Early Childhood Development Research Paper

In this paper, I will be analyzing my development from child to teen and from teen to an adult. First, I will reflect back to specific moments in my life and look forward to my possible future in terms of development. Next, I will be choosing three concepts and apply them to each portion of my development and provide examples from my life for each. Finally, I will make connections from my development over the years to the assumptions of the contextual meta-theory.

My development had a normal start with a few rough patches here and there. At a young age, my parents realized I had a hard time with reading and math. I wasn’t keeping up with the other kids in my classes in terms of developmental learning. Most kids had learned how to read and do

They would call me everything from a fat cow to a sloppy whore, they told me on the daily to give up, that I would never amount to anything, and the final straw was when they told me that I should die. Hearing things like that quickly took a heavy toll on my self-esteem. Self-esteem is “the judgments we make about our own worth and the feelings associated with those judgments” (Berk 201). I started to believe the things that they were telling me, after hearing them every day for several months, which turned into several years, and I developed depression and body image issues. That said I gained quite a few things that were even more important in my development, I discovered who my true friends were, I found who made up my support system during hard times, and coping techniques that I still use to this day. Most importantly I gained the strength, resilience, and determination to keep working hard, moving forward and to follow my

The two assumptions that I will be applying to my developmental experiences are, continuous vs. discontinuous and universal vs. contextual. Continuous is “quantitative and gradual” it happens in stages and discontinuous is “qualitative and abrupt” it happens in intervals or gaps (Hernández, 18). For example, my struggle in reading, my parents and I had to take steps to diagnose my dyslexia, and then find me a tutor to help me learn how to read. From there the next step was to practice reading in class, at home and in my free time. I gradually learned how to read at an accelerated rate, however, had I not taken these steps my learning would have stopped and I never would be where I am today. Universal is “its the same all over the world” and contextual is “its specific to each individual and differs from place to place” (Hernández, 18). For example, my experience with gender typing is contextual because people in other cultures are more strict with girls doing, wearing, and behaving how they believe a girl should. If my experience with gender typing was universal, the women in the world would have more freedom and we possibly wouldn’t have a wage gap or even sexism