Topic 7: Child psychology — Edexcel A-Level Psychology
Test yourself on Topic 7: Child psychology with PEARSON EDEXCEL A-Level practice questions.
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Topic 7: Child psychology explained
The claim tested across this topic is continuity, the idea that early relationships and early environments leave a mark on later functioning.
Read the full explanation
Bowlby (1944) compared forty four juvenile thieves with a control group and found fourteen showed affectionless psychopathy, most of whom had endured prolonged early separation from their mothers, and he explained the link through an internal working model carried into adult relationships. Hazan and Shaver (1987) found adult romantic styles mapped onto the attachment categories Ainsworth identified in infancy. Rutter's English and Romanian Adoptees study showed the picture is not fixed, since children adopted before about six months largely caught up while later adopted children showed lasting difficulties. Influences such as maternal alcohol use and stress operate before any relationship begins.
Individual differences and developmental psychology must be considered when learning about differences that can come from the child’s age, gender, social situation, privation and deprivation.
Two approaches meet in this topic. The developmental approach asks what changes with age for children in general, while the individual differences approach asks why children of the same age differ so much. Rutter separated deprivation, the loss of a bond already formed, from privation, never forming one, and argued that Bowlby had blurred the two. Case evidence is mixed: Genie, found at thirteen after extreme isolation, never gained normal language, whereas the Czech twins studied by Koluchova recovered well once adopted into a warm family. Hodges and Tizard (1989) followed institution reared children and found adopted children formed good family attachments yet still struggled with peers in adolescence. Day care quality, poverty, family conflict and gendered expectation all shape outcomes too.
Your focus
- Students must show understanding that child psychology is about the development of the individual from before birth to adolescence and beyond, in that what we experience as children affects our later development.
- Individual differences and developmental psychology must be considered when learning about differences that can come from the child’s age, gender, social situation, privation and deprivation.
Topic 7: Child psychology exam tips
Marking Points
- Credit for stating the continuity claim and then testing it, using the internal working model or a sensitive period as the mechanism that carries early experience forward.
- Bowlby (1944): forty four thieves compared with a matched clinic control group, with affectionless psychopathy concentrated among those with early prolonged separation, although Bowlby made the diagnoses and gathered the histories himself, so researcher bias is a fair criticism.
- Rutter's Romanian adoptee findings used on both sides, since severe early privation had lasting effects for later adopted children yet substantial recovery among the earliest adopted shows early experience is influential rather than fixed.
- Credit for including the prenatal stage, for example maternal alcohol use, smoking or extreme stress affecting birth weight and later attention and behaviour.
- Evaluation credit for method, since longitudinal designs follow the same children but lose participants and take years, while cross sectional comparisons are quicker but confound age with cohort.
- Credit for the precise distinction, since deprivation follows an attachment already formed while privation means none was ever formed, and the predicted outcomes differ.
- Koluchova's twins and the Genie case used as contrasting evidence, with the fair conclusion that recovery depends on age at rescue and on the quality of care afterwards rather than on privation alone.
- Hodges and Tizard (1989): children reared in institutions and later adopted formed attachments to adoptive parents but continued to show difficulty with peers and with adults outside the family.
- Credit for naming the individual difference variables the board lists, age, gender and social situation, and giving one evidenced example of each rather than asserting that children vary.
- Evaluation credit for the idiographic and nomothetic issue, since case studies of extreme privation are rich but unrepeatable and confounded by malnutrition and abuse, while large cohort studies generalise but average away the individual.
Examiner Tips
- 💡This framing statement rarely gets a question of its own, but it supplies the evaluation paragraph for almost every child psychology essay, so keep the continuity argument and one contradicting study ready.
- 💡Where a question asks you to discuss the effect of early experience, give half the answer to what the evidence does not show, because that is where the harder marks sit.
- 💡Name the research method whenever you name a study here, since markers reward knowing that longitudinal and case study evidence carry different weight.
- 💡Questions often supply two children who differ in age, gender or home circumstances and ask you to explain the different outcomes, so learn one study for each variable.
- 💡When asked to compare developmental and individual differences explanations, use the same criteria for both, such as the evidence base and whether the account predicts a single case.
- 💡A case study question wants both sides, the depth of the material and the impossibility of replicating or generalising from it.
Common Mistakes
- Treating attachment as the whole of child psychology. This topic also covers deprivation, day care, autism and cross cultural comparison, and the framing statement covers all of it.
- Reporting the thieves study as proof that separation causes delinquency. It was a retrospective correlational comparison, and the children also differed in poverty and family conflict.
- Assuming early damage is permanent. The adoption evidence shows recovery is possible, and that is the point most often missed in an evaluation paragraph.
- Using deprivation and privation interchangeably, which throws away the whole point of Rutter's critique of the maternal deprivation hypothesis.
- Treating Genie as proof of a critical period for language. She was starved, beaten and possibly impaired before the isolation began, so the case cannot separate those causes.
- Writing that day care harms children. The evidence points to quality, staff ratio, stability of carers and number of hours rather than to day care as a category.