A theory of development is a scheme or system of ideas that is based on evidence and attempts to explain, describe and predict behaviour and development. Motor development relates to the development of motor skills and consists of motor milestones, the basic motor skills acquired in infancy and early childhood (e.g: sitting, crawling). Motor development gives an individual

Prenatal development is the development of human individuals before they are born. The foetus is the organism 12 weeks after conception until birth. The embryo is the developing organism during the period when organs are forming. A neonate is an infant less than a month old. Postnatal development is the development of a human individual after he is

Emotional development can be divided into three areas: recognising emotions, understanding emotions and regulating emotions.

Darwin argued that the ability to communicate emotions is innate. Evidence for this comes from cross-cultural understanding of emotions and new-borns that portray certain emotions. There is a distinction between basic emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, anger, interest, surprise and disgust) and

The human language is characterised by the following things:

1. Communication system
   It is a communication system, a means for speakers of a language to communicate with one another. This part is not unique to human language.
2. A symbolic system
   It is a symbolic system because words and parts of words represent meaning. They

Cultural tools refer to any tools that help us calculate, produce models, make predictions and understand the world more fully. Orthographies, writing systems, differ greatly. Alphabetic scripts are a writing system in which written symbols correspond to spoken sounds. In Chinese, each letter corresponds to a morpheme. Children find it difficult to realize that letters represent phonemes. Children

Adolescents can see both figures in ambiguous figures, while young children can only see one, or take longer to see the other. This suggests increased flexibility of perception. Adolescents have a superior ability to allocate attentional resources. Selective attention is the ability to allocate attentional resources and focus on a specific topic. Adolescents have superior selective attention. Young

Resilience occurs when children experience positive outcomes despite experiencing significant risk. Risk is defined as those stressors that have proven or presumed effects on increasing the likelihood of maladjustment in children (e.g: poverty, maltreatment). Risk factors are catastrophic events. Risk factors pose a pervasive threat through deprivation of children’s basic needs. A protective factor is anything that prevents

Developmental delay refers to a delayed, but normal path of development. A developmental difference refers to a qualitatively different path of development. Whether the development is delayed or different depends on the area of development. One approach to quantifying a delay includes looking at the extent to which individual children perform relative to a level expected for their