Child Development Assignment

Last night I went on a mission to Barnes & Noble’s to observe local children in their natural state. Although this sounds somewhat like a creepy, safari-like activity, this was an assignment for my child development (Psychology 25) class. We have to make observations of children we encounter in the neighborhood, and try to identify their stage of development, personality, age, and social relationships.

I sat on the floor of the children’s section, leaning against the huge Barnes & Noble teddy bear, and waited with my notepad and pencil. It was pretty empty for a while, but after twenty minutes, the first (and only) child of the night came with her parents.

The point of the assignment was to be a natural observer, which meant no interaction with the child, so I had to pretend like I was doing something else. I chose a random dinosaur picture book and pretended to write notes about it, when I was actually watching the child and taking note of her speech patterns and behavior. I tried to play it cool, and occasionally exchanged one dinosaur book for another, like I was genuinely researching dinosaurs. Still, I’m glad the parents did not take much notice of me, because a college student furiously studying dinosaur picture books could not have looked normal. After 30 minutes of nervous spying, I came to the conclusion that based on her developed sentence structure and cognitive understanding level, the girl was about 2 years old.

Like observation activity, the best thing about my child development class is the real life applications. We read about developmental stages in the textbook and learn about it through lectures, but the facts become real when we have real babies come into class, or watch home video clips of children and identify their age. Even one of our test questions on the midterm was to pick out key developments of a child after watching a short clip of the baby playing with toys. Our class material also extends to child rearing methods and schooling and even to larger issues in society, like over-protective parents, stem-cell research, or children as witnesses in courts. Although my mom did tell me that things don’t go as planned with children, if I remember the things I learn in this class, I’ll be able to be a better parent.