Ch 3Human Development — Class 11 Psychology, concept-first.

From the moment of birth until old age, a person keeps changing in ways that go far beyond the physical.

Development is often equated with just physical change, but psychologists use the term much more broadly.

Development is the pattern of progressive, orderly and predictable change that begins at conception and continues throughout life. It is not the same as growth or maturation, though it includes both.

People clearly differ from one another — in skin, hair and eye colour, in height, in temperament, and in psychological traits like intelligence, learning ability, memory and personality — yet everyone…

Development never happens in a vacuum — it is always embedded within a particular socio-cultural context.

Development is commonly described in terms of periods or stages. People at different points in life clearly behave differently, partly because each is in a different stage of the life-span (for instan…

The period from conception to birth is called the prenatal period, and it typically lasts about 40 weeks.

Infancy — the first two years of life — is a period of extraordinarily rapid change. The brain develops at an astonishing rate both before and immediately after birth, with billions of neural connecti…

A newborn is not nearly as helpless as is often assumed. The activities needed to sustain life — breathing, sucking, swallowing, and eliminating bodily wastes — are already present at birth.

Newborns are considerably more capable, sensorially, than they may appear. They can recognise their mother's voice within just a few hours of being born, alongside a range of other sensory capacities.…

Jean Piaget argued that children do not simply absorb information passively from their environment — they actively construct their own understanding of the world.

Babies are social creatures from the moment they are born. An infant fairly quickly begins to show a preference for familiar faces and responds to a parent's presence by cooing and gurgling.

A child's physical growth slows down compared to infancy, but development continues rapidly across every domain.

Early physical development follows two well-established principles. The first is the cephalocaudal trend — development proceeds from the head (cephalic) region toward the tail (caudal) region — which…

Gross motor skills during the early childhood years involve the use of the arms and legs, and moving around the environment with growing confidence and purpose.

The child's growing ability to grasp object permanence enables them to begin using mental symbols to represent objects that are not physically present — for example, children at this age commonly draw…

The important dimensions of children's socio-emotional development during childhood are the development of the self, of gender, and of morality.

Another important aspect of a child's development is learning to distinguish between the rightness or wrongness of human actions.

The term adolescence derives from the Latin word adolescere, meaning 'to grow into maturity.' It is the transitional period in a person's life between childhood and adulthood, and is commonly defined…

Puberty, or the attainment of sexual maturity, marks the end of childhood and signifies the beginning of adolescence; it is characterised by dramatic physical changes in both the overall rate of growt…

During adolescence, thought becomes more abstract, logical, and idealistic; adolescents become increasingly capable of examining their own thoughts, other people's thoughts, and what others might be t…

Every adolescent, at some point, seeks answers to questions such as: Who am I? Which subjects should I study? Do I believe in God? The answers to all of these questions involve the quest to define one…

The final major stretch of the human life-span — adulthood and old age — brings its own distinctive tasks and transitions: taking on adult roles such as career, marriage and parenthood; gradual physic…

An adult is generally defined as someone who is responsible, mature, self-supporting, and well integrated into society.

Exactly when 'old age' begins is not easy to determine. Traditionally, the age of retirement was closely linked to the definition of old age; now that people are living longer, the age at which people…