Developmental Psychology Quotes

The only 'good' learning is that which is in advance of development.

It is my belief that children are full of understanding and know as much as and more than adults, until they are about seven, when they suddenly become stupid, like adults.

Aging is the diminishing of early fearlessness.

There's a constant debate over nature or nurture - they're inseparable.

What was I like as a kid? The same as I am now, just smaller with a higher voice.

In genetic epistemology, as in developmental psychology, too, there is never an absolute beginning.

Of all the intellectual faculties, judgment is the last to mature. A child under the age of fifteen should confine its attention either to subjects like mathematics, in which errors of judgment are impossible, or to subjects in which they are not very dangerous, like languages, natural science, history, etc.

One of the best ways of understanding human nature is to study children. After all, if we want understand who we are, we should find out how we got to be that way.

For children mastery entails struggle. This means they must be permitted to struggle. If parents inappropriately step in to "help"-out of impatience or solicitude-they sabotage important learning. Among other things, the child is unlikely to discover the advantages of perseverance and self-discipline.

I'm really into psychology, and I want to be a psych major.

But nothing warps time quite like childhood

For the first two years of a child's life, we spend every waking hour tryibg to get the child to communicate. Then we spend the rest of our lives trying to figure out how we can reverse the process.

If you put a baseball and other toys in front of a baby, he'll pick up a baseball in preference to the others.

Everything is explicable in the terms of the behavior of a small child.

What we recall as children is a version of what's happening around us.

So no, it's not all in the genes, but what isn't in the genes isn't in the family environment either. It can't be explained in terms of the overall personalities or the child-rearing practices of parents.

Childhood constitutes the most important element in an adult's life, for it is in his early years that a man is made.

What a child can do in cooperation today, he can do alone tomorrow.

I've never studied psychology.

Childhood is analogous to language learning. It has a biological basis but cannot be realized unless a social environment triggers and nurtures it, that is, has need of it. If a culture is dominated by a medium that requires the segregation of the young in order that they learn unnatural, specialized, and complex skills and attitudes, then childhood, in one form or another, will emerge, articulate and indispensable.

Under Freud's influence, many ambitious biographers - not to mention psychologists, philosophers, and historians - have sought answers in their subject's childhood.

There are many who hold, as I do, that the most important part of life is not the age of university studies, but the first one, the period from birth to the age of six. For that is the time when a man's intelligence itself, his greatest implement, is being formed. But not only his intelligence; the full totality of his psychic powers.

What children can do with the assistance of others might be in some sense even more indicative of their mental development than what they can do alone

At Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, I started taking psychology courses. I was interested in the nature of the human mind, the structure itself, pathologies with which it is afflicted. I really intended to be a writer all along, but I needed to take a subject that I could make a living at, either teaching it or doing it.

I've studied human psychology my whole life.