ahead".
Despite the differences that certainly exist between children of the same age, each stage of childhood has its own specific characteristics. For example, at 3-4 months all babies are happy with an adult, about a year old children prefer to play with toys, and about two years old they start talking, etc. These changes are not accidental, but natural. If they occur differently in this or that child, we can talk about deviations in their mental development: lagging behind, outstripping or deforming, which always have their reasons. Clarification of the patterns of development and explanation of its causes is the most important task of child psychology.
All children go through certain stages or stages in their development, which are characterized by the specific features of their mental life. The study of the laws of the child's mental development is the main subject of child psychology. Its main task is describe and explain the features of the child's mental life at each age stage.

The specifics of child development

What determines the specificity of child development? The main question that arises here is the question of the relative role of the natural properties of the organism and the human conditions for raising a child. To answer it, it would be necessary to conduct an experiment, when children from the first days of life would grow up in conditions of isolation from adults: they would not hear speech, would not see other people, would not use objects common to us. If in such conditions children developed in about the same way, the child's mental abilities could be considered innate, inherent in nature itself.
It is clear that no scientist and no parent will allow such a risky experiment with a child. However, there have been such cases in the history of mankind. Children grew up outside human society, were raised by animals. They are called "Mowgli children", by analogy with the hero of the famous novel by R. Kipling.

For example, at the beginning of the twentieth century. Indian scientist Reed Singh saw a she-wolf taking her cubs for a walk, among whom there were two girls - one about eight, and the other one and a half years old. Singh took the girls with him and tried to educate them. It turned out that these children were deprived of all, without exception, specifically human forms of behavior. They walked on four limbs, ate raw meat, were nocturnal, howled at night, snapped at people and tried to hide. In short, they were much more like wolf cubs than human children. The youngest of them, Amala, died a year later, unable to withstand the human conditions of life. The eldest, Kamala, lived to be 17 years old. For 9 years it was possible to teach her upright posture and some hygienic skills with great difficulty. However, full-fledged mental development was impossible for the girl. She was never able to think, feel and speak humanly, remaining a creature with typically wolfish habits.

Thus, the German psychologist R. Spitz described the children of one orphanage who had not seen their mothers from the age of 3 months. The care, food, hygiene conditions in this establishment were typical of satisfactorily functioning establishments of this kind. However, all the children experienced a sharp delay in not only mental but also physical development. Within 2 years, about half of the children died. Those who survived at the age of 3-4 were absolutely incapable of independent movement, could not sit without support, could not eat with a spoon and dress independently, did not react to others.

So, children who are left in the first months of life without the attention of adults at all, despite normal nutrition and physical care, either simply do not survive, or stop developing and remain in an embryonic state. This may indicate that the presence of a human brain is far from the main condition for human development. It is not enough to be born as a human being to become one. The child absorbs in himself what is given by the conditions of life, education. And if these conditions are bestial - wolf, dog, monkey, the child grows up into an animal of the corresponding species. If a child is left alone with the outside world, he simply does not survive and does not develop without a "nurturing" environment. The human psyche does not arise without human conditions of life. It is not in the brain or in the body of the child.
And at the same time, psychic, spiritual life is inherent only in man, and no animal can under any circumstances become a man.

In science, attempts have been made repeatedly to develop human qualities in animals. For example, the Soviet zoopsychologist N.N. Ladygina-Kots raised a little chimpanzee in her family from one and a half to four years. The monkey was taught to use things, play with toys, talk and treated her quite humanly. But the results were very modest. The chimpanzee learned with difficulty some human skills (holding a pencil or a broom, knocking with a hammer, etc.). But the meaning of human actions turned out to be completely inaccessible to him: while running a pencil on paper, he could not draw anything meaningful, "sweeping" the floor, he shifted rubbish from one place to another, etc. He did not have any tendency to master words, even with persistent special training. These data indicate that without the human brain, human qualities of the psyche cannot arise.

So what happens? It seems that a child does not have any natural prerequisites for human development, and at the same time only a human child can become a human being. This means that there is still something in the human body that allows it to so quickly and successfully assimilate all forms of human behavior, learn to think, experience, control itself.
Yes there is. Oddly enough, the main advantage of a child is his innate helplessness, his inability to any specific forms of behavior. The extraordinary plasticity of the human brain is one of its main features that ensure mental development.In animals, most of the brain matter is already "occupied" by the time of birth - it contains innate forms of behavior - instincts. The child's brain is open to new experiences and is ready to accept what life and upbringing give him. Scientists have proven that in animals, the process of brain formation generally ends by the time of birth, while in humans this process continues for many years after birth and depends on the living conditions and upbringing of the child. These conditions not only fill the "blank pages" of the brain, but also affect its very structure. Therefore, the first, childhood years are so important, cardinal for the development of a person.
The human brain has practically not changed since the time of our distant ancestors who lived several tens of thousands of years ago. At the same time, during this time, humanity has made a gigantic path in its development. This became possible because human development occurs in a fundamentally different way than development in the animal world. If in the animal kingdom certain forms of behavior are inherited, just like the structure of the organism, or are acquired in the process of the individual experience of an individual, then in humans the forms of activity and mental qualities characteristic of him are transmitted in another way - by inheriting cultural and historical experience. Each new generation "stands on the shoulders" of the entire previous history of mankind. It does not come to the natural world, but to the world of culture, in which there are already sciences, literature, music, houses, cars and much more. There are ideas about how children should develop and how they should become by adulthood. The child himself will never invent all this, but he must master it in the process of his human development. This is what cultural or social inheritance is all about. Therefore, the development of the child is determined not only and not so much by the maturation of the organism, but above all by the social and cultural conditions of the life and upbringing of the child in society. These conditions differ significantly in different cultures in different historical eras.

Childhood as a sociocultural phenomenon

Historically, the concept of childhood is associated not with the biological state of immaturity, but with a certain social status of children in different historical epochs, the range of rights and responsibilities of the child, the types of activities available to him. It is rather difficult to study the history of childhood, since it is impossible to carry out observations in this area, and cultural monuments related to children are extremely poor. The works of the French demographer and historian F. Aries, who tried to recreate the history of childhood on the basis of works of fine art, are of unique interest. His research showed that up to the XIII century. the artists did not refer to the images of children at all. In the painting of the XIII century. images of children are found only in religious subjects (angels, baby Jesus), while images of real children are absent. Apparently, then childhood was considered a period of little value and quickly passing. This, according to Aries, was facilitated by the demographic situation of that time - high fertility and high infant mortality. There was a general indifference and non-serious attitude towards children. A sign of overcoming such indifference is the appearance in the XIV century. portraits of deceased children, which suggests that the death of a child is beginning to be perceived as a bereavement, and not as a common occurrence. The overcoming of complete indifference to children, judging by the history of painting, occurs only in the 17th century, when images of real children first appear in portraits. As a rule, these are portraits of the Tsarevichs and influential persons in childhood. Thus, according to Aries, the discovery of childhood began in the 13th century, but the evidence of this discovery is most fully manifested at the end of the 16th and 17th centuries.
One of the interesting signs of a changed attitude towards children is the appearance of new elements in children's clothing. In the Middle Ages, as soon as a child grew out of diapers, he was immediately dressed in an adult costume. Only in the XVI-XVII centuries. special children's clothing appears. It is typical that boys and girls 2-4 years old were dressed in the same children's dresses. This type of children's costume existed until the beginning of the 20th century. It is characteristic that in those social classes where there is no big difference between the work of adults and children (as, for example, in peasant families before the revolution), children are dressed in adult clothes (of course, in smaller sizes).
F. Aries's research begins in the Middle Ages, since only at this time images of children appear in painting. However, taking care of children and their upbringing, of course, has always been. The descriptions of the way of life and life of primitive tribes that have survived to this day allow us to present the features of the upbringing of ancient peoples.

One such description is contained in the notes of Douglas Lockwood about his travels to the Gibson Desert (Western Australia) and about meetings with the aborigines of the Pin-Tubi tribe. Until 1957, most of the people of this tribe did not see a white man, their contacts with neighboring tribes were very limited, as a result of which the culture and way of life of the people of the Stone Age were largely preserved in this tribe. Their entire life is spent in the desert and is focused on finding water and food. The strong and resilient women of the Pintubi tribe participate in this quest on an equal basis with men. They can walk for hours in the desert with a heavy load on their heads. Children are given birth lying on the sand, helping each other. They do not have any idea about hygiene and do not even know the reasons for childbirth. They have no utensils other than the jugs they wear on their heads. When Lockwood offered them a mirror and a comb, they could not use them for their intended purpose, and the image in the mirror caused surprise and fear. Lockwood describes how a 2–3-year-old girl, while eating, thrust huge pieces of flatbread into her mouth, or pieces of meat from a small iguana, which she herself baked on the hot sand. Her younger sister sat next to her and straightened out a can of stew (from the expedition's reserves), pulling out the meat with her fingers. Another observation: a small girl who cannot walk made a separate fire for herself and, bending her head, fanned the coals so that the fire would kindle and warm her. She was naked and was probably cold, but she did not cry. Lockwood notes that although there were three small children at the camp, he never heard a baby cry.
Evidence of the early growing up of children can be found in many literary sources of the 19th century. Children sometimes started working at the age of 5, often at the age of 6, and almost all children of poor parents worked at the age of 8; the working day lasted 14-16 hours. Let us recall the well-known character of N. Nekrasov's poem "A Little Man with a Marigold", who at the age of 6 considers himself a full-fledged man.

These and many other materials allowed D. B. Elkonin to put forward the position of the historical conditionality of childhood. Childhood arises when the child cannot be directly included in the system of social reproduction, since he cannot yet master the tools of labor due to their complexity. If these tools are simple and primitive, the main methods of obtaining food are gathering and hunting, a child can very early join the work of adults, practically assimilating the ways of action of adults. Under such conditions, when the child is directly involved in the life of adults, there is no need for special preparation for future working life. The development of civilization inevitably led to the fact that the inclusion of children in the productive labor of adults turned out to be impossible and was postponed in time. Childhood lengthened with the development of humanity. This lengthening of childhood did not occur by building on new periods, but by a kind of “wedging in” of a new period of development. Elkonin brilliantly revealed the nature of such a "wedging" of a new period on the example of the emergence of role-playing game, and with it a new stage of development, which in modern psychology is called preschool.
Questions about the historical origin of periods of childhood, about the relationship between childhood history and the history of society are extremely important for understanding the psychology of a modern child. It should be remembered that the type of upbringing that we are observing at the present time is only one of the possible and far from the only one.

Child psychology in the system of sciences

Child psychology is a relatively young science. It was born at the end of the 19th century, and it is considered to be the beginning of the book by the Darwinian scientist Wilhelm Preyer "The Soul of a Child". In it, Preyer records the daily observations of the development of his own son. Despite the obvious biological orientation of these observations, Preyer was the first to carry out an objective study of the psyche of the child, therefore he is traditionally considered the founder of child psychology. Throughout the XX century. child psychology developed quite rapidly and intensively. However, having stood out as a separate area of \u200b\u200bknowledge, it has strong ties with other sciences. Consider the place of child psychology in the system of other sciences.
The study of the mental development of a child is possible only with certain general ideas about what a person is and what his essential characteristics are. Such representations are given by philosophy. It may be recalled that psychology originally arose within the framework of philosophy and for a long time existed as its integral part. In the future, it stood out as an independent area of \u200b\u200bknowledge and itself was divided into many separate disciplines. But still, every scientist trying to study a person, whether he wants it or not, necessarily relies on a certain philosophical base, on a certain understanding of the essence of man. Therefore, philosophy, or philosophical anthropology, is the foundation of psychology in general and child psychology in particular. On the other hand, issues related to the origin of consciousness, activity, human personality, which are central to philosophers, are specifically and in detail developed in child psychology. Many famous philosophers (V.V. Ilyenkov, F.T.Mikhailov, and others) constantly turned to the materials of child psychology and in many respects built their philosophical concepts on them. Therefore, we can say that child psychology, on the one hand, relies on philosophy, and on the other, provides it with the necessary empirical material.
The psychology of a modern person, including a child, is fundamentally different from the psychology of a person in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance. However, the historical and cultural development of mankind, phylogenesis, other sciences are engaged - history, cultural studies, anthropology. The subject of child psychology is the individual development of a person, or ontogenesis, which always occurs in a certain historical and cultural situation, at a certain stage of phylogenesis. The child psychologist needs to take into account the historical and cultural background against which child development takes place. At the same time, ontogenetic development has its own deeply specific laws.
Qualitative changes in mental life, that is, development, occur not only in childhood, but also throughout ontogenesis. And in the life of an adult, qualitative changes in his views of the world, the emergence of new needs and new forms of activity are possible. All these changes have their own psychological mechanisms and patterns. They constitute the subject of a special scientific discipline - developmental psychology, or genetic psychology. Of course, child and genetic psychology have a lot in common, since the most intensive and effective human mental development occurs in childhood. Genetic psychology is mainly based on facts and patterns obtained in child psychology. In turn, child psychology uses the patterns of human mental development, discovered in developmental psychology. But child psychology is limited to early age (from 0 to 7 years) and seeks to describe as fully as possible the qualitative changes that occur with the child throughout childhood.
Child psychology relies on concepts and methodology general psychology. The isolation of such aspects of the child's mental life as activity, mental processes, personality, etc., became possible due to the fact that these aspects were identified and described in general psychology. At the same time, general psychology dealing with an adult cannot do without the facts of child psychology. The features of the mental life of an adult cannot be understood without an analysis of their origin. The psyche of an adult is very complex, there are many processes and tendencies in it at the same time in a reduced, compressed form, which cannot be studied and analyzed without referring to their genesis. Child psychology in this respect has an indisputable advantage: everything is just beginning here, and all the processes of the emergence of new forms of activity, consciousness, thinking can be traced in an open, expanded form. Therefore, child psychology can be considered as a kind of genetic method general psychology, which allows us to trace the formation of the most complex forms of the mental life of an adult.
At the same time, child psychology is an independent fundamental science that provides a scientific basis for such applied sciences as pedagogical psychology and pedagogy. The subject of educational psychology is the development and substantiation of methods of teaching and upbringing of children at different ages. It is obvious that the development of methods for teaching and educating preschoolers is impossible without knowledge of the characteristics of the child's psyche in the early stages of ontogenesis, which is provided by child psychology. Only an understanding of the capabilities (and the boundaries of these capabilities) of the child at different stages of childhood allows the educational psychologist to develop methods of teaching and upbringing children that are adequate and effective for each age. At the same time, educational psychology provides invaluable material for child psychology, since it allows one to find out the influence of various strategies of upbringing and teaching children on the characteristics of their mental development. The fundamental problem of the relationship between the child's mental development and his education and upbringing lies in the plane of both child and educational psychology. Therefore, child and educational psychology are inextricably linked disciplines. Pedagogical psychology of a preschooler can be viewed as a special area of \u200b\u200bchild psychology, associated with the development of applied issues related to the education and upbringing of children.
Knowledge of the basics of child psychology is necessary for practical work with children. The most important condition for the successful work of educators and teachers in a nursery, kindergarten, various educational centers is knowledge of the laws of the child's mental development, understanding the interests of each child, the characteristics of his thinking and emotional life. Knowledge of child psychology helps the educator to establish contact with children, timely identify and overcome deviations in their mental development, choose appropriate forms of communication and education for them.

Current page: 1 (total of the book has 29 pages) [available passage for reading: 20 pages]

Elena Olegovna Smirnova

Child psychology

Basic concepts of child psychology and the theory of child mental development

Subject and tasks of child psychology

Child psychology - the science of the mental development of a child

The speed at which new qualities of a child appear impresses adults. The child's constant movement forward, the emergence of more and more forms of his independence and self-activity are characterized by facts inherent in child development. These facts are used by child psychology.

The main difficulty in studying the mental life of young children is that this life is in constant development, and the younger the child, the more intensively this development takes place. It not only grows, but also develops. The concepts of "growth" and "development" should be distinguished.

Growth Is a quantitative change or improvement of a function. The child's weight and height increase, he acts better with objects, speaks, walks, etc. This is a quantitative accumulation. If we consider a child as an inferior adult, then his entire life path will be reduced only to quantitative changes - that is, to an increase and strengthening of what is initially present in him, and nothing fundamentally new is formed.

In contrast, development characterized primarily by qualitative changes, the emergence of mental neoplasms. For example, a week ago, a baby was not at all interested in toys, but today he is drawn to them and constantly demands them from an adult. Previously, he did not pay attention to the assessments of others, but now he takes offense at the comments and demands praise. This means that some qualitative changes occurred in his mental life, something new arose, and the old faded into the background, that is, the structure of his mental processes changed. Development is characterized by the unevenness of the emergence of different structures, when some of them "lag behind", while others "run ahead".

Despite the differences that certainly exist between children of the same age, each stage of childhood has its own specific characteristics. For example, at 3-4 months all babies are happy with an adult, about a year old children prefer to play with toys, and about two years old they start talking, etc. These changes are not accidental, but natural. If they occur differently in this or that child, we can talk about deviations in their mental development: lagging behind, outstripping or deforming, which always have their reasons. Clarification of the patterns of development and explanation of its causes is the most important task of child psychology.

All children go through certain stages or stages in their development, which are characterized by the specific features of their mental life. The study of the laws of the child's mental development is the main subject of child psychology. Its main task is describe and explain the features of the child's mental life at each age stage.

The specifics of child development

It is clear that no scientist and no parent will allow such a risky experiment with a child. However, there have been such cases in the history of mankind. Children grew up outside human society, were raised by animals. They are called "Mowgli children", by analogy with the hero of the famous novel by R. Kipling.

...

For example, at the beginning of the twentieth century. Indian scientist Reed Singh saw a she-wolf taking her cubs for a walk, among whom there were two girls - one about eight, and the other one and a half years old. Singh took the girls with him and tried to educate them. It turned out that these children were deprived of all, without exception, specifically human forms of behavior. They walked on four limbs, ate raw meat, were nocturnal, howled at night, snapped at people and tried to hide. In short, they were much more like wolf cubs than human children. The youngest of them, Amala, died a year later, unable to withstand the human conditions of life. The eldest, Kamala, lived to be 17 years old. For 9 years it was possible to teach her upright posture and some hygienic skills with great difficulty. However, full-fledged mental development was impossible for the girl. She was never able to think, feel and speak humanly, remaining a creature with typically wolfish habits.

...

Thus, the German psychologist R. Spitz described the children of one orphanage who had not seen their mothers from the age of 3 months. The care, food, hygiene conditions in this establishment were typical of satisfactorily functioning establishments of this kind. However, all the children experienced a sharp delay in not only mental but also physical development. Within 2 years, about half of the children died. Those who survived at the age of 3-4 were absolutely incapable of independent movement, could not sit without support, could not eat with a spoon and dress independently, did not react to others.

And at the same time, psychic, spiritual life is inherent only in man, and no animal can under any circumstances become a man.

...

In science, attempts have been made repeatedly to develop human qualities in animals. For example, the Soviet zoopsychologist N.N. Ladygina-Kots raised a little chimpanzee in her family from one and a half to four years. The monkey was taught to use things, play with toys, talk and treated her quite humanly. But the results were very modest. The chimpanzee learned with difficulty some human skills (holding a pencil or a broom, knocking with a hammer, etc.). But the meaning of human actions turned out to be completely inaccessible to him: while running a pencil on paper, he could not draw anything meaningful, "sweeping" the floor, he shifted rubbish from one place to another, etc. He did not have any tendency to master words, even with persistent special training. These data indicate that without the human brain, human qualities of the psyche cannot arise.

Yes there is. Oddly enough, the main advantage of a child is his innate helplessness, his inability to any specific forms of behavior. The extraordinary plasticity of the human brain is one of its main features that ensure mental development.In animals, most of the brain matter is already "occupied" by the time of birth - it contains innate forms of behavior - instincts. The child's brain is open to new experiences and is ready to accept what life and upbringing give him. Scientists have proven that in animals, the process of brain formation generally ends by the time of birth, while in humans this process continues for many years after birth and depends on the living conditions and upbringing of the child. These conditions not only fill the "blank pages" of the brain, but also affect its very structure. Therefore, the first, childhood years are so important, cardinal for the development of a person.

The human brain has practically not changed since the time of our distant ancestors who lived several tens of thousands of years ago. At the same time, during this time, humanity has made a gigantic path in its development. This became possible because human development occurs in a fundamentally different way than development in the animal world. If in the animal kingdom certain forms of behavior are inherited, just like the structure of the organism, or are acquired in the process of the individual experience of an individual, then in humans the forms of activity and mental qualities characteristic of him are transmitted in another way - by inheriting cultural and historical experience. Each new generation "stands on the shoulders" of the entire previous history of mankind. It does not come to the natural world, but to the world of culture, in which there are already sciences, literature, music, houses, cars and much more. There are ideas about how children should develop and how they should become by adulthood. The child himself will never invent all this, but he must master it in the process of his human development. This is what cultural or social inheritance is all about. Therefore, the development of the child is determined not only and not so much by the maturation of the organism, but above all by the social and cultural conditions of the life and upbringing of the child in society. These conditions differ significantly in different cultures in different historical eras.

Childhood as a sociocultural phenomenon

One of the interesting signs of a changed attitude towards children is the appearance of new elements in children's clothing. In the Middle Ages, as soon as a child grew out of diapers, he was immediately dressed in an adult costume. Only in the XVI-XVII centuries. special children's clothing appears. It is typical that boys and girls 2-4 years old were dressed in the same children's dresses. This type of children's costume existed until the beginning of the 20th century. It is characteristic that in those social classes where there is no big difference between the work of adults and children (as, for example, in peasant families before the revolution), children are dressed in adult clothes (of course, in smaller sizes).

...

One such description is contained in the notes of Douglas Lockwood about his travels to the Gibson Desert (Western Australia) and about meetings with the aborigines of the Pin-Tubi tribe. Until 1957, most of the people of this tribe did not see a white man, their contacts with neighboring tribes were very limited, as a result of which the culture and way of life of the people of the Stone Age were largely preserved in this tribe. Their entire life is spent in the desert and is focused on finding water and food. The strong and resilient women of the Pintubi tribe participate in this quest on an equal basis with men. They can walk for hours in the desert with a heavy load on their heads. Children are given birth lying on the sand, helping each other. They do not have any idea about hygiene and do not even know the reasons for childbirth. They have no utensils other than the jugs they wear on their heads. When Lockwood offered them a mirror and a comb, they could not use them for their intended purpose, and the image in the mirror caused surprise and fear. Lockwood describes how a 2–3-year-old girl, while eating, thrust huge pieces of flatbread into her mouth, or pieces of meat from a small iguana, which she herself baked on the hot sand. Her younger sister sat next to her and straightened out a can of stew (from the expedition's reserves), pulling out the meat with her fingers. Another observation: a small girl who cannot walk made a separate fire for herself and, bending her head, fanned the coals so that the fire would kindle and warm her. She was naked and was probably cold, but she did not cry. Lockwood notes that although there were three small children at the camp, he never heard a baby cry.

Evidence of the early growing up of children can be found in many literary sources of the 19th century. Children sometimes started working at the age of 5, often at the age of 6, and almost all children of poor parents worked at the age of 8; the working day lasted 14-16 hours. Let us recall the well-known character of N. Nekrasov's poem "A Little Man with a Marigold", who at the age of 6 considers himself a full-fledged man.

These and many other materials allowed D. B. Elkonin to put forward the position of the historical conditionality of childhood. Childhood arises when the child cannot be directly included in the system of social reproduction, since he cannot yet master the tools of labor due to their complexity. If these tools are simple and primitive, the main methods of obtaining food are gathering and hunting, a child can very early join the work of adults, practically assimilating the ways of action of adults. Under such conditions, when the child is directly involved in the life of adults, there is no need for special preparation for future working life. The development of civilization inevitably led to the fact that the inclusion of children in the productive labor of adults turned out to be impossible and was postponed in time. Childhood lengthened with the development of humanity. This lengthening of childhood did not occur by building on new periods, but by a kind of “wedging in” of a new period of development. Elkonin brilliantly revealed the nature of such a "wedging" of a new period on the example of the emergence of role-playing game, and with it a new stage of development, which in modern psychology is called preschool.

Child psychology in the system of sciences

The psychology of a modern person, including a child, is fundamentally different from the psychology of a person in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance. However, the historical and cultural development of mankind, phylogenesis, other sciences are engaged - history, cultural studies, anthropology. The subject of child psychology is the individual development of a person, or ontogenesis, which always occurs in a certain historical and cultural situation, at a certain stage of phylogenesis. The child psychologist needs to take into account the historical and cultural background against which child development takes place. At the same time, ontogenetic development has its own deeply specific laws.

Qualitative changes in mental life, that is, development, occur not only in childhood, but also throughout ontogenesis. And in the life of an adult, qualitative changes in his views of the world, the emergence of new needs and new forms of activity are possible. All these changes have their own psychological mechanisms and patterns. They constitute the subject of a special scientific discipline - developmental psychology, or genetic psychology. Of course, child and genetic psychology have a lot in common, since the most intensive and effective human mental development occurs in childhood. Genetic psychology is mainly based on facts and patterns obtained in child psychology. In turn, child psychology uses the patterns of human mental development, discovered in developmental psychology. But child psychology is limited to early age (from 0 to 7 years) and seeks to describe as fully as possible the qualitative changes that occur with the child throughout childhood.

Child psychology relies on concepts and methodology general psychology. The isolation of such aspects of the child's mental life as activity, mental processes, personality, etc., became possible due to the fact that these aspects were identified and described in general psychology. At the same time, general psychology dealing with an adult cannot do without the facts of child psychology. The features of the mental life of an adult cannot be understood without an analysis of their origin. The psyche of an adult is very complex, there are many processes and tendencies in it at the same time in a reduced, compressed form, which cannot be studied and analyzed without referring to their genesis. Child psychology in this respect has an indisputable advantage: everything is just beginning here, and all the processes of the emergence of new forms of activity, consciousness, thinking can be traced in an open, expanded form. Therefore, child psychology can be considered as a kind of genetic method general psychology, which allows us to trace the formation of the most complex forms of the mental life of an adult.

At the same time, child psychology is an independent fundamental science that provides a scientific basis for such applied sciences as pedagogical psychology and pedagogy. The subject of educational psychology is the development and substantiation of methods of teaching and upbringing of children at different ages. It is obvious that the development of methods for teaching and educating preschoolers is impossible without knowledge of the characteristics of the child's psyche in the early stages of ontogenesis, which is provided by child psychology. Only an understanding of the capabilities (and the boundaries of these capabilities) of the child at different stages of childhood allows the educational psychologist to develop methods of teaching and upbringing children that are adequate and effective for each age. At the same time, educational psychology provides invaluable material for child psychology, since it allows one to find out the influence of various strategies of upbringing and teaching children on the characteristics of their mental development. The fundamental problem of the relationship between the child's mental development and his education and upbringing lies in the plane of both child and educational psychology. Therefore, child and educational psychology are inextricably linked disciplines. Pedagogical psychology of a preschooler can be viewed as a special area of \u200b\u200bchild psychology, associated with the development of applied issues related to the education and upbringing of children.

Knowledge of the basics of child psychology is necessary for practical work with children. The most important condition for the successful work of educators and teachers in a nursery, kindergarten, various educational centers is knowledge of the laws of the child's mental development, understanding the interests of each child, the characteristics of his thinking and emotional life. Knowledge of child psychology helps the educator to establish contact with children, timely identify and overcome deviations in their mental development, choose appropriate forms of communication and education for them.

Recently in our country the profession is becoming more widespread practical child psychologist. The task of this specialist includes diagnostics and correction of the mental development of children, as well as work with "difficult" children and their parents. Knowledge of child psychology is a necessary foundation for this profession. Only an understanding of age norms and patterns of mental development allows a practical psychologist to identify the individual characteristics of each child, their compliance with the age norm, diagnose deviations in the mental development of individual children and choose adequate and effective methods of correction.

Smirnova V.G., Milner B.Z. and others. Organization and its business environment (Document)

Ilyin E.P. Sports Psychology (Document)

Smirnova E.O., Kholmogorova V.M. Interpersonal relationships of preschoolers: diagnosis, problems, correction (Document)

Flint V.E., Smirnova O.V. Conservation and restoration of biodiversity (Document)

Gagarin A.V. Zoopsychology and Comparative Psychology (Document)

n1.doc

E.O.Smirnova

CHILD PSYCHOLOGY

M .: Humanit. Ed. Center VLADOS, 2003.

CHAPTER 1

Subject and tasks of child psychology

Child psychology - the science of the mental development of a child

The speed at which new qualities of a child appear impresses adults. The constant movement of the child forward, the emergence of more and more forms of his independence and initiative is characterized by the facts inherent in child development. These facts are used by child psychology.

The main difficulty in studying the mental life of young children is that this life is in constant development, and the younger the child, the more intensively this development takes place. It not only grows, but also develops. The concepts of "growth" and "development" should be distinguished.

Growth - it is a quantitative change or improvement of a function. The child's weight and height increase, he acts better with objects, speaks, walks, etc. This is a quantitative accumulation. If we consider a child as an inferior adult, then his entire life path will be reduced only to quantitative changes - that is, to an increase and strengthening of what is initially present in him, and nothing fundamentally new is formed,

Despite the differences that certainly exist between children of the same age, each stage of childhood has its own specific characteristics. For example, at 3-4 months all babies are happy with an adult, about a year old children prefer to play with toys, and about two years old they start talking, etc. These changes are not accidental, but natural. If they occur differently in this or that child, we can talk about deviations in their mental development: lagging ahead or deformations, which always have their reasons. Clarification of the patterns of development and explanation of its causes is the most important task of child psychology.

All children go through certain stages or stages in their development, which are characterized by the specific features of their mental life. The study of the laws of the child's mental development is the main subject of child psychology. Its main task - describe and explain the features of the child's mental life at each age stage.

The specifics of child development

What determines the specificity of child development? The main question that arises here is the question of the relative role of the natural properties of the organism and the human conditions for raising a child. To answer it, it would be necessary to conduct an experiment, when children from the first days of life would grow up in conditions of isolation from adults: they would not hear speech, would not see other people, would not use objects common to us. If in such conditions children developed in about the same way, the child's mental abilities could be considered innate, inherent in nature itself. It is clear that no scientist and no parent will allow such a risky experiment with a child. However, there have been such cases in the history of mankind. Children grew up outside human society, were raised by animals. They are called "Mowgli children", by analogy with the hero of the famous novel by R. Kipling.

For example, at the beginning of the XX century. Indian scientist Reed Singh saw a she-wolf taking her cubs for a walk, among which there were two girls - one about eight, and the other one and a half years old. Singh took the girls with him and tried to educate them. It turned out that these children were deprived of all, without exception, specifically human forms of behavior. They moved on four limbs, ate raw meat, were nocturnal, howled at night, snapped at people and tried to hide. In short, they were much more like wolf cubs than human children. The youngest of them, Amala, died a year later, unable to withstand the human conditions of life. The eldest, Kamala, lived to be 17 years old. For 9 years it was possible to teach her upright posture and some hygienic skills with great difficulty. However, full-fledged mental development was impossible for the girl. She was never able to think, feel and speak humanly, remaining a creature with typically wolfish habits.

Thus, the German psychologist R. Spitz described the children of one orphanage who had not seen their mothers from the age of 3 months. The care, food, hygiene conditions in this establishment were typical of satisfactorily functioning establishments of this kind. However, all the children experienced a sharp delay in not only mental but also physical development. Within 2 years, about half of the children died. Those who survived at 3-4 years old were absolutely incapable of independent movement, could not sit without support, could not, eat with a spoon and dress independently, did not react to others.

So, children who were left in the first months of life without the attention of adults at all, despite normal nutrition and physical care, either simply do not survive, or stop developing and remain in an embryonic state. This may indicate that the presence of a human brain is far from the main condition for human development. It is not enough to be born as a human being to become one. The child absorbs in himself what is given by the conditions of life, education. And if these conditions are bestial - wolf, dog, monkey, the child grows up into an animal of the corresponding species. If a child is left alone with the outside world, he simply does not survive and does not develop without a "nurturing" environment. The human psyche does not arise without human conditions of life. It is not in the brain or in the body of the child.

And at the same time, psychic, spiritual life is inherent only in man, and no animal can under any circumstances become a man.

In science, attempts have been made repeatedly to develop human qualities in animals. For example, the Soviet zoopsychologist N.N. Ladygina-Kots raised a little chimpanzee in her family from one and a half to four years. The monkey was taught to use things, play with toys, talk and treated her quite humanly. But the results were very modest. The chimpanzee learned with difficulty some human skills (holding a pencil or a broom, knocking with a hammer, etc.) But the meaning of human actions turned out to be completely inaccessible to him: while running a pencil on paper, he could not draw something meaningful, "sweeping" the floor, he shifted rubbish from one place to another, etc. He did not have any tendency to master words, even with persistent special training. These data indicate that without the human brain, human qualities of the psyche cannot arise.

The human brain has practically not changed since the time of our distant ancestors who lived several tens of thousands of years ago. At the same time, during this time, humanity has made a gigantic path in its development. This became possible because human development occurs in a fundamentally different way than development in the animal world. If in the animal kingdom certain forms of behavior are inherited, just like the structure of the organism, or are acquired in the process of the individual experience of an individual, then in humans the forms of activity and mental qualities characteristic of him are transmitted in another way - by inheriting cultural and historical experience. Each new generation "stands on the shoulders" of the entire previous history of mankind. It does not come to the natural world, but to the world of culture, in which there are already sciences, literature, music, houses, cars and much more. There are ideas about how children should develop and how they should become by adulthood. The child himself will never invent all this, but he must master it in the process of his human development. This is what cultural or social inheritance is all about. Therefore, the development of a child is determined not only and not so much by the maturation of the organism, but, above all, by the social and cultural conditions of the life and education of the child in society. These conditions differ significantly in different cultures in different historical eras.
Childhood as a sociocultural phenomenon

One of the interesting signs of a changed attitude towards children is the appearance of new elements in children's clothing. In the Middle Ages, as soon as a child grew out of diapers, he was immediately dressed in an adult costume. Only in the XVI-XVII centuries. special children's clothing appears. It is characteristic that boys and girls 2-4 years old were dressed in the same children's dresses. This type of children's costume existed until the beginning of the 20th century. It is characteristic that in those social classes where there is no big difference between the work of adults and children (as, for example, in peasant families before the revolution), children are dressed in adult clothes (of course, in smaller sizes).

One such description is contained in the notes of Douglas Lockwood about his travels to the Gibson Desert (Western Australia) and about his encounters with the Pintubi Aborigines. Until 1957, most of the people of this tribe did not see a white man, their contacts with neighboring tribes were very limited, as a result of which the culture and way of life of the people of the Stone Age were largely preserved in this tribe. Their entire life is spent in the desert and is focused on finding water and food. The strong and resilient women of the Pintubi tribe participate in this quest on an equal basis with men. They can walk for hours in the desert with a heavy load on their heads. Children are given birth lying on the sand, helping each other. They do not have any idea about hygiene and do not even know the reasons for childbirth. They have no utensils other than the jugs they wear on their heads. When Lockwood offered them a mirror and a comb, they could not use them for their intended purpose, and the image in the mirror caused surprise and fear. Lockwood describes how a 2-3-year-old girl, while eating, thrust huge pieces of flatbread into her mouth, then pieces of meat of a small iguana, which she herself baked on the hot sand. Her younger sister sat next to her and straightened out a can of stew (from the expedition's reserves), pulling out the meat with her fingers. Another observation: a small girl who cannot walk made a separate fire for herself and, bending her head, fanned the coals so that the fire would kindle and warm her. She was naked and was probably cold, but she did not cry. Lockwood notes that although there were three small children at the camp, he never heard a baby cry.

These and many other materials allowed D. B. Elkonin to put forward the position of the historical conditionality of childhood. Childhood arises when the child cannot be directly included in the system of social reproduction, since he cannot yet master the tools of labor due to their complexity. If these tools are simple and primitive, the main methods of obtaining food are gathering and hunting, a child can very early join the work of adults, practically assimilating the ways of action of adults. Under such conditions, when the child is directly involved in the life of adults, there is no need for special preparation for future working life. The development of civilization inevitably led to the fact that the inclusion of children in the productive labor of adults turned out to be impossible and was postponed in time. Childhood lengthened with the development of humanity. This lengthening of childhood did not occur by building on new periods, but by a kind of “wedging in” of a new period of development. Elkonin brilliantly revealed the nature of such a "wedging" of a new period on the example of the emergence of role-playing game, and with it a new stage of development, which in modern psychology is called preschool.

Child psychology in the system of sciences

The study of the mental development of a child is possible only with certain general ideas about what a person is and what his essential characteristics are. Such representations are given by philosophy. It may be recalled that psychology originally arose within the framework of philosophy and for a long time existed as its integral part. In the future, it stood out as an independent area of \u200b\u200bknowledge and itself was divided into many separate disciplines. But still, every scientist trying to study a person, whether he wants it or not, necessarily relies on a certain philosophical base, on a certain understanding of the essence of man. Therefore, philosophy, or philosophical anthropology, is the foundation of psychology in general and child psychology in particular. On the other hand, issues related to the origin of consciousness, activity, human personality, which are central to philosophers, are specifically and in detail developed in child psychology. Many famous philosophers (V. B. Ilyenkov, F.T. Mikhailov and others) constantly turned to the materials of child psychology and in many respects built their philosophical concepts on them. Therefore, we can say that child psychology, on the one hand, relies on philosophy, and on the other, provides it with the necessary empirical material.

The psychology of a modern person, including a child, is fundamentally different from the psychology of a person in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance. However, the historical and cultural development of mankind, phylogenesis, other sciences are engaged - history, cultural studies, anthropology. The subject of child psychology is the individual development of a person, or ontogenot,which always occurs in a certain historical and cultural situation, at a certain stage of phylogenesis. The child psychologist needs to take into account the historical and cultural background against which child development takes place. At the same time, ontogenetic development has its own deeply specific laws.

Qualitative changes in mental life, that is, development, occur not only in childhood, but also throughout ontogenesis. And in the life of an adult, qualitative changes in his views of the world, the emergence of new needs and new forms of activity are possible. All these changes have their own psychological mechanisms and patterns. They constitute the subject of a special scientific discipline - developmental psychology, or genetic psycho logic. Of course, child and genetic psychology have a lot in common, since the most intensive and effective human mental development occurs in childhood. Genetic psychology is mainly based on facts and patterns obtained in child psychology. In turn, child psychology uses the patterns of human mental development, discovered in developmental psychology. But child psychology is limited to early age (from 0 to 7 years) and seeks to describe as fully as possible the qualitative changes that occur with the child throughout childhood.

Child psychology relies on concepts and methodology general psychology. The isolation of such aspects of the child's mental life as activity, mental processes, personality, etc., became possible due to the fact that these aspects were identified and described in general psychology. At the same time, general psychology dealing with an adult cannot do without the facts of child psychology. The features of the mental life of an adult cannot be understood without an analysis of their origin. The psyche of an adult is very complex, there are many processes and tendencies in it at the same time in a reduced, compressed form, which cannot be studied and analyzed without referring to their genesis. Child psychology in this respect has an indisputable advantage: everything is just beginning here, and all the processes of the emergence of new forms of activity, consciousness, thinking can be traced in an open, expanded form. Therefore, child psychology can be considered as a kind of genetic method general psychology, which allows us to trace the formation of the most complex forms of the mental life of an adult.

At the same time, child psychology is an independent fundamental science that provides a scientific basis for such applied sciences as educational psychology and pedagogy. The subject of educational psychology is the development and substantiation of methods of teaching and upbringing of children at different ages. It is obvious that the development of methods for teaching and educating preschoolers is impossible without knowledge of the characteristics of the child's psyche in the early stages of ontogenesis, which is provided by child psychology. Only an understanding of the capabilities (and the boundaries of these capabilities) of the child at different stages of childhood allows the educational psychologist to develop methods of teaching and upbringing children that are adequate and effective for each age. At the same time, educational psychology provides invaluable material for child psychology, since it allows one to find out the influence of various strategies of upbringing and teaching children on the characteristics of their mental development. The fundamental problem of the relationship between the child's mental development and his education and upbringing lies in the plane of both child and educational psychology. Therefore, child and Educational psychology are inextricably linked disciplines. Pedagogical psychology of a preschooler can be viewed as a special area of \u200b\u200bchild psychology, associated with the development of applied issues related to the education and upbringing of children.

Recently in our country the profession of practical child psychologist is becoming more and more widespread. The task of this specialist includes diagnostics and correction of the mental development of children, as well as work with "difficult" children and their parents. Knowledge of child psychology is a necessary foundation for this profession. Only an understanding of age norms and patterns of mental development allows a practical psychologist to identify the individual characteristics of each child, their compliance with the age norm, diagnose deviations in the mental development of individual children and choose adequate and effective methods of correction.

RESULTS

Childhood is the period of the most intensive and effective human development.

CHAPTER 2

Child psychology methods

M method (from the Greek "way to something") is a general approach, a way of research. The method is determined by the subject of study and general ideas about it. For example, if a scientist examines the mental development of a child and at the same time proceeds from the idea that this development is determined by natural, biological factors, his main method will be the maximum possible elimination of all social influences influencing from the outside on the subject of study. If, on the contrary, he believes that this development is determined by the influences of the social environment, he will specially organize these external influences and analyze the nature of their influence on the characteristics of the child's psyche. Thus, different views on the subject give rise to different research strategies, or different methods.

It is necessary to distinguish between methods and research methods. Unlike a method, a method is a private, tactical way of obtaining facts, which depends on the specific conditions of the scientist's work, the characteristics of his object (for example, the age of the children), the inventiveness of the researcher himself, etc. There are a great many research methods in child psychology. There are only two methods - observation and experiment. True, each of them has several options.

Observation method

Initially, child psychology was a purely descriptive science. Its task consisted in the phenomenological description of the processes of the child's mental development and their symptoms, and the main strategy was, accordingly, to observe the developmental processes. These observations usually took the form of diary entries. One of the first researchers to monitor the development of a child was Charles Darwin. In 1881, he was the first to describe the appearance of a child's smile on the 45-46th day of life, attachment to an adult at the end of the 5th month of life, and many other important facts.

As already noted, the first book on child psychology was the work of the German physiologist W. Preyer "The Soul of the Child" (1882). In the study of Preyer, the child was first systematically monitored from birth to the end of the 3rd year of life, daily, at the same time intervals. Many major psychologists kept diaries of their children's development. Thus, the famous German child psychologist V. Stern (1871-1938) used the diary entries he and his wife kept to substantiate his hypotheses. The prominent Swiss psychologist J. Piaget (1896-1980), highlighting the stages of a child's mental development, often referred to observations of his own grandchildren. The famous Soviet child psychologist D. B, Elkonin (1904-1984) used observations of his grandson to describe the process of the formation of the child's objective actions.

There were entire scientific institutions where the method of observing children was the main one. For example, N.M.Schelovanov organized in 1920 a clinic for the normal development of children, in which foundlings and orphans lived mainly. The development of children in the clinic was monitored around the clock, thanks to which we received a lot of classic works on child psychology. They were the first to identify and describe the revitalization complex in infants, interesting features of the development of walking, object manipulations of children, etc.

The observation method can yield very important results. But it all depends on what and how to observe. In this regard, several observation options are distinguished.

First, it can be solid and selective . Continuous observations simultaneously cover many aspects of the child's behavior. Its task is to describe the general picture of behavior. Of course, it is impossible to record all the movements and words of the child. Only that which seems to the observer to be the most important and significant is recorded, especially that new that can be seen in the child at the moment of observation. But what exactly turns out to be new and important, the researcher does not know in advance (or does not formulate).

In contrast, sample observations record one aspect of behavior that is predetermined. For example, the expression of emotions in a child, his actions with toys, the peculiarities of the child's words, etc. In this case, the child's behavior is recorded in any special natural situations or at certain periods of time (during play, communication with adults, etc.).

Second, observation can be hidden and included . In covert observation, the figure of the observer should be invisible to the child or should not attract his attention. To do this, use a special device - a mirror with one-way permeability (or a Gisel mirror, in honor of its inventor Gisel). It is placed between the child's room and the researcher's room. In the first room, an ordinary mirror hangs on the wall, and in the second there is a window through which you can observe the child. Currently, television installations and film cameras are used for covert surveillance. It can also be performed by an adult who is habitual and invisible to the child. The main thing is that he does not violate the ease and naturalness of the child's behavior.

Participatory observation is different in that the observing adult is not only visible, noticeable to the child, but also participates in joint actions with him (plays, feeds, reads books, etc.) He is included in the child's activities. At the same time, he not only plays or feeds, but also monitors the baby (notes for himself his reactions, initiative and response actions, emotions, statements, etc.), then describes his observations. This task is rather difficult. Here you need not only to notice and remember all the manifestations of the child, but also to be able to observe yourself, take into account your own actions that cause certain manifestations of the observed baby. Such included observation is often used by educators, teachers, parents and other adults who are in constant contact with children.

Third, observation can be disposable (cut) and long-term (prolonged , or longitudinal). A one-time observation is carried out once, at a time. Using this method, the researcher usually compares the behavior of different children (boys and girls, children of different ages, children from different cultures, etc.) in the same situations and draws conclusions about the characteristics of their psyche.

Prolonged (longitudinal, or longitudinal) observation continues for a long time (several years) and is carried out for the same children. With this method, the researcher does not compare different groups of children, but different stages in the development of one child (or several children). Prolonged observation makes it possible to trace the emergence of new abilities, interests of the child, to describe the various stages of his development. The diaries of parents and psychologists mentioned above are typical cases of prolonged observation.

However, in all cases, the researcher can trace only the external, observable aspects of the child's behavior: his statements, expressive movements, his actions with toys, etc. But the psychologist is not interested in external manifestations themselves, but in internal, mental processes that are hidden behind them, inaccessible direct observation. To understand these processes and be able to interpret the observed behavior of the child, the psychologist must have a preliminary idea of \u200b\u200bwhat he can and wants to see, he must operate with concepts, be able to use the language with which he will describe the behavior of the child. The success of observation depends on how clearly the goal of observation is formulated for the researcher and how clearly he imagines what he will observe. If this is not the case, his impressions will be vague and vague, the main thing will mix with the secondary, and it will be impossible to get any factual material.

The observation method has a number of undeniable advantages. It allows us to unfold before us the concrete life of the child, gives many living, interesting facts, but allows us to explore the child in the natural conditions of his life. It is indispensable for the primary orientation of the problem and for obtaining preliminary facts. But this method also has a number of disadvantages, the main of which is its extreme laboriousness. It requires a high psychological education of the researcher and a huge investment of time, which does not at all guarantee the receipt of new facts. The researcher is forced to wait until the phenomena of interest to him arise by themselves. In addition, the results of observations often do not allow understanding the reasons for certain forms of behavior. Many researchers have noticed that when observing, the psychologist sees only what he already knows, and what he does not yet know passes by his attention. Therefore, another, more active and purposeful method is more effective - experiment.
Experimental method

A psychological experiment allows the psychologist to purposefully evoke the phenomena of the psyche that interest him. In the experiment, the psychologist specifically creates and modifies the conditions in which the child is. The child's behavior under different experimental conditions (his qualitative and quantitative analysis) allows us to draw some conclusions about his psychological characteristics. For example, to find out what form of communication with an adult preschoolers prefer, the experimenter organizes various situations of communication with the child. In one of them, an adult plays toys with him, in another, he reads books or talks about something cognitive, in the third, he talks about personal topics: about his relationships with friends, different human qualities, etc. Then the experimenter compares the nature of the child's behavior in these situations and finds out which of them is preferable for the preschooler. This experiment allows us to ascertain the main form of communication of the child. Such experiments are called ascertaining, since they allow fixing (or ascertaining) any features of the child's development.

The experimental method turned out to be effective, economical and found wide application in psychology in general and in children in particular. The specificity of the experiment in child psychology lies in the fact that the experimental conditions should be close to the natural living conditions of the child and should not disrupt the usual forms of his activity. Unusual laboratory conditions (for example, the use of new equipment, the presence of alien adults, etc.) can confuse the child and cause a refusal to work, Therefore, the experiment in child psychology should be close to the natural conditions of the child's life. It is called that - a natural experiment, in contrast to a laboratory experiment, which can take place in any situation using the most sophisticated equipment. Experiments with children are best carried out in the form of an interesting game or activities familiar to the child - drawing, constructing, solving riddles, etc. Children should not suspect that the games that are offered to them are specially organized for their study.

One of the types of psychological experiment are tests. The test is a specially selected posterior system that is offered to children under strictly defined conditions. For completing each task, the child receives an assessment in points. The assessment should be objective and not depend on the personal attitude of the experimenter. Preliminarily, for each age group, the age norms for completing each task are determined (that is, what score corresponds to three, four, or six years of age). Comparison of the results shown by the child with the age norm makes it possible to determine whether the child is normally developed for his age or whether his development deviates from the norm (lags or advances). With the help of tests, it is possible to identify the result of solving a particular problem, but it is impossible to determine the qualitative features (or method) of its solution. Since child psychology is primarily interested in the features of the child's internal, mental life, and not in its objective results, the test method in child psychology cannot be used as the main one.

The experiment strategy is called slicing strategy , because here, as it were, the level of age-related or individual development of a mental process is removed. This strategy is very widely used in child psychology. Sometimes a slicing strategy is combined with a prolonged, longitudinal research strategy. Initially, in relation to a certain number of children, the first section is carried out, after a while the second section is carried out for the same children using the same methods, then the third, etc., after which the results of individual sections are compared and the dynamics of one process or another is revealed. Experiment and observation are often combined in the same study.

However, the methods listed above (both observation and ascertaining, or slice, experiment) only make it possible to record certain features of the child's behavior or the degree of success in solving problems. But they do not provide an opportunity to find out what is happening behind this visual, perceived picture. They do not lead to an understanding of the conditions and driving forces behind a child's development. Observing how the child solves problems, we will not be able to understand why he solves them (or does not solve them), and no close observation will give an answer to these questions.

A clear advantage in this respect is possessed by genetic modeling , or formative, experiment ... Its essence lies in the fact that the method of studying mental processes is the experimental formation of new abilities in children who did not have them before. This research strategy can be called a strategy for the experimental genesis of psychic abilities. Its implementation involves the use of various ways and means of active formation of the ability, the development of which is being studied. The researcher, depending on his theoretical ideas, formulates in advance a hypothesis about what lies at the basis of mental ability and what are the conditions for its effective development. Then, based on his hypothesis, he creates (or models) these conditions in his experiment and leads the child through a series of formative or developmental influences. After that, the researcher finds out whether the psychic abilities, the development of which is being studied, have changed. Thus, the hypothesis about the psychological causes and conditions of the child's mental development is tested. For example, a psychologist hypothesizes that the thinking of a small child is based on his practical objective actions. To test this hypothesis, he specially organizes the practical activities of children (gives them toys with a secret for research, teaches them how to handle new objects, specially deals with them in practical, research activities, etc.). After a series of such sessions, he finds out if there have been any changes in the mental abilities of these children. If so, then his hypothesis can be considered confirmed.

Different types of experiment, as a rule, are combined with each other in the same study. First, an ordinary cross-sectional experiment is carried out (in this case, it is called ascertaining) in order to fix the initial level of development of the ability being studied. Then follows a formative (or genetic-modeling) experiment, the purpose of which is to obtain a new level of development of the ability, depending on the initial hypothesis. Finally, the same slice experiment as in the beginning is repeated to find out what shifts occurred as a result of the formative experiment. This final experiment is usually called control.

Considering that children of preschool age develop rather quickly and without any experimental influences, to assess the effectiveness of a formative experiment, it is necessary to compare the changes that occur over the same period of time in children - participants in formative experiments and children of the same age living in natural conditions. The first group of children is usually called experimental, the second - control. Comparison of the results of the experimental group shows the difference that the conditions organized in the experiment give.

A formative experiment, like a slice experiment, can be longitudinal, that is, it can be continued for a number of years with the same children. For example, the long-term experimental teaching of children according to new programs and the elucidation of the influence of these programs on the mental development of children can be regarded as a longitudinal psychological and pedagogical formative experiment.

In addition to the basic research methods - observation and experiment - auxiliary methods are used in child psychology. These include the analysis of the results of children's activities (drawings, crafts, fairy tales composed by children, etc.) and the method of conversation (or interview).

Especially widely used analysis of children's drawings ... Children's drawings reflect the emotional state of the child, the peculiarities of the perception of people and objects around, the nature of relations with others. However, the interpretation of children's drawings requires high qualifications and extensive experience with this material. In addition, it can never be definite and unambiguous and always presupposes some subjectivity of the researcher. Therefore, in serious research, this method can only be used as an additional, auxiliary.

Conversation method (the method of questions, or interviews) can be used in work with children from the age of 4, when they are already quite good at speaking, but within very limited limits. The fact is that children of preschool age cannot yet express their thoughts and feelings in words, therefore their answers are usually short, formal and reproducing the words of an adult. The selection of questions for a conversation with children is a great art. They should be understandable and interesting for the child and in no case should contain clues. Conversation with a child can also be used only as an auxiliary, secondary method.

RESULTS

Method - it is a general strategy, a general way of obtaining facts, which is determined by the task and the subject of research, as well as the theoretical ideas of the researcher. In contrast, technique - it is a private, specific way of collecting materials, depending on the conditions of the research and the capabilities of the researcher.

The main research methods of child psychology - onobservanceandexperiment. Observation can be continuous or selective, hidden or included, one-time or prolonged (longitudinal).

In a psychological experiment, the researcher deliberately creates the conditions in which the child's activity takes place, or sets certain tasks for him. In child psychology, the experiment should be as close as possible to the natural living conditions of children. Unusual laboratory conditions (for example, the use of new equipment, alien adults, etc.) are not applicable when working with children. They should not suspect that the games offered to them are specially organized for their study.

One of the types of psychological experiment is zet - a system of specially selected tasks that are offered to children under strictly defined conditions. For completing each task, the child receives an assessment in points. The assessment should be objective and not depend on the personal attitude of the experimenter. Comparison of the child's results with the age norm makes it possible to determine whether the child is normally developed for his age or whether his development deviates from the norm (lags or advances). This strategy of the experiment is called the strategy of slices, since the level of age-related or individual development of a mental process is removed here.

A special type of experiment that allows to identify the driving forces and reasons for the development of mental abilities is genetic modeling , or formative, experiment, inwhich is the experimental formation of a particular mental ability. Considering that preschool children develop rather quickly and without any experimental influences, in order to evaluate the effectiveness of a formative experiment, it is necessary to compare the changes that occur over the same period of time in children - participants in the experiment and in children of the same age living in natural conditions.

The first group of children is called experimental,second - control.Comparison of the results of the control and experimental groups shows that "increase", which is given by the conditions organized in the experiment.

A formative experiment, just like a slice experiment, can be longitudinal, that is, it can be continued for a number of years with the same children. The long-term experimental teaching of children according to new programs and the elucidation of the influence of these programs on the mental development of children can be regarded as a longitudinal psychological and pedagogical formative experiment.

The experimental research strategy can be cut (one-time) and prolonged (or long-term, longitudinal). Both strategies can be combined in the same study.

In addition to the basic methods (observation and experiment) in child psychology, the analysis of the results of child activity and the method of conversation are used as additional methods. These methods can only be used as auxiliary methods.