I've decided that this blog will be more about my experiences in graduate school and less about book reviews. I will try to keep it interesting anyway.
I am attending the University of Phoenix Masters of Mental Health Counseling program.
The last class I took was the portfolio class that is how they do the admissions process. If you pass the class you get into the program. It think having a portfolio class was a good idea because now that I have passed the class I have a lot more confidence in my ability to be a graduate student, and it also helped me to get a feel for how it works.
Before each week of class we have to read about 300 pages from the textbook and journal articles. It is so great, I love it. The material is so interesting and I am finally in a situation where I can share my thoughts about what I read without people getting bored or telling me to go away.
The class I'm taking is about family and human development. This week we learned about genetics, childbirth, infancy and attachment.
Teen girls who get pregnant often get pregnant not because they are unaware of the risks but because they are confused about attachment. They don't have the feeling of attachment with parents or other adults, so they look for it in boys. They get sexual attachment confused with parental attachment and look for it in the wrong places.
Infant development is on a continuum and there is a bell curve of normalcy. The average age for infants to start walking is one year old, but that is within a range of normalcy. I commented in class (because it was the best example) that my sister started walking at 9 months (or maybe 10) and I started walking at 15 months but that we are both within a normal range. I said that it was because we had different temperaments as babies. But then people in the class commented that maybe the difference was in birth order (which is probably true because I'm the youngest and I didn't have to walk because my siblings carried me all the time)
My professor said maybe your sister had a bigger cerebellum
My sister and I were both born in February. Maybe it was because my sister learned to walk in salt lake city and she could play outside in November. I learned to walk in Wisconsin. Winter is really cold there. Maybe I didn't walk until 15 months because I was too cold and wanted to wait until spring.
That's whats so interesting about psychology. You can study a common trend but within that trend each individual is different for many reasons. There are so many factors that make up an individual: nurture, and nature. And about free will, intelligence, resiliency, interventions, even things like nutrition, outside environment, medications, choices of other people, or public policy?People are so very cool.
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Interesting. Personally I think babies come out a certain way, and while there's a lot you can do to nurture them in a certain way, they will always have a certain personality.
ReplyDeleteMaybe I walked early because mom always had to hold Katie so I was left alone more than you were. Maybe Erin didn't crawl till 13 months because her only examples were the cats while Marissa walked at 10 months because of the other kids' examples. In reality, I think that they were born a certain way (one much more cautious and the other more brave) but it is hard to tell what factors play into it. It may also be priorities. There are a lot of things babies have to learn the first couple years of life, but they have to spend a lot of time concentrating on one thing at a time. You were probably just learning other things before walking became a priority.
I'm going with the waiting until spring theory.
ReplyDeleteAs your Mom, I think I would go with the temperament idea, that each of my children were themselves because of their personalities more than anything and therefore their developmental milestones were different from each other. For example, David crawled so fast that he didn't see a need to walk as much. He actually walked at 12 months, but I had been expecting him to for about 2 months. As far as Katie, she didn't need holding at all, but was probably one of my most active children. She only regressed when we were around other people because of her extreme shyness; she was afraid of new situations and other people outside of family and therefore was very clingy when we went outside the home and only then would she need more of my attention. Laura was a very independent child from the very start and didn't want to be held much. She was much happier walking around herself. You, Emily were the other way; you loved to be held and wanted me to carry you around.
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