Developmental Psychology Archives - Page 6 of 14 - The Psychology Notes Headquarters

Why Egocentrism Isn’t What Most People Think It Is

A toddler who covers their eyes and shouts “You can’t see me!” is showing a mild form of egocentrism — and so is the teenager who spends an hour agonizing over a photo, convinced the whole school will notice every detail. Neither one is being selfish. What looks like self-centeredness is actually a cognitive stage tied to how the developing...

Anal Retentive vs Anal Expulsive: What Freud Really Meant

People throw around “anal retentive” to describe a coworker who color-codes their spreadsheets, but the phrase actually traces back to a specific stage in Freud’s theory of personality development, and the story behind it is stranger than the meme suggests. The anal stage occurs between roughly 18 months and 3 years old, when toilet training becomes the child’s first real...

Middle Childhood Developmental Tasks: Havighurst’s 7 Key Milestones

Not every child moves through middle childhood on schedule, and that gap is often where problems quietly take root. Between ages 6 and 12, Robert Havighurst’s middle childhood developmental tasks theory identifies seven milestones a child needs to work through to enter adolescence on solid footing, and a child who stalls on even one of them can end up struggling...

Trust vs Mistrust: The Caregiving Pattern That Builds Hope

A four-month-old wakes crying at 2 AM. In one household, a parent arrives within a minute, checks the diaper, and feeds the baby back to sleep. In another, the same cry sometimes brings comfort and sometimes goes unanswered for twenty minutes, with no pattern either way. Erik Erikson argued that thousands of moments like these, repeated across an infant’s first...

Industry vs Inferiority: 5 Examples From Erikson’s Stage 4

A fourth-grader whose science fair project falls flat next to a classmate’s parent-built volcano can walk away either prouder of his own work or convinced he doesn’t measure up — and which one happens has almost nothing to do with the actual quality of his project. Industry vs inferiority is the fourth stage of Erik Erikson’s psychosocial theory, unfolding between...

The Chronosystem: Time, Transitions & Historical Context

How does growing up in 2026 differ fundamentally from growing up in 1986? The same person born in different decades experiences radically different childhoods—one with smartphones and social media, another with rotary phones and three television channels. Time matters profoundly in human development, yet early developmental theories largely ignored its role. Bronfenbrenner added a fifth piece to his ecological model...

Category: Developmental Psychology