Research Book 1/5

So after reading about 1/5 of  The Scientist in The Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About The Mind, it is difficult to view babies and young children the same anymore. The very beginning of this book was more of an overview of what we originally thought we knew about babies  and of what we have come to discover years later through various forms of research and close observation. This book pointed out to me that unfortunately, the study of  children’s development, Developmental Psychology is a fairly recent field of study and the ground work was put together mostly by two people in particular, Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky. Thanks to their earlier work, and recent research we have now adopted a new theory that an infants’ brain is like a computer, and not a blank slate as it was thought of before. Technology has also significantly affected Developmental Psychology because, now we have what Piaget and Vygotsky did not, camcorders and now psychologists have learned new amazing facts about babies, like the fact that six-month-olds can tell the difference between Swedish and English! Fascinating stuff. I also learned that babies start to understand that they are similar to others, and that we can feel upset or happy about certain things. Babies are so much smarter than I actually thought, this book finally explained to me why the “terrible two’s” are in deed so terrible, and it’s for the simple fact that children do (bad) things just because we don’t want them to. I think this shows a deep understanding of other people, and how they feel, because this demonstrates that children are acting with a purpose. So far into the book there hasn’t been much talk concerning language, but I skimmed through the table of contents and it’s coming up soon, in chapter 4 approximately 3/5 into the book, but meanwhile I will be reading all the other cool elements about “What children learn about things” next.