Psychosocial Development in Early Childhood.

Abstract

\JIREAT STEIDES WERE MADE IX PSYCHOSOCIAL DEVELopment from the neonatal period to the end of infancy. The infant's social behavior repertoire increased enormously. During infancy he encountered the problems of the oral and anal phases and worked out some solution to them. He learned social needs. He learned to be dependent but also took the first steps toward independence. He learned, to some degree, to direct and perhaps even control his aggression. He encountered sex in its primitive beginning. He began to recognize himself as a person and to appreciate the presence and effect of other persons. Above all, he developed a complex pattern of relationships with another human being, his mother. But at the end of infancy he was by no means a fully socialized human being. Allport expresses this point very well when he writes:Even at the age of two, the child is, when measured by standards applied to adults, an unsocialized horror. Picture, if you can, an adult who is extremely destructive of property, insistent and demanding that every desire be instantly gratified, helpless and almost totally dependent on others, unable to share his possessions, impatient, prone to tantrums, violent and uninhibited in the display of his feelings (2, 28). 1 1 From Allport (2).