R&D: Childhood as a subject of psychological research. The historical concept of childhood The emergence of concepts of childhood in psychology

1. Childhood as a psychological problem. Historical and socio-psychological aspects of the world of childhood

Today, any educated person, when asked what childhood is, will answer that childhood is a period of enhanced development, change and learning. But only scientists understand that this is a period of paradoxes and contradictions, without which it is impossible to imagine the development process. V. Stern, J. Piaget, I.A. Skolyansky and many others. D.B. Elkonin said that paradoxes in child psychology are developmental mysteries that scientists have yet to unravel. He invariably began his lectures with a description of the two main paradoxes of child development, embodying the need for a historical approach to understanding childhood. Let's consider them.

Man, being born, is endowed with only the most elementary mechanisms for maintaining life. In terms of physical structure, organization of the nervous system, types of activity and methods of its regulation, man is the most perfect creature in nature. However, according to the state at the time of birth, a drop in perfection is noticeable in the evolutionary series - the child does not have any ready-made forms of behavior. As a rule, the higher a living being ranks among animals, the longer his childhood lasts, the more helpless this creature is at birth. This is one of the paradoxes of nature that predetermines the history of childhood.

In the course of history, the enrichment of the material and spiritual culture of mankind has continuously grown. Over the millennia, human experience has increased many thousands of times. But during the same time, the newborn child has not changed much. Based on the data of anthropologists on the anatomical and morphological similarities between the Cro-Magnon and the modern European, it can be assumed that the newborn of a modern person does not differ in any significant way from a newborn who lived tens of thousands of years ago.

How is it that, under similar natural conditions, the level of mental development that a child reaches at each historical stage in the development of society is not the same?

Childhood is the period from newborn to full social and, consequently, psychological maturity; it is the period when the child becomes a full member of the human experience. At the same time, the duration of childhood in a primitive society is not equal to the duration of childhood in the Middle Ages or today. The stages of human childhood are a product of history, and they are just as subject to change as they were thousands of years ago. Therefore, it is impossible to study the childhood of a child and the laws of its formation outside the development of human society and the laws that determine its development. The duration of childhood is directly dependent on the level of material and spiritual culture of society.

The problem of childhood history is one of the most difficult in modern child psychology, because in this area it is impossible to carry out either observation or experiment. Ethnographers are well aware that cultural monuments related to children are poor. Even in those not very frequent cases when toys are found in archaeological excavations, these are usually objects of worship, which in ancient times were placed in graves to serve the owner in the afterlife. Miniature images of people and animals were also used for witchcraft purposes.

Theoretically, the question of the historical origin of childhood periods was developed in the works of P.P. Blonsky, L.S. Vygotsky, D.B. Elkonin. The course of the mental development of the child, according to L.S. Vygotsky, does not obey the eternal laws of nature, the laws of the maturation of the organism. That is why he emphasized that there is no eternal childishness, but only historically childish.

F. Aries was interested in how the concept of childhood developed in the minds of artists, writers and scientists in the course of history and how it differed in different historical eras. His studies in the visual arts led him to the conclusion that until the 13th century, art did not appeal to children, artists did not even try to depict them. No one believed that the child contains a human personality. If children appeared in works of art, they were depicted as reduced adults. Then there was no knowledge about the characteristics and nature of childhood. The word "child" for a long time did not have the exact meaning that is given to it now. So, it is typical, for example, that in medieval Germany the word "child" was a synonym for the concept of "fool".

Childhood was considered to be a period of rapid passing and of little value. Indifference towards childhood, according to F. Aries, was a direct consequence of the demographic situation of that time, which was characterized by high birth rates and high infant mortality. A sign of overcoming indifference to childhood, according to the French demographer, is the appearance in the 16th century of portraits of dead children. Their death, he writes, was now experienced as a truly irreparable loss, and not as a completely ordinary event. The differentiation of the ages of human life, including childhood, according to F. Aries, is formed under the influence of social institutions, i.e. new forms of social life generated by the development of society. Thus, early childhood first appears within the family, where it is associated with specific communication - "tenderness" and "spoiltness" of a small child. A child for parents is just a pretty, funny baby with whom you can have fun, play with pleasure and at the same time teach and educate him. This is the primary, "family" concept of childhood. The desire to “dress up” children, “spoil” and “undead” them could only appear in the family. However, this approach to children as "adorable toys" could not remain unchanged for long.

The development of society has led to a further change in attitudes towards children, a new concept of childhood has arisen. For teachers of the 17th century, love for children was no longer expressed in pampering and amusing them, but in a psychological interest in education and training. In order to correct a child's behavior, it is first necessary to understand it, and the scientific texts of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are full of comments on child psychology. It should be noted that deep pedagogical ideas, advice and recommendations are also contained in the works of Russian authors of the 16th-17th centuries.

The concept of rational education based on strict discipline penetrated family life in the 18th century. All aspects of children's life begin to attract the attention of parents. But the function of organized preparation for adult life is assumed not by the family, but by a special public institution - the school, designed to educate qualified workers and exemplary citizens. It was the school, according to F. Aries, that brought childhood beyond the first 2-4 years of maternal, parental education in the family. The school, by virtue of its regular, orderly structure, contributed to the further differentiation of that period of life which is denoted by the general word "childhood." The “class” has become a universal measure that defines a new marking of childhood. the child enters a new age every year as soon as the class changes. in the past, a child's life was not subdivided into such thin layers. Class therefore became the determining factor in the process of differentiation of ages within childhood or adolescence itself.

The next age level is also associated by F. Aries with a new form of social life - the institution of military service and compulsory military service. This is adolescence or adolescence. The concept of a teenager has led to a further reshaping of learning. Educators began to attach great importance to the form of dress and discipline, the education of stamina and masculinity, which had previously been neglected.

Childhood has its own laws and, of course, does not depend on the fact that artists begin to pay attention to children and depict them on their canvases. The study of F. Aries begins with the Middle Ages, because only at that time did picturesque scenes depicting children appear. But care for children, the idea of education, of course, appeared long before the Middle Ages. Already in Aristotle there are thoughts dedicated to children.

Based on the study of ethnographic materials by D.B. Elkonin showed that at the earliest stages of the development of human society, when the main way of obtaining food was gathering with the use of primitive tools for knocking down fruits and digging up edible roots, the child very early joined the work of adults, practically assimilating the methods of obtaining food and using primitive tools. Under such conditions, there was neither the need nor the time for the stage of preparing children for future work activities. As emphasized by D.B. Elkonin, childhood occurs when the child cannot be directly included in the system of social reproduction, since the child cannot yet master the tools of labor due to their complexity. As a result, the natural inclusion of children in productive labor is pushed back. According to D.B. Elkonin, this elongation in time does not occur by building a new period of development over the existing ones (as F. Aries believed), but by a kind of wedge-in of a new period of development, leading to an “upward shift in time” of the period of mastering the tools of production. D.B. Elkonin brilliantly revealed these features of childhood in the analysis of the emergence of a role-playing game and a detailed examination of the psychological characteristics of primary school age.

2. The subject and tasks of child psychology. Actual problems of modern child psychology

Developmental psychology studies the process of development of mental functions and personality throughout a person's life. A person develops especially intensively at the beginning of his life path - from birth to 18 years, until a rapidly maturing child graduates from school and enters adulthood. In the corresponding section of developmental psychology, regularities and facts of child development are revealed. So, child psychology studies the mental development of children from birth to 18 years.

The main thing that distinguishes developmental psychology from other areas of psychology is the emphasis on the dynamics of development. Therefore, it is called genetic psychology (from the Greek "genesis" - origin, formation). Nevertheless, developmental psychology is closely related to other areas of psychology: general psychology, personality psychology, social, pedagogical and differential psychology. As you know, in general psychology, mental functions are studied - perception, thinking, speech, memory, attention, imagination. In developmental psychology, the process of development of each mental function and the change in interfunctional relationships at different age stages can be traced. In personality psychology, such personal formations as motivation, self-esteem and the level of claims, value orientations, worldview, etc. are considered, and developmental psychology answers the questions when these formations appear, what are their characteristics at a certain age. The connection of developmental psychology with social psychology makes it possible to trace the dependence of the development and behavior of a child and then an adult on the specifics of the groups to which he belongs: from the family, the kindergarten group, the school class, teenage companies, etc. Each age is its own, special influence of the people around the child, adults and peers. The purposeful influence of adults raising and teaching the child is studied within the framework of educational psychology. Age-related "pedagogical psychology", as it were, looks at the process of interaction between a child and an adult from different angles: developmental psychology from the point of view of the child, pedagogical - from the point of view of the educator, teacher

The subject of developmental psychology is:

Quantitative and qualitative changes in the psyche during the transition from one age group to another,

A unique combination of psychological and behavioral characteristics for each age.

Driving forces, conditions and laws of human mental development.

Tasks:

1. The study of mental development at each age stage,

2. use of acquired knowledge in the educational process.

3. the use of the theoretical basis in the practice of psychological service.

Problems of modern child psychology

1. The problem of the influence of heredity and environment on the psyche and behavior of a person;

2. The problem of the influence of spontaneous and organized education and upbringing on the development of children (which influences more: family, street, school?);

The problem of correlation and identification of inclinations and abilities;

The problem of the correlation of intellectual and personal changes in the mental development of the child.

3. Methodological principles of the study of the child's psyche. Stages of building a psychological study

The general scientific principles of the dialectical approach correspond so precisely and harmoniously to the tasks of studying the laws of a child's mental development that it seems as if they were specially created for researchers in the field of child psychology. The methodology of psychological research is built on the basis of the general principles of dialectical methodology. Thus, the requirement for objectivity in the study of phenomena is carried out in the methodological principle of the unity of consciousness and activity, according to which the child's psyche is both formed and manifested in regularly changing types of activity. In this case, it is important to emphasize the fact that we judge the internal mental life of a child by its external manifestations, products of children's creativity, etc.

It is impossible to understand the personality of the child, his behavior without analyzing his communication with other people (the principle of the unity of studying personality in activity and communication). It is especially important to study how personality manifests itself in activities that are significant for a child of a particular age; as peculiar conditions of the personal microenvironment (relationships with the mother, father, other family members, peers and, to a large extent, with the educator, teacher) - external conditions - are melted into the internal psychological qualities of the human personality.

The principle of the genetic (historical) approach to the study of the child's psyche is also important. For understanding child psychology, this principle is so significant that this science itself is sometimes referred to as genetic psychology. According to this principle, when studying the phenomena of the child's psyche, we strive to find out how they arose, how they develop and change under the influence of the child's interaction with adults, his own activities and communication with peers. The above principle directs the researcher to analyze the influence of specific cultural and historical conditions on the development of the psyche of children, on the formation of their personality.

The dialectical approach to the study of the development of the child's psyche also presupposes the implementation of the principle of determinism - the reason for the conditionality of certain changes by certain external and internal factors, the interconnection of all aspects of mental development.

It should also be said about the integrity of the child's psyche, his entire mental make-up, bearing in mind that a personality is a complex holistic system where everything is interconnected and interdependent. It is important to take this into account, since individual diagnostic methods (survey, tests, etc.) seem to "snatch" some small particle from this whole. But this particle makes sense only within a holistic phenomenon. We must always remember: any feature of the psyche is inscribed in a complex picture and makes sense only within this picture. Therefore, the same quantitative indicators that we obtain in the course of the study become meaningful only when viewed against the background of the child's personality. Each individual fact obtained must be considered at a qualitative level, i.e. taking into account his involvement in the whole inner picture of the child's world and the melody of his behavior. Hence follows the need to study the child's psyche in all its diverse connections with the people around it. It is the principle of consistency and integrity in the study that provides such an approach.

The principle of not harming the subject requires such an organization of the study of the child (group), in which neither the process of the study itself, nor its results would cause any harm to the subjects (their health, condition, social status, etc.).

But this is not enough. We strive to apply methods that help the development of the child, his personality. Hence, it is very important to ensure the unity of diagnosis and correction of the development of the psyche. Strictly speaking, this is the main goal. Diagnostics should be aimed not at selecting children, but at monitoring the course of their mental development in order to correct detected deviations. Let's listen to the advice of the famous child psychologist D.B. Elkonina: "... Control over developmental processes should be especially thorough so that the correction of possible deviations in development begins as early as possible"

Reliance on the principle of correction in the selection of diagnostic methods and the direct implementation of diagnostics, based on the recognition of the variability of the psyche, is a prerequisite for the work of a practical psychologist, teacher-researcher.

It is important to pay attention to one more principle - the principle of impartiality. It involves the prevention of a biased attitude towards both an individual subject and a group of children. The implementation of this approach largely depends on the adequacy of the applied methods to the objectives of the study, their correspondence to the age, sex of the subjects, experimental conditions, etc.

The ancients said that you cannot step into the same river twice. In the same way, our momentary today's knowledge about the child is relative. When studying a child's personality, one should take into account its continuous change and development. It is not for nothing that it is recommended to study the same manifestation of personality and communication continuously, in other words, against the background of everyday observations, repeat the same tests and other tests in order to understand the current level of development of the child and its prospects.

The diagnostic activity of a psychologist, teacher, educator involves cooperation not only with teachers-colleagues, but also with parents, competent communication with which often allows you to get very important information about the inner world of the child. The successful implementation of the principle of cooperation and a number of other principles mentioned above is facilitated by such qualities of researchers as contact, focus on children, empathy, observation in relation to the manifestations of the psyche, the ability to maintain a sense of trust and sympathy among others.

Thus, when studying the child's psyche, one should take into account the methodological principles of psychological research. The possibility of using the method of observation in psychology in general and child psychology in particular is based on the methodological principle of the unity of consciousness and activity. Since the child's psyche is formed and manifested in his activities - in actions, words, gestures, facial expressions, etc., we can judge internal mental processes and states based on these external manifestations, on the basis of acts of behavior.

Stages of scientific research

Traditionally, the following stages are distinguished:

1. Definition of the goal (for what, why is it carried out?);

2. Choice of object (what individual or what kind of group is to be studied?);

3. Clarification of the subject of research (which aspects of behavior reveal the content of the studied mental phenomena?);

4. Planning situations (in what cases or under what conditions does the subject of research reveal itself most clearly?);

5. Establishing the duration of the total research time;

6. Choice of methods of registration of the studied material (how to keep records?);

7. Forecasting possible errors and searching for ways to prevent them;

8. Correction of the research program;

9. Stage of the study;

10. Processing and interpretation of the received information.

4. Empirical methods for studying the child psyche: a natural and formative experiment in child psychology

Experiment (from Latin "trial, experience") is the leading method of scientific knowledge, including psychological research. It is aimed at identifying cause-and-effect relationships. It is characterized by the creation of optimal conditions for the study of certain phenomena, as well as a purposeful and controlled change in these conditions.

Unlike observation, an experiment is an active way of cognizing reality, it involves the systematic intervention of a scientist in the situation under study, its management. If passive observation allows us to answer the questions "How? How does something happen?", then the experiment makes it possible to answer the question of a different kind - "Why does this happen?"

One of the basic concepts in describing an experiment is a variable. So called any real condition of the situation, which can be changed. The experimenter manipulates the variables, while the observer waits for the change that the experimenter makes at will.

Typically, the experiment involves two groups of subjects / experimental and control. A variable (one or more) is introduced into the work of the first of them, and the work of the other is not introduced. If all other conditions of the experiment are the same, and the groups themselves are similar in composition, then it can be proved that the hypothesis is true or false.

Depending on the conditions of activity, this method is divided into laboratory and natural.

A laboratory experiment is carried out in specially organized conditions that differ from real ones. In this case, technical means and special equipment are usually used. The actions of the subjects are completely determined by the instructions.

An experiment of this kind has its advantages and disadvantages. Here is a sample listing:

Many significant achievements in psychological science have been the result of the use of laboratory experiments. However, the results obtained in this way are not always amenable to legitimate transfer to the surrounding reality.

A natural experiment is carried out in real conditions with purposeful variation of some of them by the researcher. In psychology, as a rule, it is used to study the characteristics of behavior.

A natural experiment aimed at solving the problems of pedagogy and pedagogical psychology is usually called a psychological-pedagogical experiment.

A significant contribution to the methodology for organizing such experiments was made by the domestic scientist Alexander Fedorovich Lazursky (1910). For example, the scheme of experimental development of psychological qualities proposed by him, including:

Measurement of the manifestations of the personality traits of the subjects;

Socio-pedagogical impact on them in order to increase the level of lagging qualities;

Re-measurement of the manifestations of the personal properties of the subjects;

Comparison of the results of the first and second measurements;

Conclusions about the effectiveness of the implemented impacts as pedagogical techniques that led to the recorded results.

According to the nature of the researcher's actions, the ascertaining and forming experiments are distinguished.

The first of them provides for the identification of existing mental characteristics or levels of development of the corresponding qualities, as well as a statement of the relationship of causes and consequences.

The formative experiment involves the active, purposeful influence of the researcher on the subjects in order to develop certain properties or qualities. This allows you to reveal the mechanisms, dynamics, patterns of formation of mental phenomena, to determine the conditions for their effective development.

search, aimed at obtaining fundamentally new results in a little-studied area. Such experiments are carried out when it is not known whether there is a causal relationship between variables, or in cases where the nature of the variable is not established.

Clarifying, the purpose of which is to determine the boundaries within which the operation of a given theory or law is extended. In this case, the conditions, methodology, and objects of study usually vary in comparison with the initial experiments.

Critical, organized in order to refute an existing theory or law with new facts.

Reproducing, providing for the exact repetition of the experiments of predecessors to determine the reliability, reliability and objectivity of the results obtained by them.

Let us briefly describe the content of the main stages of the experimental study;

1. THEORETICAL STAGE, which includes the definition of the research topic, the preliminary statement of the problem, the study of the necessary scientific literature, the clarification of the problem, the choice of the object and subject of research, the formulation of a hypothesis.

2. PREPARATORY STAGE, which involves the preparation of an experiment program, including the choice of variables, analysis of ways to achieve the "purity" of the experiment, determination of the optimal sequence of experimental actions, development of methods for fixing and analyzing the results, preparation of the necessary equipment, preparation of instructions for the subjects.

3. EXPERIMENTAL STAGE, combining the entire set of research work provided in advance from instructing and motivating the subjects to registering the results.

4. INTERPRETATIONAL STAGE, the content of which is the formulation of a conclusion about the confirmation or refutation of the hypothesis on the analysis of the results obtained, as well as the preparation of a scientific report.

5. Features of psychological observations of children

Observation is the oldest method of knowledge. Its primitive form - worldly observations is used by every person in everyday practice. By registering the facts of the surrounding social reality and his behavior, a person tries to find out the reasons for certain actions and actions.

It is necessarily based on two principles:

Passivity of the subject of cognition, expressed in the refusal to interfere in the processes under study in order to preserve the naturalness of their course;

The immediacy of perception, which implies the limitation of the possibility of obtaining data within the visually represented situation of the present time (usually what is happening "here and now" is observed).

In psychology, observation is understood as a method of studying the mental characteristics of individuals on the basis of fixing the manifestations of their behavior.

It is impossible to observe the inner, subjective essences of thinking, imagination, will, temperament, character, abilities, etc., taken by themselves, outside of specific external manifestations. The subject of observations are verbal and non-verbal acts of behavior that take place in a particular situation or environment.

So, studying people, the researcher can observe:

1) speech activity (content, sequence, duration, frequency, direction, intensity ...);

2) expressive reactions (expressive movements of the face, body);

3) the position of bodies in space (displacement, immobility, distance, speed, direction of movement ...);

4) physical contacts (touches, pushes, punches, passes, joint efforts...).

Observation is the simplest and most common of all objective methods in psychology. Scientific observation is in direct contact with ordinary everyday observation. It is necessary to highlight the general conditions that observation must generally satisfy in order to be a scientific method. The first basic requirement is the presence of a clear goal setting: a clearly conscious goal must guide the observer. In accordance with the purpose, an observation plan must be defined, fixed in the scheme. The planned and systematic nature of observation is its most essential feature as a scientific method. They must eliminate the element of chance inherent in everyday observation. Thus, the objectivity of observation depends, first of all, on its planning and systematic nature. And, if the observation proceeds from a clearly conscious goal, then it must acquire a selective character. It is absolutely impossible to observe everything in general due to the limitless diversity of the existing. Any observation, therefore, has a selective, partial character. Observation becomes a method of scientific knowledge only insofar as it is not limited to simple registration of facts, but proceeds to the formulation of hypotheses in order to test them on new observations.

Advantages and disadvantages of the observation method.

The most important advantage of the observation method is that it is carried out simultaneously with the development of the studied phenomena and processes. It opens up the possibility of directly perceiving the behavior of people in specific conditions and in real time. That is, the natural conditions of activity are preserved. A carefully prepared observation procedure ensures that all significant elements of the situation are recorded. This creates the prerequisites for its objective study. It is acceptable to use a variety of technical means for data recording. Observation allows you to cover events in a broad, multidimensional way, to describe the interaction of all its participants. It does not depend on the desire of the observed to speak out, to comment on the situation. It is not necessary to obtain the prior consent of the subjects. Objective observation, while retaining its importance, for the most part should be supplemented by other research methods. The shortcomings of the observation method are divided into two groups: objective - these are those shortcomings that do not depend on the observer and subjective - these are those that are directly dependent from the observer, since they are associated with the personal, professional characteristics of the observer. The objective shortcomings primarily include: - limited, fundamentally private nature of each observed situation. Therefore, no matter how comprehensive and deep the analysis is, the conclusions obtained can be generalized and extended to wider situations only with the greatest care and subject to many requirements. - Complexity, and often simply impossibility, of repeating observations. Social processes are irreversible, they cannot be "played out" again so that the researcher can fix the features he needs, the elements of an event that has already taken place. - High labor intensity of the method. The implementation of observation often involves the participation in the collection of primary information of a large number of people of sufficiently high qualification.

When diagnosing children of primary and secondary preschool age, one should keep in mind both changes in the form of play and the emergence of a new type of social activity that leads the development of the child, interpersonal communication. Children of this age for the first time begin to show interest in peers as individuals and join them in joint games. Therefore, methods should be developed in such a way that they involve both observations in individual objective activity and in a collective game of a plot-role-play plan. Its participants can be not only children, but also adults. In addition, at this age, to a certain extent, it is already possible to rely on the data of children's self-consciousness and on the assessments that they themselves give to other children and adults. This is especially true for the manifestation of various individual qualities in communication with other people.

At the senior preschool age, games with rules are added to the named types of activity and elementary reflexive abilities arise. Older preschoolers are not only aware of and guided in their behavior by some rules of interpersonal interaction, especially in games, but within certain limits they can engage in one or another type of activity (learning, play), analyze their own behavior in it, evaluate themselves and those around them.

Thus, when studying preschool children, it is necessary to take into account the psychological and behavioral characteristics. This is a relatively low level of consciousness and self-awareness; dominance of involuntary cognitive processes, their low mediation by speech; poor awareness of personal qualities, inadequate self-esteem. From this it follows that the best method of collecting information and studying preschool children is observation.

6. Methods for studying communication and relationships in the preschool group

OBSERVATION IN THE STUDY OF INTERPERSONAL COMMUNICATION

Observation is a method of collecting factual material with mandatory recording of acts of behavior, their quantitative and qualitative analysis and interpretation of data.

Fixing can be carried out in specially prepared forms (protocols) using writing tools, as well as, if possible, technical means (video camera, tape recorder, etc.).

Observation, in which the purpose of the study is to determine the status of a person in the system of interpersonal communication by fixing the number of contacts in a group, is called contactometry.

The level of sociability can also be assessed by questionnaire methods (assessment of the level of sociability of Ryakhovsky).

Sociometry

To study interpersonal relationships in a group, the method of sociometry is used. This method was developed by Moreno, and adapted for kindergarten by Ya.L. Kolominsky. Sociometry can be carried out with children 4 years old. Children are given the right to choose 3 people from the group, according to the results of the choice, a sociomatrix, sociogram is filled in and the sociometric status of the child in the group is determined - star, popular, unpopular, isolated.

According to sociometry, corrective work is carried out to form favorable relationships in the group and improve the status of the child in the group.

7. Drawing as a means of studying the child's family microenvironment

Drawing techniques are a highly informative means of knowing the child's personality, since by drawing, the child reflects his attitude to the objects he draws. When analyzing children's drawings, the sequence of images of family members is studied, indicating the importance of their role in the family; the spatial arrangement of family members, which, according to the author, is an indicator of their emotional closeness; the composition of the drawn family in comparison with the real one; 4) differences between graphic presentations in form, proportions, details, size.

The popularity of drawing techniques is due to several reasons.

1. The process of drawing has an exceptional, disinhibiting effect on the child, reduces the stress that occurs during psychological examination, and helps to establish emotional contact with the child.

2. Drawings are easy to use: firstly, a sheet of paper and a pencil are all the necessary tools, and secondly, the child, as it were, fixes his actions, the movement of thought with a pencil. This enables the psychologist to pay more attention to changes in the emotional state of the subject, to note the features of the drawing process.

3. Drawing techniques (in particular, drawing a family) are a highly informative means of knowing the personality of a child, reflecting how the child perceives himself and other family members, what feelings he experiences in the family.

4. The process of drawing, especially when depicting situations that are significant for the child, has a psychotherapeutic effect. In the drawing, the child, as it were, gets rid of personal tension, loses possible solutions to the situation.

A detailed system of analysis and interpretation of the family drawing was first presented in the work of W. Wolf. He gave the children the task: "Draw your family." In the drawing, the author analyzed: 1) the sequence of depicting family members, indicating the importance of their role in the family: the child starts the drawing with a more significant person and ends with a less significant one; 2) the spatial arrangement of family members, which, according to the author, is an indicator of their emotional closeness; 3) the composition of the drawn family in comparison with the real one (the absence of a family member in the drawing is a rare case; it often expresses the desire to get rid of an emotionally unacceptable family member); 4) differences between graphic presentations in form, proportions, details, size. The discrepancy between the ratio of values in the figure to the real state of affairs indicates that the value is determined to a greater extent by mental factors than by the facts of reality. W. Wolf connects the child's portrayal of other family members as inadequately large with the perception of their dominance, drawing himself large with a sense of his importance in the family. Interpreting the differences in the image of individual parts of the body, the author relies on the assumption that these differences are generated by special experiences associated with the functions of these parts of the body.

Summarizing, we can say that W. Wolf singled out those characteristics of the drawing, which later will form the main part of the interpretation of other authors.

Various authors contribute to the development of the family drawing methodology, expanding the range of interpreted parameters of the methodology. Despite the differences in the schemes of interpretation, variations in procedures, it is possible to conditionally distinguish the main parameters of the interpretation of the picture: a) the structure of the family picture; b) features of the drawn family members; c) the drawing process.

Interpretation of the structure of the family drawing (location of figures, comparison of the composition of the drawn and real family). Having received the instruction “draw your family”, the child not only solves a creative problem, but first of all structures an imaginary social situation in a certain way. It is believed that such a task provides the child with an opportunity to express his feelings for other family members, a subjective assessment of his own place in the family. These psychological parameters are reflected in the characteristics of the family structure and, therefore, can be identified by a specialist. This approach is based on the hypothesis that the structure of the family pattern is not random, but is associated with experienced and perceived intra-family relationships; reflects the general attitude to the family drawing, which can be adequately assessed only by interpreting specific parameters of the family drawing structure.

8. Twin method of studying the child's psyche

METHODS OF PSYCHOGENETICS (from the Greek psyche - soul, genos - origin) - methods that allow you to determine the influence of hereditary factors and the environment on the formation of certain mental characteristics of a person. The most informative is the method of twins. It is based on the fact that monozygotic (identical) twins have an identical genotype, dizygotic (twins) - non-identical; while members of twin pairs of any type should have a similar upbringing environment. Then, a greater intra-pair similarity of monozygotic twins compared to dizygotic twins may indicate the presence of hereditary influences on the variability of the trait under study. A significant limitation of this method is that the similarity of the actual psychological characteristics of monozygotic twins can also be of non-genetic origin. As for the analysis of the heritability of normal psychological traits, this method, taken in isolation from other methods of psychogenetics, does not provide reliable information, because differences between populations in the distribution of one or another psychological trait can be caused by social causes, customs, etc. In child psychology The study by V.S. Mukhina, in which the author studied her own twin children, kept diaries and analyzed the data. This method well reflects the influence of the environment on the development of the personality, and also shows the influence of one's own activity on mental development.

9. The role of biological and social factors in the mental development of the child. The ratio of genotype and phenotype in childhood

In psychology, many theories have been created that explain the mental development of the child and its origins in different ways. They can be combined into two large areas - biologization and sociology. In the biologization direction, the child is considered as a biological being, endowed by nature with certain abilities, character traits, and forms of behavior. Heredity determines the entire course of his development - and its pace, fast or slow, and its limit - whether the child is gifted, achieves a lot or turns out to be mediocrity. The environment in which the child is brought up becomes just a condition for such an initially predetermined development, as if manifesting what was given to the child before his birth.

E. Haeckel formulated a law in the 19th century: ontogenesis (individual development) is an abbreviated repetition of phylogenesis (historical development).

Transferred to developmental psychology, the biogenetic law made it possible to present the development of the child's psyche as a repetition of the main stages of biological evolution and the stages of the cultural and historical development of mankind. Here is how one of the supporters of the theory of recapitulation V. Stern describes the development of the child: in the first months of his life, the child is at the stage of a mammal; in the second half of the year it reaches the stage of the highest mammal - the monkey; then - the initial stages of the human condition; development of primitive peoples; starting from entering school, he assimilates human culture - first in the spirit of the ancient and Old Testament world, later (in adolescence) the fanaticism of Christian culture, and only towards maturity rises to the level of culture of the New Age.

The opposite approach to the development of the child's psyche is observed in the sociological direction. Its origins are in the ideas of the 17th century philosopher John Locke. He believed that a child is born with a pure soul, like a white wax board (tabularasa). On this board, the educator can write anything, and the child, not burdened by heredity, will grow up the way close adults want to see him.

It is obvious that both approaches - both biologization and sociology - suffer from one-sidedness, downplaying or denying the importance of one of the two factors of development. In addition, the development process is deprived of its inherent qualitative changes and contradictions: in one case, hereditary mechanisms are launched and what was contained from the very beginning in the makings is deployed, in the other, more and more experience is acquired under the influence of the environment. The development of a child who does not show his own activity, rather resembles a process of growth, quantitative increase or accumulation.

What is meant by biological and social factors of development at the present time?

The biological factor includes, first of all, heredity. There is no consensus on what exactly in the psyche of the child is genetically determined. Domestic psychologists believe that at least two points are inherited - temperament and the makings of abilities. The central nervous system functions differently in different children. A strong and mobile nervous system, with a predominance of excitation processes, gives a choleric, "explosive" temperament, with a balance in the processes of excitation and inhibition - sanguine.

Hereditary inclinations give originality to the process of development of abilities, facilitating or hindering it. The development of abilities depends not only on the inclinations. If a child with absolute pitch does not regularly play a musical instrument, he will not achieve success in the performing arts, and his special abilities will not develop. If a student who grasps everything on the fly during a lesson does not study conscientiously at home, he will not become an excellent student, despite his data, and his general ability to assimilate knowledge will not develop. Skills develop through activity. In general, the child's own activity is so important that some psychologists consider activity the third factor in mental development.

The biological factor, in addition to heredity, includes the features of the course of the prenatal period of a child's life. The illness of the mother, the medications she was taking at this time, can cause a delay in the mental development of the child or other abnormalities. The birth process itself also affects the subsequent development, so it is necessary that the child avoids birth trauma and takes the first breath in time.

The second factor is the environment. The natural environment affects the mental development of the child indirectly - through the traditional types of labor activity in the given natural zone and culture, which determine the system of raising children. The social environment directly affects the development, in connection with which the environmental factor is often called social.

Important is not only the question of what is meant by biological and social factors, but also the question of their relationship. William Stern put forward the principle of convergence of two factors. In his opinion, both factors are equally significant for the mental development of the child and determine its two lines. These lines of development (one is the maturation of hereditarily given abilities and character traits, the other is development under the influence of the child's immediate environment) intersect, i.e. convergence takes place. Modern ideas about the relationship between the biological and the social, adopted in domestic psychology, are mainly based on the provisions of L.S. Vygotsky.

L.S. Vygotsky emphasized the unity of hereditary and social elements in the process of development. Heredity is present in the development of all the child's mental functions, but it seems to have a different proportion. Elementary functions (beginning with sensations and perception) are more hereditarily conditioned than higher ones (arbitrary memory, logical thinking, speech). Higher functions are the product of a person's cultural and historical development, and hereditary inclinations here play the role of prerequisites, and not moments that determine mental development. The more complex the function, the longer the path of its ontogenetic development, the less the influence of heredity affects it. On the other hand, the environment also always “participates” in development. No sign of child development, including lower mental functions, is ever purely hereditary.

Each characteristic, developing, acquires something new, which was not in the hereditary inclinations, and thanks to this, the specific weight of hereditary influences is either strengthened, or weakened, and relegated to the background. The role of each factor in the development of the same trait is different at different age stages. For example, in the development of speech, the importance of hereditary prerequisites decreases early and sharply, and the child's speech develops under the direct influence of the social environment, while in the development of psychosexuality the role of hereditary factors increases in adolescence.

Thus, the unity of hereditary and social influences is not a permanent unity given once and for all, but a differentiated unity that changes in the process of development itself. The mental development of a child is not determined by the mechanical addition of two factors. At each stage of development, in relation to each sign of development, it is necessary to establish a specific combination of biological and social moments, to study its dynamics.

10. Patterns and driving forces of the mental development of the child

Patterns are manifested in all spheres of the psyche and persist throughout ontogeny.

1. Unevenness and heterochrony of mental development.

Each mental function has a special pace and rhythm of becoming, some go ahead of the rest, being the basis for others. In infancy, the sense organs are intensively developed, at an early age - speech, objective activity.

Sensitive periods are the most favorable for the formation of one or another side of the psyche, sensitivity to certain influences is aggravated.

2. mental development proceeds in stages, having a complex specialization in time.

Each age stage has its own pace and rhythm. The most rapid mental development occurs from 0 to 3 years. Stages cannot be rebuilt or changed, each has its own value. It is important not to accelerate, but to enrich mental development. The stages of mental development are characterized by 3 components:

1. The social situation of development - the ratio of external and internal conditions for the development of the psyche.

2. Leading activity - an activity that provides cardinal lines of mental development, the formation of personality neoplasms, there is a restructuring of mental processes, new types of activity arise.

3. Age-related neoplasms - a new type of personality structure and its activities, mental changes that occur at a given age, which determine the transformations in the child's mind.

THEN. L.S. Vygotsky formulated the basic law of mental development:

The forces that drive the development of a child at a particular age inevitably lead to the denial and destruction of the very basis of the development of the entire age, with internal necessity determining the annulment of the social situation of development, the end of a given epoch of development and the transition to the next age stage.

3. In the course of mental development, differentiation and integration of processes, properties, and qualities takes place.

4. In the course of mental development, there is a change in the causes that determine it.

1. the relationship of biological and social causes is changing,

2. a different correlation of social causes.

5. The psyche is plastic.

The driving forces of mental development are contradictions: between the needs of the individual and external circumstances, between her increased physical abilities, spiritual needs and old forms of activity; between new requirements of activity and unformed skills and abilities.

The factors of a person's mental development are that objectively existing that necessarily determines his life activity in the broadest sense of the word.

Factors of mental development of a person can be external and internal. External factors are the environment and society in which a person develops. The internal factors of personality development are the biogenetic and physiological characteristics of a person and his psyche.

The prerequisites for the mental development of a person are something that has a certain effect on the individual, i.e. external and internal circumstances, on which the characteristics, the level of her mental development depend.

They are external and internal. The external prerequisites for the mental development of a person are the quality and characteristics of a person's upbringing. The internal prerequisites for the development of a personality are activity and desire, as well as the motives and goals that a person sets for himself in the interests of his improvement as a person.

11. L.S. Vygotsky - the creator of the psychological theory of ontogenetic development

Age development, especially children's, is a complex process that, due to a number of its features, leads to a change in the entire personality of the child at each age stage. For JLC. Vygotsky's development is, first of all, the emergence of the new. The stages of development are characterized by age-related neoplasms, i.e. qualities or properties that did not exist before in finished form. But the new “does not fall from the sky,” as L.S. Vygotsky, it appears naturally, prepared by the entire course of previous development.

The source of development is the social environment. Each step in the development of the child changes the influence of the environment on him: the environment becomes completely different when the child moves from one age situation to the next. L.S. Vygotsky introduced the concept of "social situation of development" - a relationship specific for each age between the child and the social environment. The interaction of the child with his social environment, educating and teaching him, determines the path of development that leads to the emergence of age-related neoplasms.

How does the child interact with the environment? L.S. Vygotsky distinguishes two units of analysis of the social situation of development - activity and experience. It is easy to observe the external activity of the child, his activity. But there is also an inner plane, a plane of experiences. The same situation in the family is experienced differently by different children, even children of the same age - twins. As a result, the conflict between parents, for example, will have little effect on the development of one child, while the other will cause neurosis and other deviations. The same child, developing, passing from one age to another, will experience the same family situation in a new way.

The social situation of development changes at the very beginning of the age period. By the end of the period, neoplasms appear, among which a central neoplasm occupies a special place, which is of the greatest importance for development at the next stage.

L.S. Vygotsky considered the dynamics of transitions from one age to another. At different stages, changes in the child's psyche can occur slowly and gradually, or they can happen quickly and abruptly. Accordingly, stable and crisis stages of development are distinguished. The stable period is characterized by a smooth course of the development process, without sharp shifts and changes in the child's personality. Minor minimal changes that occur over a long period of time are usually invisible to others. But they accumulate and at the end of the period give a qualitative leap in development: age-related neoplasms appear. Only by comparing the beginning and end of the stable period, one can imagine the huge path that the child has traveled in his development.

Stable periods make up a large part of childhood. They usually last for several years. And age-related neoplasms that appear slowly and for a long time turn out to be stable, fixed in the personality structure.

In addition to stable, there are crisis periods of development. In developmental psychology, there is no consensus about crises, their place and role in the mental development of the child. Some psychologists believe that child development should be harmonious, crisis-free. Crises are an abnormal, “painful” phenomenon, the result of improper upbringing. Another part of psychologists argues that the presence of crises in development is natural. Moreover, according to some ideas, a child who has not truly experienced a crisis will not fully develop further.

L.S. Vygotsky attached great importance to crises and considered the alternation of stable and crisis periods as a law of child development. At present, we often talk about turning points in the development of a child, and actually crisis, negative manifestations are attributed to the characteristics of his upbringing, living conditions. Close adults can mitigate these external manifestations or, on the contrary, strengthen them.

Crises, unlike stable periods, do not last long, a few months, under unfavorable circumstances stretching up to a year or even two years. These are brief but turbulent stages during which significant developmental shifts occur and the child changes dramatically in many of its features. Development can take on a catastrophic character at this time.

The crisis begins and ends imperceptibly, its boundaries are blurred, indistinct. The aggravation occurs in the middle of the period. For the people around the child, it is associated with a change in behavior, the appearance of "difficult to educate ™", as L.S. Vygotsky. The child is getting out of the control of adults, and those measures of pedagogical influence that used to be successful are now no longer effective. Affective outbursts, whims, more or less acute conflicts with loved ones - a typical picture of the crisis, characteristic of many children. Schoolchildren's working capacity decreases, interest in classes weakens, academic performance decreases, sometimes painful experiences and internal conflicts arise.

However, different children have crisis periods in different ways. The behavior of one becomes unbearable, and the second hardly changes, just as quiet and obedient. There are much more individual differences during crises than during stable periods. And yet, in any case, there are changes even in the external plan. To notice them, you need to compare the child not with a peer who is going through a difficult crisis, but with himself - the way he was before. Each child experiences difficulties in communicating with others, each has a slower pace of progress in academic work.

The main changes that take place during a crisis are internal. Development becomes negative. What does it mean? Involutionary processes come to the fore: what was formed at the previous stage disintegrates, disappears. The child loses the interests that yesterday directed all his activities, refuses the old values and forms of relationships. But along with the losses, something new is being created. Neoplasms that have arisen in a stormy, short period turn out to be unstable and in the next stable period they are transformed, absorbed by other neoplasms, dissolved in them and, thus, die off.

During periods of crisis, the main contradictions become aggravated: on the one hand, between the increased needs of the child and his still limited abilities, on the other hand, between the new needs of the child and previously established relationships with adults. Now these and some other contradictions are often considered as the driving forces of mental development.

Crisis and stable periods of development alternate. Therefore, the age periodization of L.S. Vygotsky has the following form: neonatal crisis ™ - infancy (2 months - 1 year) - crisis of 1 year - early childhood (1-3 years) - crisis of 3 years - preschool age (3-7 years) - crisis of 7 years - school age (7-13 years) - crisis 13 years - puberty (13-17 years) - crisis 17 years.

FOREWORD

Chapter I. CHILDHOOD AS A SUBJECT OF PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH

1. Historical analysis of the concept of "childhood"

2. Childhood as a subject of science

3. The specifics of the mental development of the child.

4. Strategies for researching the child's mental development

Chapter II. OVERCOMING BIOGENETIC APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF THE CHILD'S PSYCHE

1. Biogenetic principle in psychology

2. Normative approach to the study of child development.

3. Identification of learning and development

4. The theory of three stages of child development.

5. Concepts of convergence of two factors of child development.

6. Approaches to the analysis of the internal causes of the mental development of the child.

Chapter III. PSYCHOANALYTICAL THEORIES OF CHILD DEVELOPMENT.

1. The theory of Sigmund Freud.

2. The development of classical psychoanalysis in the works of Anna Freud.

3. Epigenetic theory of personality development. Eric Erickson.

Chapter IV. SOCIAL LEARNING THEORY

1. Departure from classical behaviorism...

2. Education and development.

3. Critical periods of socialization.

4. Encouragement and punishment as conditions for the formation of new behavior.

5. The role of imitation in the formation of new behavior.

6. Child and adult.

7. Family as a factor in the development of a child's behavior

Chapter V

1. Stages of scientific biography.

2. Key concepts of the concept of J. Piaget.

3. The discovery of the egocentricity of children's thinking

4. Discovery of the stages of a child's intellectual development.

Chapter VI. L. S. VYGOTSKY AND HIS SCHOOL

1. Change of scientific outlook.

2. Further steps along the path opened by L. S. Vygotsky.

Chapter VII. THE CONCEPT OF D. B. EL’KONIN. THE PERIOD OF EARLY CHILDHOOD.

1. Neonatal crisis

2. Stage of infancy.

3. Early age.

4. Crisis of three years

Chapter VIII. THE CONCEPT OF D. B. EL’KONIN. THE PERIOD OF CHILDHOOD.

1. Preschool age.

2. The crisis of seven years and the problem of school readiness.

3. Junior school age.

Chapter IX. ADOLESCENT AGE IN THE LIGHT OF DIFFERENT CONCEPTS..

1. Influence of historical time.

2. Classic studies of the crisis of adolescence.

3. New trends in the study of adolescence (L.S. Vygotsky, D.B. Elkonin, L.I.

Chapter X. UNFINISHED DISPUTES.

1. P. Ya. Galperin and J. Piaget.

2. On the patterns of functional and age-related development of the child's psyche.

3. Forms and functions of imitation in childhood.

4. The problem of general and specific patterns of mental development

deaf-blind child.

CONCLUSION

Annex 1. CONVENTION ON THE RIGHTS OF THE CHILD

FOREWORD

Currently, there are many textbooks on child psychology in the world. Almost every major Western university has its own original version. As a rule, these are voluminous, well-illustrated manuals summarizing a huge amount of scientific research. Some of them have been translated into Russian. However, in none of these truly interesting books do we find an analysis of the holistic concept of child development developed by L.S. Vygotsky and his followers, which is a true pride and a true achievement of Russian psychology.

The lack of knowledge about such an essential concept makes us believe that any foreign textbook does not fully reflect the current level of psychological knowledge about the development of the child.

Domestic textbooks on child psychology are small in volume and poor in illustrative material. In addition, they also have a substantial shortcoming: generalizing the experience accumulated in our science, they give a very poor idea of the achievements of modern foreign psychology. The book brought to the attention of the reader was created mainly in order to fill in these gaps and present in a balanced and complete form the diverse approaches to understanding the mental development of the child, which were developed in the 20th century, that is, for the entire period of the existence of child psychology as a separate scientific discipline. The presentation of the material is based on several basic principles.

This is, first of all, the principle of historicism, which makes it possible, as it were, to string on one rod all the most important problems of child development that arose in different periods of time. The book analyzes the historical origin of the concept of "childhood", traces the connection between the history of childhood and the history of society, shows the historical background for the emergence of child psychology as a science.

The second principle underlying the selection of the analyzed concepts of child development is associated with the development and introduction into science of new methods for studying mental development. Changes in ideas about mental development are always associated with the emergence of new research methods. “The problem of the method is the beginning and basis, the alpha and omega of the entire history of the cultural development of the child,” wrote L.S. Vygotsky. To truly rely on the method, to understand its relation to other methods, to establish its strengths and weaknesses, to understand its fundamental justification and to develop a correct attitude towards it means, to a certain extent, to develop a correct and scientific approach to the entire further exposition of the most important problems of child psychology. aspect of cultural development”. It is this principle, this attitude of L.S. Vygotsky made it possible to analyze the historical path of child psychology from the first naive ideas about the nature of childhood to the modern in-depth systematic study of this phenomenon. The biogenetic principle in psychology, the normative approach in the study of child development, the identification of development and learning in behaviorism, the explanation of development by the influence of environmental factors and heredity in the theory of convergence, the psychoanalytic study of the child, comparative studies of norm and pathology, orthogenetic concepts of development - all these and many other approaches individually and all together reflect the essence and illustrate the connection between the concepts of mental development and methods of its study.

The third principle concerns the analysis of the development of the main aspects of human life - the emotional-volitional sphere, behavior and intellect. The theory of classical psychoanalysis 3. Freud develops in the works of M. Klein and A. Freud, and then goes into the concept of psychosocial development of the life path of the personality of E. Erickson.

The problem of development in classical behaviorism is rethought in the theory of social learning - the most powerful direction of modern American developmental psychology. Studies of cognitive development are also undergoing changes - there is a transition from the study of the epistemic subject to the study of a specific child in the real conditions of his life.

Against the background of all these outstanding achievements of Western psychology, nevertheless, a genuine revolutionary revolution in child psychology was made by L.S. Vygotsky. He proposed a new understanding of the course, conditions, source, form, specifics, driving forces of the child's mental development; he described the stages of child development and the transitions between them, identified and formulated the basic laws of the child's mental development.

L.S. Vygotsky chose the psychology of consciousness as the field of his research. He called it "top psychology" and contrasted it with three others - deep, superficial and explanatory. L.S. Vygotsky developed the doctrine of age as a unit of child development and showed its structure and dynamics. He laid the foundations of child (age) psychology, which implements a systematic approach to the study of child development. The doctrine of psychological age makes it possible to avoid biological and environmental reductionism in explaining child development.

Analysis of L.S. Vygotsky is the semantic core of this work. However, it would be a mistake to assume that Vygotsky's ideas have frozen, turned into a dogma, have not received a natural development and logical

continuation. Note that not only the merits, but even some limitations of the ideas of L.S. Vygotsky stimulated the development of domestic child psychology. Theoretical analysis of the ideas of L.S. Vygotsky and his followers shows that there is a completely different child psychology, still little known to most psychologists.

A large section of the textbook is devoted to characterizing the stable and critical periods of a child's mental development. Here, the analysis of the facts of child development is carried out on the basis of the teachings of L.S. Vygotsky on the structure and dynamics of age. The age structure includes a description of the social situation of the child's development, the leading type of activity and the main psychological neoplasms of the age. At each age, the social situation of development contains a contradiction (a genetic problem), which must be solved in a special, age-specific, leading type of activity.

The resolution of the contradiction is manifested in the emergence of psychological neoplasms of age. These new formations do not correspond to the old social situation of development, they go beyond its framework. A new contradiction arises, a new genetic problem, which can be solved by building a new system of relations, a new social situation of development, indicating the transition of the child to a new psychological age. In this self-movement, the dynamics of child development is manifested. Such is the scheme for considering all age periods of a child's life from birth to adolescence, such is the logic of their development.

The final section of the book discusses some debatable problems of child psychology about the reasons for the diversity of imitation in childhood, about the patterns of functional and age-related development of the child's psyche, about the general and specific in the development of a normal and abnormal child.

In our opinion, such a construction of the textbook will contribute not only to the assimilation of theory, facts, problems and methods for their study, but also to the development of scientific thinking in the field of child psychology.

This edition is close to the form of a textbook for students studying psychology and pedagogy. For each section, possible topics for seminars are indicated, which the teacher can develop in more detail. Topics for independent work are aimed at expanding the general horizons of students. The recommended literature includes the most significant works in the field of child psychology. Reading them will deepen and expand the knowledge presented in the textbook.

I would like to take this opportunity to express my deep gratitude for various kinds of assistance to students and graduate students with whom I had the pleasure of working.

Chapter I. CHILDHOOD AS A SUBJECT OF PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH.

1. Historical analysis of the concept of "childhood"

Today, any educated person, when asked what childhood is, will answer that childhood is a period of enhanced development, change and learning. But only scientists understand that this is a period of paradoxes and contradictions, without which it is impossible to imagine the development process. V. Stern, J. Piaget, I.A. Sokolyansky and many others. D.B. Elkonin said that paradoxes in child psychology are developmental mysteries that scientists have yet to unravel.

His lectures at Moscow University D.B. Elkonin invariably began with a description of the two main paradoxes of child development, embodying the need for a historical approach to understanding childhood. Let's consider them.

However, according to the state at the time of birth, a drop in perfection is noticeable in the evolutionary series - the child does not have any ready-made forms of behavior. As a rule, the higher a living being ranks among animals, the longer his childhood lasts, the more helpless this creature is at birth. This is one of the paradoxes of nature that predetermines the history of childhood.

How is it that, under similar natural conditions, the level of mental development that a child reaches at each historical stage in the development of society is not the same?

Childhood is the period from newborn to full social and, consequently, psychological maturity; This is the period of the child becoming a full-fledged member of human society. At the same time, the duration of childhood in a primitive society is not equal to the duration of childhood in the Middle Ages or today. The stages of human childhood are a product of history, and they are just as subject to change as they were thousands of years ago. Therefore, it is impossible to study the childhood of a child and the laws of its formation outside the development of human society and the laws that determine its development. The duration of childhood is directly dependent on the level of material and spiritual culture of society.

As is known, the theory of knowledge and dialectics must be made up of the history of individual sciences, the history of the mental development of a child, young animals, and the history of language. Focusing attention precisely on the history of the mental development of the child, it should be distinguished both from the development of the child in ontogeny and from the uneven development of children in various contemporary cultures.

The problem of childhood history is one of the most difficult in modern child psychology, since it is impossible to carry out either observation or experiment in this area. Ethnographers are well aware that cultural monuments related to children are poor. Even in those, not very special cases, when toys are found in archaeological excavations, these are usually objects of worship, which in ancient times were placed in graves to serve the owner in the afterlife. Miniature images of people and animals were also used for witchcraft and magic.

We can say that the experimental facts were preceded by theory. Theoretically, the question of the historical origin of childhood periods was developed in the works of P.P. Blonsky, L.S. Vygotsky, D.B. Elkonin. The course of the mental development of the child, according to L.S. Vygotsky, does not obey the eternal laws of nature, the laws of the maturation of the organism. The course of child development in a class society, he believed, "has a very definite class meaning." That is why he emphasized that there is no eternally childish, but only historically childish.

Thus, in the literature of the 19th century, evidence of the absence of childhood among proletarian children is numerous. For example, in a study of the situation of the working class in England, F. Engels referred to the report of a commission created by the English Parliament in 1833 to examine working conditions in factories: children sometimes started working at the age of five, often at six, even more often at seven, but almost all children of poor parents worked from the age of eight; Their working hours lasted 14-16 hours.

It is generally accepted that the status of the childhood of a proletarian child is formed only in the 19th-20th centuries, when child labor began to be prohibited with the help of legislation on the protection of children. Of course, this does not mean that the legal laws adopted are capable of providing a childhood for the workers of the lower strata of society. Children in this environment, and above all girls, still perform the work necessary for social reproduction (care for babies, housework, some agricultural work). Thus, although in our time there is a ban on child labor, one cannot speak of the status of childhood without taking into account the position of parents in the social structure of society.

The "Convention on the Rights of the Child", adopted by UNESCO in 1989 and ratified by most countries of the world, is aimed at ensuring the full development of the child's personality in every corner of the Earth.

Children's images in the painting of the XIII century are found only in religious and allegorical subjects. These are angels, baby Jesus and a naked child as a symbol of the soul of the deceased. The image of real children was absent from painting for a long time. No one apparently believed that the child contained a human personality. If children appeared in works of art, they were depicted as reduced adults. Then there was no knowledge about the characteristics and nature of childhood. The word "child" for a long time did not have the exact meaning that is given to it now. So, it is typical, for example, that in medieval Germany the word "child" was a synonym for the concept of "fool".

Childhood was considered to be a period of rapid passing and of little value. Indifference towards childhood, according to F. Aries, was a direct consequence of the demographic situation of that time, which was characterized by high birth rates and high infant mortality. A sign of overcoming indifference to childhood, according to the French demographer, is the appearance in the 16th century of portraits of dead children. Their death, he writes, was now experienced as a truly irreparable loss, and not as a completely ordinary event. The overcoming of indifference to children takes place, judging by painting, not earlier than the 17th century, when the first portraits of real children begin to appear on the canvases of artists. As a rule, these were portraits of children of influential persons and royal persons in childhood. Thus, according to F. Aries, the discovery of childhood began in the 13th century, its development can be traced in the history of painting of the 14th-16th centuries, but the evidence of this discovery is most fully manifested at the end of the 16th and throughout the entire 17th century.

According to the researcher, clothing is an important symbol of a change in attitudes towards childhood. In the Middle Ages, as soon as a child grew out of diapers, he was immediately dressed in a suit that was no different from the clothes of an adult of the corresponding social status. Only in the 16th-17th centuries did special children's clothing appear, distinguishing a child from an adult. Interestingly, for boys and girls aged 2-4 years, the clothes were the same and consisted of a children's dress. In other words, in order to distinguish a boy from a man, he was dressed in a woman's costume, and this costume lasted until the beginning of our century, despite the change in society and the lengthening of the period of childhood. Note that in peasant families before the revolution, children and adults dressed the same. By the way, this feature is still preserved where there are no big differences between the work of adults and the play of a child.

Analyzing portraits of children in old paintings and descriptions of children's costumes in literature, F. Aries identifies three trends in the evolution of children's clothing:

Feminization- a suit for boys largely repeats the details of women's clothing.

Archaization- the clothes of children in this historical time are late compared to adult fashion and largely repeat the adult costume of the past era (this is how the boys got short pants).

The use for children of the upper classes of the usual adult costume of the lower (peasant clothes).

As F. Aries emphasizes, the formation of a children's costume has become an external manifestation of profound internal changes in attitudes towards children in society - now they are beginning to occupy an important place in the lives of adults.

The discovery of childhood made it possible to describe the full cycle of human life To characterize the age periods of life in scientific writings of the 16th-17th centuries, terminology was used that is still used in scientific and colloquial speech: childhood, adolescence, youth, youth, maturity, old age, senility (deep old age ). But the modern meaning of these words does not correspond to their original meaning. In the old days, the periods of life correlated with the four seasons, with the seven planets, with the twelve signs of the zodiac. The coincidence of numbers was perceived as one of the indicators of the fundamental unity of Nature.

In the field of art, ideas about the periods of human life were reflected in the painting of the columns of the Doge's Palace in Venice, in many engravings of the 16th-19th centuries, in painting and sculpture. In most of these works, emphasizes F. Aries, the age of a person corresponds not so much to biological stages as to the social functions of people. So, for example, in the painting of the Doge's Palace, the age of toys is symbolized by children playing with a wooden skate, a doll, a windmill and a bird; school age - boys learn to read, carry books, and girls learn to knit; the age of love and sport - boys and girls walk together at the festival; the age of war and chivalry - a man shooting a gun; maturity - a judge and a scientist are depicted.

The differentiation of the ages of human life, including childhood, according to F. Aries, is formed under the influence of social institutions, that is, new forms of social life generated by the development of society. Thus, early childhood appears for the first time within the family, where it is associated with the specific communication of "tenderness" and "spoiltness" of a small child. A child for parents is just a pretty, funny baby with whom you can have fun, play with pleasure and at the same time teach and educate him. This is the primary, "family" concept of childhood. The desire to “dress up” children, “spoil” and “undead” them could only appear in the family. However, this approach to children as "adorable toys" could not remain unchanged for long.

The development of society has led to a further change in attitudes towards children. A new concept of childhood emerged. For teachers of the 17th century, love for children was no longer expressed in pampering and amusing them, but in a psychological interest in education and training. In order to correct a child's behavior, it is first necessary to understand it, and the scientific texts of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are full of comments on child psychology. It should be noted that deep pedagogical ideas, advice and recommendations are also contained in the works of Russian authors of the 16th-17th centuries.

The concept of rational education based on strict discipline penetrated family life in the 18th century. All aspects of children's life begin to attract the attention of parents. But the function of organized preparation of children for adult life is assumed not by the family, but by a special public institution - the school, designed to educate qualified workers and exemplary citizens. It was the school, according to F. Aries, that brought childhood beyond the first 2-4 years of maternal, parental education in the family. The school, thanks to its regular, orderly structure, contributed to the further differentiation of that period of life, which is denoted by the general word "childhood". The “class” has become a universal measure that defines a new marking of childhood. The child enters a new age every year as soon as he changes class. In the past, the life of a child and childhood were not subdivided into such thin layers. Class therefore became the determining factor in the process of differentiation of ages within childhood or adolescence itself.

Thus, according to the concept of F. Aries, the concept of childhood and adolescence is associated with the school and the classroom organization of the school as those special structures that were created by society in order to give children the necessary preparation for social life and professional activities.

The next age level is also associated by F. Aries with the new

form of social life - the institution of military service and compulsory military service. This is adolescence or adolescence. The concept of "adolescent" has led to a further restructuring of learning. Educators began to attach great importance to the form of dress and discipline, the education of stamina and masculinity, which had previously been neglected. The new orientation was immediately reflected in art, in particular in painting: “The recruit now no longer appears as a roguish and prematurely aged warrior from the paintings of Danish and Spanish masters of the 17th century - he now becomes an attractive soldier, depicted, for example, by Watteau,” writes F Aries. A typical image of a young man is created by R. Wagner in Siegfried.

Later, in the 20th century, the First World War gave rise to the phenomenon of "youth consciousness", represented in the literature of the lost generation. “So, the era that did not know youth,” writes F. Aries, “was replaced by an era in which youth has become the most valuable age” ... “Everyone wants to enter it early and stay in it longer. “Each period of history corresponds to a certain privileged age and a certain division of human life: “youth is the privileged age of the 17th century, childhood is the 19th, youth is the 20th.”

As we can see, the research of F. Aries is devoted to the emergence of the concept of childhood or, in other words, the problem of understanding childhood as a social phenomenon. But when analyzing the concept of F. Aries, it is necessary to remember the psychological laws of awareness. First of all, as JI.S. Vygotsky, "in order to realize, one must have what must be realized." And further studying the process of awareness in detail, J. Piaget emphasized that there is an inevitable delay and a fundamental difference between the formation of a real phenomenon and its reflective reflection.

The study of F. Aries begins with the Middle Ages, because only at that time did picturesque scenes depicting children appear. But care for children, the idea of education, of course, appeared long before the Middle Ages. Already in Aristotle there are thoughts dedicated to children. In addition, the work of F. Aries is limited to the study of the childhood of only a European child from the upper strata of society and describes the history of childhood without regard to the socio-economic level of development of society.

On the basis of documentary sources, F. Aries describes the content of the childhood of noble people. Thus, the children's activities of Louis XIII (beginning of the 17th century) can serve as a good illustration for this. At a year and a half, Louis XIII plays the violin and sings at the same time. (Music and dance were taught to the children of noble families from an early age.) Louis does this before a wooden horse, a windmill, a top (the toys that were given to children of that time) attract his attention. Louis XIII was three years old when he first participated in the celebration of Christmas in 1604, and already from this age he began to learn to read, and at the age of four he knew how to write. At five he played with dolls and cards, and at six he played chess and tennis. The playmates of Louis XIII were pages and soldiers. Louis played hide-and-seek and other games with them. At the age of six, Louis XIII practiced riddles and charades. Everything changed at the age of seven. Children's clothes were abandoned, and upbringing took on a masculine character. He begins to learn the art of hunting, shooting, gambling and horseback riding. Since that time, literature of a pedagogical and moralistic type has been read to him. At the same time, he begins to visit the theater and participates in collective games with adults.

But many other examples of childhood can be cited. One of them is taken from the 20th century. This is a description of Douglas Lockwood's journey deep into the Gibson Desert (Western Australia) and his encounter with the aboriginal Pintubi tribe ("lizard eaters"). Until 1957, most of the people of this tribe had never seen a white man, their contacts with neighboring tribes were insignificant, and thanks to this, the culture and way of life of the Stone Age people were preserved to a very large extent. The whole life of these people, passing in the desert, is focused on finding food and water. Pintubi women, strong and hardy, could walk for hours in the desert with a heavy load of fuel on their heads. They gave birth to children, lying on the sand, helping and sympathizing with each other. They had no idea about hygiene, did not even know the reason for childbearing. They did not have any utensils, except for wooden vessels for water. The camp had two or three more spears, several sticks for digging yams, millstones for grinding wild berries, and half a dozen wild lizards - their only food supplies ... Everyone went hunting with spears, which were made entirely of wood. In cold weather, nudity made life unbearable for these people... No wonder their bodies bore so many marks from smoldering sticks from campfires... D. Lockwood gave the natives a pocket mirror and a comb, and the women tried/comb their hair with the back of the comb. But even after the comb was put into his hand in the correct position, he still did not fit into his hair, since they had to be washed first, but there was not enough water for this. The man managed to comb his beard, while the women threw their gifts on the sand and soon forgot about them. “Mirrors,” writes D. Lockwood, “also did not succeed; although these people had never seen their own reflection before. The head of the family knew, of course, what his wives and children looked like, but he never saw his own face. Glancing in the mirror, he was surprised and intently examined himself in it ... The women in my presence looked in the mirror only once. Perhaps they mistook the image for spirits and therefore were frightened.

The natives slept, lying on the sand, without blankets or other covers, clinging to two dingoes curled up for warmth. D. Lockwood writes that a girl of two or three years old, while eating, put into her mouth either huge pieces of cake, or pieces of meat from a tiny guana, which she herself baked in hot sand. Her younger half-sister was sitting next to her in the mud and was cracking down on a can of stew (from the expedition's stocks), pulling the meat out with her fingers. The next morning, D. Lockwood examined the jar. She was licked to a shine. Another observation by D. Lockwood: “Before dawn, the natives lit a fire to protect them from the cold gusts of the southeast wind. By the light of the fire, I saw how a little girl, who still did not know how to walk properly, arranged a separate fire for herself. She tilted her head and fanned the coals so that the fire would spread to the branches and warm her. She was naked and probably suffering from a cold, and yet she did not cry. There were three small children in the camp, but we never heard them cry.”

Observations like these allow us to take a deeper look at history. In comparison with the analysis of works of art, with folklore and linguistic studies, ethnographic material provides important data on the history of childhood development.

As already noted, the question of the historical origin of the periods of childhood, the connection between the history of childhood and the history of society, the history of childhood as a whole, without the solution of which it is impossible to form a meaningful concept of childhood, was raised in child psychology at the end of the 20s of the 20th century and continues still being developed. According to the views of Soviet psychologists, to study child development historically means to study the child's transition from one age stage to another, to study the change in his personality within each age period that occurs under specific historical conditions. And although the history of childhood has not yet been sufficiently studied, the very posing of this question in the psychology of the 20th century is important. And if, according to D.B. Elkonin, there are still no answers to many questions of the theory of the mental development of the child, then the solution can already be imagined. And it is seen in the light of the historical study of childhood.

Man, being born, is endowed with only the most elementary mechanisms for maintaining life. In terms of physical structure, organization of the nervous system, types of activity and methods of its regulation, a person is the most perfect creature in nature. However, according to the state at the time of birth, a drop in perfection is noticeable in the evolutionary series - the child does not have any ready-made forms of behavior. As a rule, the higher a living being ranks among animals, the longer his childhood lasts, the more helpless this creature is at birth. This is one of the paradoxes of nature that predetermines the history of childhood. In the course of history, the enrichment of the material and spiritual culture of mankind has continuously grown. Over the millennia, human experience has increased many thousands of times. But during the same time, a newborn child has not changed much. .

Childhood- the period lasting from newborn to full social and, consequently, psychological maturity; This is the period of the child becoming a full-fledged member of human society. At the same time, the duration of childhood in a primitive society is not equal to the duration of childhood in the Middle Ages or today. The stages of human childhood are a product of history, and they are just as subject to change as they were thousands of years ago. Therefore, it is impossible to study the childhood of a child and the laws of its formation outside the development of human society and the laws that determine its development. The duration of childhood is directly dependent on the level of material and spiritual culture of society.

Childhood history problem- one of the most difficult in modern child psychology, since in this area it is impossible to conduct either observation or experiment. Theoretically, the question of the historical origin of childhood periods was developed in the works of P. P. Blonsky, L. S. Vygotsky, and D. B. Elkonin. The course of a child's mental development, according to L S. Vygotsky, does not obey the eternal laws of nature, the laws of maturation of the organism. The course of child development in a class society, he believed, "has a completely definite class meaning." That is why he emphasized that there is no eternally childish, but only historically childish.

Historically, the concept of childhood is associated not with the biological state of immaturity, but with a certain social status, with the range of rights and obligations inherent in this period of life, with a set of types and forms of activity available to it. The French demographer Philippe Aries collected many facts about how, in the course of history, the concept of childhood was formed in the minds of artists, writers and scientists. His research in the field of fine arts led him to the conclusion that until the 12th century, artists did not even try to depict children, with the exception of religious subjects. The differentiation of the ages of human life, including childhood, according to F. Aries, is formed under the influence of social institutions, then there are new forms of social life generated by the development of society. Thus, early childhood first appears within the family, where it is associated with specific communication - "tenderness" and "pampering" of a small child. A child for parents is just a pretty, funny baby with whom you can have fun, play with pleasure and at the same time teach and educate him. This is the primary, "family" concept of childhood. The desire to "dress up" children, "spoil" and "undead" them could only appear in the family. However, this approach to children as "adorable toys" could not remain unchanged for long. The development of society has led to a further change in attitudes towards children. A new concept of childhood emerged. For teachers of the 17th century, love for children was no longer expressed in pampering and amusing them, but in a psychological interest in education and training. The concept of rational education based on strict discipline penetrated family life in the 18th century. All aspects of children's life begin to attract the attention of parents. But the function of organized preparation of children for adult life is assumed not by the family, but by a special public institution - the school. The school, thanks to its regular, orderly structure, contributed to the further differentiation of that period of life, which is denoted by the general word "childhood". The "class" has become a universal measure that defines a new marking of childhood. The child enters a new age every year as soon as he changes class. In the past, the life of a child and childhood were not subdivided into such thin layers. Class therefore became the determining factor in the process of differentiation of ages within childhood or adolescence itself. The research of F. Aries is devoted to the emergence of the concept of childhood or, in other words, the problem of understanding childhood as a social phenomenon. But when analyzing the concept of F. Aries, it is necessary to remember the psychological laws of awareness. First of all, as JI said. S. Vygotsky, "in order to realize, one must have what must be realized." And further studying the process of awareness in detail, J. Piaget emphasized that there is an inevitable delay and a fundamental difference between the formation of a real phenomenon and its reflective reflection.

Childhood has its own laws and, of course, does not depend on the fact that artists begin to pay attention to children and depict them on their canvases. Even if we recognize the indisputable judgment of F. Aries that art is a reflected picture of morals, works of art in themselves cannot provide all the necessary data for analyzing the concept of childhood, and one can not agree with all the author's conclusions. The study of F. Aries begins with the Middle Ages, because only at that time did picturesque scenes depicting children appear. But care for children, the idea of education, of course, appeared long before the Middle Ages. Already in Aristotle there are thoughts dedicated to children. In addition, the work of F. Aries is limited to the study of the childhood of only a European child from the upper strata of society and describes the history of childhood without regard to the socio-economic level of development of society.

As D. B. Elkonin emphasized , childhood occurs when the child cannot be directly included in the system of social reproduction, since the child cannot yet master the tools of labor due to their complexity. As a result, the natural inclusion of children in productive labor is pushed back. According to D. B. Elkonin, this elongation in time does not occur by building a new period of development over the existing ones (as F. Aries believed), but by a kind of wedging of a new period of development, leading to an “upward shift in time” of the period of mastering the tools of production . D. B. Elkonin brilliantly revealed these features of childhood in the analysis of the emergence of role-playing games and a detailed examination of the psychological characteristics of primary school age.

According to the views of Soviet psychologists, to study child development historically means to study the child's transition from one age stage to another, to study the change in his personality within each age period that occurs under specific historical conditions. And although the history of childhood has not yet been sufficiently studied, the very posing of this question in the psychology of the 20th century is important. And if, according to D. B. Elkonin, there is still no answer to many questions of the theory of the mental development of the child, then the way of solution can already be imagined. And it is seen in the light of the historical study of childhood.

Historical analysis of the concept of "childhood"
Today, any educated person, when asked what childhood is, will answer that childhood is a period of enhanced development, change and learning. But only scientists understand that this is a period of paradoxes and contradictions, without which it is impossible to imagine the development process. V. Stern, J. Piaget, I. A. Sokolyansky and many others wrote about the paradoxes of child development. D. B. Elkonin said that the paradoxes in child psychology are the mysteries of development that scientists have yet to unravel.
D. B. Elkonin invariably began his lectures at Moscow University with a description of the two main paradoxes of child development, which embody the need for a historical approach to understanding childhood. Let's consider them.
Man, being born, is endowed with only the most elementary mechanisms for maintaining life. According to the physical structure, organization of the nervous system, according to the types of activity and methods of its regulation, a person is the most perfect creature in nature.
However, according to the state at the time of birth, a drop in perfection is noticeable in the evolutionary series - the child does not have any ready-made forms of behavior. As a rule, the higher a living being ranks among animals, the longer his childhood lasts, the more helpless this being is at birth. This is one of the paradoxes of nature that predetermines the history of childhood.
In the course of history, the enrichment of the material and spiritual culture of mankind has continuously grown. Over the millennia, human experience has increased many thousands of times. But during the same time, the newborn child has not changed much. Based on the data of anthropologists on the anatomical and morphological similarities between the Cro-Magnon and the modern European, it can be assumed that the newborn of a modern person does not differ in any significant way from a newborn that lived tens of thousands of years ago.
How is it that, under similar natural conditions, the level of mental development that a child reaches at each historical stage in the development of society is not the same?
Childhood is a period lasting from newborn to full social and, consequently, psychological maturity; This is the period of the child becoming a full-fledged member of human society. At the same time, the duration of childhood in a primitive society is not equal to the duration of childhood in the Middle Ages or today. The stages of human childhood are a product of history, and they are just as subject to change as they were thousands of years ago. Therefore, it is impossible to study the childhood of a child and the laws of its formation outside the development of human society and the laws that determine its development. The duration of childhood is directly dependent on the level of material and spiritual culture of society.
As is known, the theory of knowledge and dialectics must be made up of the history of individual sciences, the history of the mental development of a child, young animals, and the history of language. Focusing on the history of the mental development of the child, it should be distinguished both from the development of the child in ontogeny and from the uneven development of children in various modern cultures.
The problem of childhood history is one of the most difficult in contemporary child psychology, since neither observation nor experiment can be carried out in this area. Ethnographers are well aware that cultural monuments related to children are poor. Even in those not very frequent cases when toys are found in archaeological excavations, these are usually cult objects that in ancient times were placed in graves so that they would serve the owner in the afterlife. Miniature images of people and animals were also used for witchcraft and magic.
We can say that the experimental facts were preceded by theory. Theoretically, the question of the historical origin of periods of childhood was developed in the works of P. P. Blonsky, L. S. Vygotsky, D. B. Elkonin. The course of a child's mental development, according to J1 S. Vygotsky, does not obey the eternal laws of nature, the laws of the organism's maturation. The course of child development in a class society, he believed, "has a completely definite class meaning." That is why he emphasized that there is no eternally childish, but only historically childish.
Thus, in the literature of the 19th century, evidence of the absence of childhood among proletarian children is numerous. For example, in a study of the situation of the working class in England, F. Engels referred to the report of a commission created by the English Parliament in 1833 to survey working conditions in factories: children sometimes started working at the age of five, often at six, even more often at seven, but almost all children of the poor parents worked from the age of eight; Their working hours lasted 14-16 hours.
It is generally accepted that the status of the childhood of a proletarian child is formed only in the 19th-20th centuries, when child labor began to be prohibited with the help of legislation on the protection of children. Of course, this does not mean that the legal laws adopted are capable of providing a childhood for the workers of the lower strata of society. Children in this environment and, above all, girls, today still perform the work necessary for social reproduction (care for babies, housework, some agricultural work). Thus, although in our time there is a ban on child labor, one cannot speak of the status of childhood without taking into account the position of parents in the social structure of society.
The "Convention on the Rights of the Child", adopted by UNESCO in 1989 and ratified by most countries of the world, is aimed at ensuring the full development of the child's personality in every corner of the Earth. Historically, the concept of childhood is associated not with the biological state of immaturity, but with a certain social status, with the range of rights and obligations inherent in this period of life, with a set of types and forms of activity available to it. Many interesting facts were collected to confirm this idea by the French demographer and historian Philip Aries . Thanks to his work, interest in the history of childhood in foreign psychology has increased significantly, and the studies of F. Aries himself are recognized as classics.
F. Aries was interested in how, in the course of history, the concept of childhood developed in the minds of artists, writers and scientists and how it differed in different historical eras. His research in the field of fine arts led him to the conclusion that until the 12th century, art did not appeal to children, artists did not even try to depict them.
Children's images in the painting of the XIII century are found only in religious and allegorical subjects. These are angels, baby Jesus and nagoedya as a symbol of the soul of the deceased. The image of real children was absent from painting for a long time. No one apparently believed that the child contained a human personality. If children appeared in works of art, they were depicted as reduced adults. Then there was no knowledge about the characteristics and nature of childhood. The word "child" for a long time did not have the exact meaning that is given to it now. So, it is typical, for example, that in medieval Germany the word "child" was a synonym for the concept of "fool".
Childhood was considered a period of fast passing and of little value. Indifference towards childhood, according to F. Aries, was a direct consequence of the demographic situation of that time, which was characterized by high birth rates and high infant mortality. A sign of overcoming indifference to childhood, according to the French demographer, is the appearance in the 16th century of portraits of dead children. Their death, he writes, was now experienced as a truly irreparable loss, and not as a completely ordinary event. The overcoming of indifference to children takes place, judging by painting, not earlier than the 11th century, when for the first time the first portraits of real children begin to appear on the canvases of artists. As a rule, these were portraits of children of influential persons and royal persons in childhood. Thus, according to F. Aries, the discovery of childhood began in the 13th century, its development can be traced in the history of painting of the 14th-15th centuries, but the evidence of this discovery is most fully manifested at the end of the 16th and throughout the entire 17th century.
According to the researcher, clothes serve as an important symbol of a change in attitudes towards childhood. In the Middle Ages, as soon as a child grew out of diapers, he was immediately dressed in a suit that was no different from the clothes of an adult of the corresponding social status. Only in the XV1-XVII centuries did special children's clothing appear that distinguishes a child from an adult. Interestingly, for boys and girls aged 2-4 years, the clothes were the same and consisted of a children's dress. In other words, in order to distinguish a boy from a man, he was dressed in a woman's costume, and this costume lasted until the beginning of our century, despite the change in society and the lengthening of the period of childhood. Note that in peasant families before the revolution, children and adults dressed the same. By the way, this feature is still preserved where there are no big differences between the work of adults and the play of a child.
Analyzing portraits of children in old paintings and descriptions of children's costumes in literature, F. Aries identifies three trends in the evolution of children's clothing:
Feminization - a costume for boys largely repeats the details of women's clothing
Archaization - children's clothing in this historical time is lagging behind in comparison with adult fashion and largely repeats the adult costume of the past era (this is how the boys got short pants).
The use for children of the upper classes of the usual adult costume of the lower (peasant clothes).
As F. Aries emphasizes, the formation of a children's costume has become an outward manifestation of deep internal changes in attitudes towards children in society - now they are beginning to occupy an important place in the lives of adults.
The discovery of childhood made it possible to describe the full cycle of human life To characterize the age periods of life in the scientific writings of the XV1-XVII centuries, terminology was used that is still used in scientific and colloquial speech: childhood, adolescence, youth, youth, maturity, old age, senility (deep old age) . But the modern meaning of these words does not correspond to their original meaning. In the old days, the periods of life correlated with the four seasons, with the seven planets, with the twelve signs of the zodiac. The coincidence of numbers was perceived as one of the indicators of the fundamental unity of Nature.
In the field of art, ideas about the periods of human life are reflected in the painting of the columns of the Doge's Palace in Venice, in many engravings of the 16th-19th centuries, in painting, sculpture. In most of these works, F. Aries emphasizes, a person's age corresponds not so much to biological stages as to the social functions of people So, for example, in the painting of the Doge's Palace, the age of toys is symbolized by children playing with a wooden skate, a doll, a windmill and a bird; school age - boys learn to read, carry books, and girls learn to knit; the age of love and sports -- boys and girls walk together at the festival; the age of war and chivalry is a man shooting a gun; maturity - a judge and a scientist are depicted.
The differentiation of the ages of human life, including childhood, according to F. Aries, is formed under the influence of social institutions, that is, new forms of social life generated by the development of society. Thus, early childhood first appears within the family, where it is associated with specific communication - "tenderness" and "pampering" of a small child. A child for parents is just a pretty, funny kid with whom you can have fun, play with pleasure and at the same time teach and educate him. This is the primary, "family" concept of childhood. The desire to "dress up" children, "spoil" and "undead" them could only appear in the family. However, this approach to children as "adorable toys" could not remain unchanged for long.
The development of society has led to a further change in attitudes towards children. A new concept of childhood emerged. For teachers of the 17th century, love for children was no longer expressed in pampering and amusing them, but in a psychological interest in education and training. In order to correct a child's behavior, it is first necessary to understand it, and the scientific texts of the late 16th and 11th centuries are full of comments on child psychology. It should be noted that deep pedagogical ideas, advice and recommendations are contained in the works of Russian authors of the 16th-17th centuries.
The concept of rational education based on strict discipline penetrates family life in the 18th century. Parents' attention begins to attract all aspects of children's lives. But the function of organized preparation of children for adult life is assumed not by the family, but by a special public institution - the school, designed to educate qualified workers and exemplary citizens. It was the school, according to F. Aries, that brought childhood beyond the first 2-4 years of maternal, parental education in the family. The school, thanks to its regular, orderly structure, contributed to the further differentiation of that period of life, which is denoted by the general word "childhood". The "class" has become a universal measure that defines a new marking of childhood. The child enters a new age every year as soon as he changes class. In the past, the life of a child and childhood were not subdivided into such thin layers. Class therefore became the determining factor in the process of differentiation of ages within childhood or adolescence itself.
Thus, according to the concept of F. Aries, the concept of childhood and adolescence is associated with the school and the class organization of the school as those special structures that were created by society in order to give children the necessary preparation for social life and professional activities.
The next age level is also associated by F. Aries with a new form of social life - the institution of military service and compulsory military service. This is adolescence or adolescence. The concept of "teenager" led to a further restructuring of education. Educators began to attach great importance to the form of dress and discipline, the education of stamina and masculinity, which had previously been neglected. The new orientation was immediately reflected in art, in particular, in painting: "The recruit now no longer appears as a roguish and prematurely aged warrior from the paintings of Danish and Spanish masters of the 17th century - he now becomes an attractive soldier, depicted, for example, by Watteau," writes F. Aries. A typical image of a young man is created by R. Wagner in Siegfried.
Later, in the 20th century, the First World War gave rise to the phenomenon of "youth consciousness", presented in the literature of the "lost generation". "So, the era that did not know youth," writes F. Aries, "was replaced by an era in which youth became the most valuable age" ... "Everyone wants to enter it early and stay in it longer." Each period of history corresponds to a certain privileged age and a certain division of human life: "youth is the privileged age of the 17th century, childhood is the 19th, youth is the 20th."
As we can see, the research of F.-Aries is devoted to the emergence of the concept of childhood or, in other words, the problem of understanding childhood as a social phenomenon. But when analyzing the concept of F. Aries, it is necessary to remember the psychological laws of awareness. First of all, as JI said. S. Vygotsky, "in order to realize, one must have what must be realized." And further studying the process of awareness in detail, J. Piaget emphasized that there is an inevitable delay and a fundamental difference between the formation of a real phenomenon and its reflective reflection.
Childhood has its own laws and, of course, does not depend on the fact that artists begin to pay attention to children and depict them on their canvases. Even if F. Aries' judgment that art is a reflected picture of morals is recognized as indisputable, works of art in themselves cannot provide all the necessary data for analyzing the concept of childhood, and one can not agree with all the author's conclusions.
The study of F. Aries begins with the Middle Ages, because only at that time did picturesque plots depicting children appear. But care for children, the idea of education, of course, appeared long before the Middle Ages. Already in Aristotle there are thoughts dedicated to children. In addition, the work of F. Aries is limited to the study of the childhood of only a European child from the upper strata of society and describes the history of childhood without regard to the socio-economic level of development of society.
On the basis of documentary sources, F. Aries describes the content of the childhood of noble people. Thus, the children's activities of Louis XIII (beginning of the 17th century) can serve as a good illustration for this. At a year and a half, Louis XIII plays the violin and sings at the same time. (Music and dance were taught to children of noble families from a very early age). Louis does this before the wooden horse, the windmill, the spinning top (the toys that were given to children of that time) catch his attention. Louis XIII was three years old when he first participated in the celebration of Christmas in 1604, and already from this age he began to learn to read, and at the age of four he knew how to write. At five he played with dolls and cards, and at six he played chess and tennis. The playmates of Louis XIII were pages and soldiers. Louis played hide-and-seek and other games with them. At the age of six, Louis XIII practiced riddles and charades. Everything changed at the age of seven. Children's clothes were abandoned, and upbringing took on a masculine character. He begins to learn the art of hunting, shooting, gambling and horseback riding. Since that time, literature of a pedagogical and moralistic type has been read to him. At the same time, he begins to visit the theater and participates in collective games with adults.
But many other examples of childhood can be cited. One of them is taken from the 20th century. This is a description of Douglas Lockwood's journey deep into the Gibson Desert (Western Australia) and his encounter with the aboriginal Pintubi tribe ("lizard eaters"). Until 1957, most of the people of this tribe had never seen a white man, their contacts with neighboring tribes were insignificant, and thanks to this, the culture and way of life of the Stone Age people were preserved to a very large extent. The whole life of these people, passing in the desert, is focused on finding food and water. Pintubi women, strong and hardy, could walk for hours in the desert with a heavy load of fuel on their heads. They gave birth to children, lying on the sand, helping and sympathizing with each other. They had no idea about hygiene, they did not even know the reason for childbearing. They did not have any utensils, except for wooden vessels for water. In the camp there were two more tri-spears, several sticks for digging yams, millstones for grinding wild berries, and half a dozen wild lizards - their only food supplies ... Wantedly everyone went with spears, which were made entirely of wood. In cold weather, nudity made the life of these people unbearable ... It is not surprising that there were so many marks on their bodies from smoldering sticks from camp fires ... D. Lockwood gave the natives a pocket mirror and a comb, and the women tried to comb their hair with the back of the comb. But even after the comb was put into his hand in the correct position, he still did not fit into his hair, since they had to be washed first, but there was not enough water for this. The man managed to comb his beard, while the women threw their presents on the sand and soon forgot about them. "what his wives and children look like, but he never saw his own face. Looking in the mirror, he was surprised and intently examined himself in it ... Women looked at me in the mirror only once. Perhaps they mistook the image for spirits and therefore were frightened" .
The natives slept, lying on the sand, without blankets or other covers, clinging to two dingoes curled up for warmth. D. Lockwood writes that a girl of two or three years old, while eating, put into her mouth either huge pieces of cakes, or pieces of meat from a tiny guana, which she herself baked in hot sand. Her younger half-sister sat nearby in the mud and cracked down on a can of stew (from the expedition's stocks), pulling it out with meat fingers. On a pale morning, D. Lockwood examined the jar. She was licked to a shine. Another observation by D. Lockwood: “Before dawn, the natives lit a fire to protect them from the cold gusts of the southeast wind. By the light of the fire, I saw how a little girl, who still did not know how to walk properly, made a separate fire for herself. Bowing her head, she fanned the coals so that the fire spread to the branches and warmed her. She was without clothes and probably suffered from the cold, and yet she did not cry. There were three small children in the camp, but we never heard them cry. "
Observations like these allow us to take a deeper look at history. In comparison with the analysis of works of art, with folklore or linguistic studies, ethnographic material provides important data on the history of childhood development.
Based on the study of ethnographic materials, D. B. Elkonin showed that at the earliest stages of the development of human society, when the main way of obtaining food was gathering with the use of primitive tools for knocking down fruits and digging up edible roots, the child very early joined the work of adults, practically mastering the methods of obtaining food. food and the use of primitive tools. "Under such conditions, there was neither need nor time for the stage of preparing children for future work. As emphasized
DB Elkonin, childhood occurs when the child cannot be directly included in the system of social reproduction, since the child cannot yet master the tools of labor due to their complexity. As a result, the natural inclusion of children in productive labor is pushed back. According to D. B. Elkonin, this elongation in time does not occur by building a new period of development over the existing ones (as F. Aries believed), but by a kind of wedge-in of a new period of development, leading to an “upward shift in time” of the period of mastering the tools of production. D. B. Elkonin brilliantly revealed these features of childhood in the analysis of the emergence of role-playing games and a detailed examination of the psychological characteristics of primary school age.
As already noted, the question of the historical origin of childhood periods, the connection between the history of childhood and the history of society, the history of childhood as a whole, without solving which it is impossible to form a meaningful concept of childhood, was raised in child psychology in the late 20s of the 20th century and continues to be developed until so far. According to the views of Soviet psychologists, to study child development historically means to study the child's transition from one age stage to another, to study the change in his personality within each age period that occurs under specific historical conditions. And although the history of childhood has not yet been sufficiently studied, the very formulation of this question in the psychology of the 20th century is important. And if, according to D. B. Elkonin, there is still no answer to many questions of the theory of the mental development of the child, then the path to the solution can already be imagined. And it is seen in the light of the historical study of childhood
Childhood as a subject of science
The science of the mental development of the child - child psychology - originated as a branch of comparative psychology at the end of the 19th century. The starting point for systematic research on the psychology of the child is the book of the German Darwinist Wilhelm Preyer "The Soul of the Child". In her V. Preyer describes the results of daily observations of the development of his own son, paying attention to the development of the senses, motor skills, will, reason and language. Despite the fact that observations of the development of the child were carried out long after the appearance of the book by V. Preyer, its indisputable priority is determined by the appeal to the study of the earliest years of the child's life and the introduction into child psychology of the method of objective observation, developed by analogy with the methods of the natural sciences. V. Preyer's views from a modern point of view are perceived as naive, limited by the level of development of science in the 19th century. He, for example, considered the mental development of the child as a particular version of the biological. (Although strictly speaking, even now there are both hidden and explicit supporters of this idea...). However, V. Preyer was the first to make the transition from an introspective to an objective study of the child's psyche. Therefore, according to the unanimous recognition of psychologists, he is considered the founder of child psychology.
The objective conditions for the formation of child psychology, which had developed by the end of the 19th century, are associated with the intensive development of industry, with a new level of social life, which created the need for the emergence of a modern school. Teachers were interested in the question: how to teach and educate children? Parents and teachers stopped considering physical punishment as an effective method of education - more democratic families appeared. The task of understanding the child was the turn of the day. On the other hand, the desire to understand oneself as an adult has prompted researchers to treat childhood more carefully - only through the study of the psychology of the child is the way to understand what the psychology of an adult is.
What is the place of child psychology in the light of other psychological knowledge? I. M. Sechenov wrote that psychology cannot be anything other than the science of the origin and development of mental processes. It is known that the ideas of genetic (from the word - genesis) research penetrated into psychology a very long time ago. There is almost no outstanding psychologist who has dealt with the problems of general psychology who has not at the same time, in one way or another, dealt with child psychology. Such world-famous scientists as J. Watson, V. Stern, K. Buhler, K. Kofka, K. Levin, A. Vallon, 3. Freud, E. Spranger, J. Piaget, V. M. Bekhterev, D. M. Uznadze, S. L. Rubinstein, L. S. Vygotsky, A. R. Luria, A. N. Leontiev, P. Ya. Galperin, etc.
However, exploring the same object - mental development - genetic and child psychology are two different psychological sciences. Genetic psychology is interested in the problems of the emergence and development of mental processes. It answers the questions, "how does this or that psychological movement occur, manifested by feeling, sensation, representation, involuntary or arbitrary movement, how do those processes occur, the result of which is a thought" (I. M. Sechenov). Genetic psychology or, what is the same, developmental psychology, analyzing the formation of mental processes, can rely on the results of studies carried out on children, but children themselves do not constitute the subject of study of genetic psychology. Genetic studies can also be carried out on adults. A well-known example of genetic research is the study of the formation of pitch hearing. In a specially organized experiment, in which the subjects had to adjust their voice to a given pitch, it was possible to observe the formation of the ability to pitch difference.
To recreate, to make, to shape a psychic phenomenon is the basic strategy of genetic psychology. The path of experimental formation of mental processes was first outlined by L. S. Vygotsky. “The method we use,” wrote L. S. Vygotsky, “can be called an experimental genetic method in the sense that it artificially causes and creates the genetic process of mental development ... An attempt at such an experiment is to melt every frozen and petrified psychological form, to turn it into a moving, flowing stream of separate moments replacing each other... to its parts, but from the process to its separate moments.
Among many researchers of the process of development, the most prominent representatives of genetic psychology are L. S. Vygotsky, J. Piaget, P. Ya. Galperin. Their theories, developed on the basis of experiments with children, are entirely related to general genetic psychology. Piaget's well-known book, The Psychology of Intellect, is not a book about a child, it is a book about intelligence. P. Ya. Galperin created the theory of the systematic and step-by-step formation of mental actions as the basis for the formation of mental processes. The experimental study of concepts carried out by L. S. Vygotsky belongs to genetic psychology.
Child psychology differs from all other psychology in that it deals with special units of analysis - this is the age, or period of development. It should be emphasized that age is not reduced to the sum of individual mental processes, it is not a calendar date. Age, according to L. S. Vygotsky, is a relatively closed cycle of child development, which has its own structure and dynamics. The duration of age is determined by its internal content: there are periods of development and in some cases "epochs" equal to one year, three, five years. Chronological and psychological ages do not coincide, Chronological or passport age is only a reference coordinate, that external grid the process of mental development of the child, the formation of his personality.
Unlike genetic psychology, child psychology is the study of the periods of child development, their change and transitions from one age to another. Therefore, following L. S. Vygotsky, it would be more correct to say about this area of psychology: child and developmental psychology. Typical child psychologists were L.S. Vygotsky, A. Vallon, 3. Freud, D. B. Elkonin. As D. B. Elkonin figuratively said, general psychology is the chemistry of the psyche, and child psychology is rather physics, since it deals with larger and in a certain way organized "bodies" of the psyche. When materials from child psychology are used in general psychology, they reveal the chemistry of the process and say nothing about the child.
The distinction between genetic and child psychology indicates that the very subject of child psychology has changed historically. At present, the subject of child psychology is the disclosure of the general patterns of mental development in ontogenesis, the establishment of the age periods of this development and the reasons for the transition from one period to another. theoretical tasks of child psychology expands the possibilities of its practical implementation.In addition to the activation of the processes of education and upbringing, a new area of practice has emerged.This is control over the processes of child development, which should be distinguished from the tasks of diagnosing and selecting children in special institutions.Just as a pediatrician monitors the physical health of children, the child psychologist must say: is the child's psyche developing and functioning correctly, and if not, what are the deviations and how should they be compensated.All this can be done only on the basis of a deep and precise theory that reveals specific mechanisms and dynamics. developmental dynamics of the child's psyche
The specifics of the mental development of the child
What is development? How is it characterized? What is the fundamental difference between development and any other changes in an object? As you know, an object can change, but not develop. Growth, for example, is a quantitative change in a given object, including a mental process. There are processes that fluctuate within the "less-more" range. These are processes of growth in the proper and true sense of the word. Growth occurs over time and is measured in terms of time. The main characteristic of growth is the process of quantitative changes in the internal structure and composition of the individual elements included in the object, without significant changes in the structure of individual processes. For example, when measuring the physical growth of a child, we see quantitative growth. L. S. Vygotsky emphasized that there are phenomena of growth in mental processes as well. For example, the growth of vocabulary without changing the functions of speech.
But behind these processes of quantitative growth, other phenomena and processes can occur. Then the growth processes become only symptoms, behind which significant changes in the system and structure of processes are hidden. During such periods, jumps in the growth line are observed, which indicate significant changes in the body itself. For example, the endocrine glands mature, and profound changes occur in the physical development of the adolescent. In such cases, when there are significant changes in the structure and properties of the phenomenon, we are dealing with development.
Development, first of all, is characterized by qualitative changes, the emergence of neoplasms, new mechanisms, new processes, new structures. X. Werner, L. S. Vygotsky and other psychologists described the main signs of development. The most important among them are: differentiation, dismemberment of the previously unified element; the emergence of new aspects, new elements in development itself; restructuring of links between the sides of the object. As psychological examples, we can mention the differentiation of the natural conditioned reflex to the position under the chest and the animation complex; the emergence of a sign function in infancy; change during childhood of the systemic and semantic structure of consciousness. Each of these processes corresponds to the listed development criteria.
As L. S. Vygotsky showed, there are many different types of development. Therefore, it is important to correctly find the place that the mental development of the child occupies among them, that is, to determine the specifics of mental development among other developmental processes. L.S. Vygotsky distinguished between preformed and unpreformed types of development. A preformed type is one in which, at the very beginning, both the stages that the phenomenon (organism) will pass through and the final result that the phenomenon will achieve are set, fixed, and fixed. Here everything is given from the very beginning. An example is embryonic development. Despite the fact that embryogenesis has its own history (there is a tendency to reduce the underlying stages, the newest stage affects the previous stages), but this does not change the type of development. In psychology, there has been an attempt to represent mental development on the principle of embryonic development. This is the concept of St. Hall. It is based on Haeckel's biogenetic law: ontogenesis is a brief repetition of phylogeny. Mental development was considered by St. Hall as a brief repetition of the stages of mental development of animals and ancestors of modern man.
The unpreformed type of development is the most common on our planet. It also includes the development of the Galaxy, the development of the Earth, the process of biological evolution, the development of society. The process of the mental development of the child also belongs to this type of processes. The unpreformed path of development is not predetermined. Children of different eras develop differently and reach different levels of development. From the very beginning, from the moment a child is born, neither the stages through which he must go, nor the end he must reach are given. Childhood development is an unreformed type of development, but it is a very special process - a process that is determined not from below, but from above, by the form of practical theoretical activity that exists at a given level of development of society (As the poet said: "Only born, already waiting for us Shakespeare"). This is a feature of child development. Its final forms are not given, but given. Not a single process of development, except for the ontogenetic one, is carried out according to a ready-made model. Human development follows the pattern that exists in society. According to L.S. Vygotsky, the process of mental development is the process of interaction between real and ideal forms. The task of the child psychologist is to trace the logic of mastering ideal forms. The child does not immediately master the spiritual and material wealth of mankind. But outside the process of assimilation of ideal forms, development is generally impossible. Therefore, within the unpreformed type of development, the mental development of the child is a special process. The process of ontogenetic development is a process unlike anything else, an extremely peculiar process that takes place in the form of assimilation
Strategies for researching the mental development of the child
The level of theory development determines the research strategy in science. This fully applies to child psychology, where the level of theory forms the goals and objectives of this science. At first, the task of child psychology was to accumulate facts and arrange them in a temporal sequence. This task corresponded to the observation strategy. Of course, even then, researchers were trying to understand the driving forces of development, and every psychologist dreamed about it. But there were no objective possibilities for solving this problem... The strategy of observing the real course of child development under the conditions in which it spontaneously develops led to the accumulation of various facts that had to be put into a system, to single out the stages and stages of development, in order to then identify the main trends and the general patterns of the development process itself and, in the end, to understand its cause.
To solve these problems, psychologists used the strategy of a natural-science ascertaining experiment, which allows one to establish the presence or absence of a phenomenon under certain controlled conditions, measure its quantitative characteristics and give a qualitative description. Both strategies - observation and ascertaining experiment - are widespread in child psychology. But their limitations become more and more obvious as it turns out that they do not lead to an understanding of the driving causes of human mental development. This happens because neither observation nor ascertaining experiment can actively influence the process of development, and its study proceeds only passively.
At present, a new research strategy is being intensively developed - the strategy of forming mental processes, active intervention, building a process with desired properties. It is because the strategy of forming mental processes leads to the intended result that one can judge its cause. Thus, the success of the formative experiment can serve as a criterion for identifying the cause of development.
Each of these strategies has its own history of development. As already mentioned, child psychology began with simple observation. Huge factual material on the development of a child at an early age was collected by parents, well-known psychologists as a result of long-term observations of the development of their own children (V Preyer, V. Stern, J. Piaget, N. A. Rybnikov, N. A. Menchinskaya, A. N. Gvozdev , V. S. Mukhina, M. Kechki and others). N.A. Rybnikov in his work "Children's diaries as material on child psychology" (1946) gave a historical outline of this basic method of studying the child. Analyzing the significance of the first foreign diaries (I. Ten, 1876;
Ch Darwin, 1877; V. Preyer, 1882), the appearance of which became a turning point in the development of child psychology, N. A. Rybnikov noted that Russian psychologists can rightfully claim primacy, since A.S. Simonovich already in 1861 conducted systematic observations of the child's extraverbal development from birth to 17 years of age.
Long-term systematic observation of the same child, daily registration of behavior, a thorough knowledge of the entire history of the development of the child, closeness to the child, good emotional contact with him - all this is the positive side of the observations. However, the observations of different authors were carried out with different goals, so they difficult to compare with each other. In addition, as a rule, in the first diaries there was no single technique of observation, and their interpretation was often subjective.
The Soviet psychologist M. Ya. Basov developed a system of objective observation, which, from his point of view, was the main method of child psychology. Emphasizing the importance of the naturalness and commonness of the conditions of observation, he described as a caricature such a situation when an observer comes to the children's group with paper and a pencil in his hands, fixes his gaze on the child and constantly writes something down. "No matter how much the child changes his position, no matter how he moves in the surrounding space, the gaze of the observer, and sometimes he follows him with his whole person and looks out for something, while he is silent all the time and writes something" M. Ya. Basov correctly considered that research work with children should be carried out by the teacher himself, raising and teaching children in a team in which the observed child is a member.
At present, most psychologists are skeptical about the method of observation as the main method of studying children. But, as D. B. Elkonin often said, "a sharp psychological eye is more important than a stupid experiment." The experimental method is remarkable in that it "thinks" for the experimenter. The facts obtained by the method of observation are very valuable. V. Stern, as a result of observing the development of his daughters, prepared a two-volume study on the development of speech. A. N. Gvozdev also published a two-volume monograph on the development of children's speech based on observations of the development of his only son.
In 1925, in Leningrad, under the leadership of N. M. Shchelovanov, a clinic for the normal development of children was established. There, the child was observed 24 hours a day, and it was there that all the main facts characterizing the first year of a child's life were discovered. It is well known that the concept of the development of sensorimotor intelligence was built by J. Piaget on the basis of observations of his three children. Long-term (for three years) study of adolescents from one class allowed D. B. Elkonin and T. V. Dragunova to give a psychological description of adolescence. Hungarian psychologists L. Garai and M. Kechki, observing the development of their own children, traced how the differentiation of the child's social position occurs in a family. V. S. Mukhina for the first time described the development of the behavior of two twin sons. These examples can be continued, although it is already clear from what has been said that the method of observation as the initial stage of research has not outlived its usefulness and cannot be treated with disdain. It is important, however, to remember that this method can only reveal phenomena, external symptoms of development.
At the beginning of the century, the first attempts were made to experimentally study the mental development of children. The French Ministry of Education ordered the well-known psychologist A. Binet to develop a methodology for selecting children for special schools. And already in 1908, the test examination of the child began, measuring scales of mental development appeared. A. Binet created a method of standardized tasks for each age. A little later, the American psychologist L. Theremin proposed a formula for measuring the IQ.
It seemed that child psychology had entered a new path of development - mental abilities with the help of special tasks (tests) could be reproduced and measured. But these hopes were not justified. It soon became clear that in the examination situation it is not known which of the psychic abilities is being examined with the help of tests. In the 1930s, the Soviet psychologist V. I. Asnin emphasized that the condition for the reliability of a psychological experiment is not the average level of problem solving, but how the child accepts the task, what task he solves. In addition, the IQ has long been considered by psychologists as an indicator of hereditary giftedness, which remains unchanged throughout a person's life. To date, the concept of a constant intelligence quotient has been greatly shaken, and in scientific psychology it is practically not used.
With the help of the test method in child psychology, a lot of research has been carried out, but they are constantly criticized because they always present the average child as an abstract carrier of psychological properties characteristic of the majority of the population of the corresponding age, identified using the method of "transverse" sections. With this measurement, the development process looks like a uniformly increasing straight line, where all qualitative new formations are hidden.
Noticing the shortcomings of the method of sections for studying the developmental process, the researchers supplemented it with the method of long-term ("longitudinal") study of the same children over a long period of time. This gave some advantage - it became possible to calculate the individual development curve of each child and determine whether his development corresponds to the age norm or whether it is above or below the average level. The longitudinal method made it possible to detect turning points on the development curve at which sharp qualitative shifts occur. However, this method is not free from shortcomings. Having received two points on the development curve, it is still impossible to answer the question of what happens between them. This method also does not make it possible to penetrate behind the phenomena, to understand the mechanism of mental phenomena. The facts obtained by this method can be explained by various hypotheses. There is no necessary accuracy in their interpretation. Thus, with all the subtleties of the experimental technique that ensure the reliability of the experiment, the strategy of ascertaining does not answer the main question: what happens between two points on the development curve? Only the strategy of experimental formation of mental phenomena can answer this question.
We owe the introduction to child psychology of the strategy of formation to L. S. Vygotsky. He applied his theory of the mediated structure of higher mental functions to form his own ability to remember. According to eyewitnesses, L. S. Vygotsky could demonstrate to a large audience the memorization of about 400 randomly named words. For this purpose, he used auxiliary means - he connected each word with one of the Volga cities. Then, following the river mentally, he could reproduce each word in the city associated with it. This method was called by L. S. Vygotsky the experimental genetic method, which makes it possible to reveal the qualitative features of the development of higher mental functions.
The strategy for the formation of mental processes eventually became widespread in Soviet psychology. Today, there are several ideas for implementing this strategy, which can be summarized as follows:
The cultural-historical concept of L. S. Vygotsky, according to which the interpsychic becomes intrapsychic. The genesis of higher mental functions is associated with the use of a sign by two people in the process of their communication; without fulfilling this role, a sign cannot become a means of individual mental activity.
The theory of activity by A. N. Leontiev: any activity acts as a conscious action, then as an operation, and as it forms, it becomes a function. The movement is carried out here from top to bottom - from activity to function.
The theory of the formation of mental actions by P. Ya. Galperin: the formation of mental functions occurs on the basis of an objective action and proceeds from the material performance of the action, and then through its speech form it passes into the mental plane. This is the most developed concept of formation. However, everything that is obtained with its help acts as a laboratory experiment. How do the data of a laboratory experiment correlate with real ontogeny? The problem of the correlation between experimental genesis and real genesis is one of the most serious and still unresolved. Its importance for child psychology was pointed out by A. V. Zaporozhets and D. B. Elkonin. A certain weakness of the formation strategy is that it has so far been applied only to the formation of the cognitive sphere of the personality, and the emotional-volitional processes and needs have remained outside the experimental study.
The concept of educational activity is the research of D. B. Elkonin and V. V. Davydov, in which a strategy for the formation of personality was developed not in laboratory conditions, but in real life - by creating experimental schools.
The theory of "initial humanization" by I. A. Sokolyansky and A. I. Meshcheryakov, which outlines the initial stages in the formation of the psyche of deaf-mute children.
The strategy for the formation of mental processes is one of the achievements of Soviet child psychology. This is the most appropriate strategy for modern understanding of the subject of child psychology. Thanks to the strategy of the formation of mental processes, it is possible to penetrate into the essence of the mental development of the child. But this does not mean that other research methods can be neglected. Any science proceeds from the phenomenon to the discovery of its nature.

Literature

Textbook. Obukhovoy L. F., Doctor of Psychology "Child (age) psychology"

Man, being born, is endowed with only the most elementary mechanisms for maintaining life. In terms of physical structure, organization of the nervous system, types of activity and methods of its regulation, a person is the most perfect creature in nature. However, according to the state at the time of birth, a drop in perfection is noticeable in the evolutionary series - the child does not have any ready-made forms of behavior. As a rule, the higher a living being ranks among animals, the longer his childhood lasts, the more helpless this creature is at birth. This is one of the paradoxes of nature that predetermines the history of childhood. In the course of history, the enrichment of the material and spiritual culture of mankind has continuously grown. Over the millennia, human experience has increased many thousands of times. But during the same time, the newborn child has not changed much.

Childhood is a period lasting from newborn to full social and, consequently, psychological maturity; This is the period of the child becoming a full-fledged member of human society. At the same time, the duration of childhood in a primitive society is not equal to the duration of childhood in the Middle Ages or today. The stages of human childhood are a product of history, and they are just as subject to change as they were thousands of years ago. Therefore, it is impossible to study the childhood of a child and the laws of its formation outside the development of human society and the laws that determine its development. The duration of childhood is directly dependent on the level of material and spiritual culture of society.

The problem of childhood history is one of the most difficult in modern child psychology, since it is impossible to carry out either observation or experiment in this area. Theoretically, the question of the historical origin of childhood periods was developed in the works of P. P. Blonsky, L. S. Vygotsky, and D. B. Elkonin. The course of a child's mental development, according to L S. Vygotsky, does not obey the eternal laws of nature, the laws of maturation of the organism. The course of child development in a class society, he believed, "has a completely definite class meaning." That is why he emphasized that there is no eternally childish, but only historically childish.

Historically, the concept of childhood is associated not with the biological state of immaturity, but with a certain social status, with the range of rights and obligations inherent in this period of life, with a set of types and forms of activity available to it. The French demographer Philippe Aries collected many facts about how, in the course of history, the concept of childhood was formed in the minds of artists, writers and scientists. His research in the visual arts led him to the conclusion that before the 12th century, artists did not even try to portray children, except for religious subjects. The differentiation of the ages of human life, including childhood, according to F. Aries, is formed under the influence of social institutions, that is, new forms of social life generated by the development of society. Thus, early childhood first appears within the family, where it is associated with specific communication - "tenderness" and "pampering" of a small child. A child for parents is just a pretty, funny baby with whom you can have fun, play with pleasure and at the same time teach and educate him. This is the primary, "family" concept of childhood. The desire to "dress up" children, "spoil" and "undead" them could only appear in the family. However, this approach to children as "adorable toys" could not remain unchanged for long. The development of society has led to a further change in attitudes towards children. A new concept of childhood emerged. For teachers of the 17th century, love for children was no longer expressed in pampering and amusing them, but in a psychological interest in education and training. The concept of rational education based on strict discipline penetrated family life in the 18th century. All aspects of children's life begin to attract the attention of parents. But the function of organized preparation of children for adult life is assumed not by the family, but by a special public institution - the school. The school, thanks to its regular, orderly structure, contributed to the further differentiation of that period of life, which is denoted by the general word "childhood". The "class" has become a universal measure that defines a new marking of childhood. The child enters a new age every year as soon as he changes class. In the past, the life of a child and childhood were not subdivided into such thin layers. Class therefore became the determining factor in the process of differentiation of ages within childhood or adolescence itself. The research of F. Aries is devoted to the emergence of the concept of childhood or, in other words, the problem of understanding childhood as a social phenomenon. But when analyzing the concept of F. Aries, it is necessary to remember the psychological laws of awareness. First of all, as JI said. S. Vygotsky, "in order to realize, one must have what must be realized." And further studying the process of awareness in detail, J. Piaget emphasized that there is an inevitable delay and a fundamental difference between the formation of a real phenomenon and its reflective reflection.

Childhood has its own laws and, of course, does not depend on the fact that artists begin to pay attention to children and depict them on their canvases. Even if we recognize the indisputable judgment of F. Aries that art is a reflected picture of morals, works of art in themselves cannot provide all the necessary data for analyzing the concept of childhood, and one can not agree with all the author's conclusions. The study of F. Aries begins with the Middle Ages, because only at that time did picturesque scenes depicting children appear. But care for children, the idea of education, of course, appeared long before the Middle Ages. Already in Aristotle there are thoughts dedicated to children. In addition, the work of F. Aries is limited to the study of the childhood of only a European child from the upper strata of society and describes the history of childhood without regard to the socio-economic level of development of society.

As D. B. Elkonin emphasized, childhood occurs when the child cannot be directly included in the system of social reproduction, since the child cannot yet master the tools of labor due to their complexity. As a result, the natural inclusion of children in productive labor is pushed back. According to D. B. Elkonin, this elongation in time does not occur by building a new period of development over the existing ones (as F. Aries believed), but by a kind of wedging of a new period of development, leading to an “upward shift in time” of the period of mastering the tools of production . D. B. Elkonin brilliantly revealed these features of childhood in the analysis of the emergence of role-playing games and a detailed examination of the psychological characteristics of primary school age.

78. The concept of the age norm. Sociocultural nature of age norms.

Age- one of the fundamental and complex categories of developmental psychology. Already its most general, formal definition has 2 meanings, both of which are widely used both in the historical and biological sciences and in the sciences of inanimate matter - these are absolute and conditional age.

Absolute(calendar, or chronological) age is expressed by the number of time units (minutes, days, years, millennia, etc.) separating the moment of the object's appearance until the moment of its measurement. This is a purely quantitative, abstract concept that denotes the duration of the existence of an object, its localization in time. Determining the chronological age of an object is called dating.

Conditional age (or age of development) is determined by establishing the location of the object in a certain evolutionary genetic series, in some process development, based on some qualitative and quantitative characteristics. Establishment of conditional age - element periodization which involves the choice of not only chronological units of measurement, but also the reference system itself and the principles of its division.

Chronological age – it is the age of an individual person, from the moment of conception (in fact, from the moment the egg is formed) until the end of life. The chronological age of each person is a personal fact of his life. The chronological ages of two different people are comparable in two measurement systems: on the one hand, according to absolute time scale(temporary shift) and, on the other hand, according to mental changes, that appear in them at a certain age (age matching).

biological age is determined by the state of metabolism and body functions in comparison with the statistically average level of development characteristic of the entire population of a given chronological age.

Psychological age is determined by correlating the level of mental (mental, emotional, etc.) development of the individual with the corresponding normative average symptom complex.

social age is measured by correlating a person's level of social development (for example, mastering a certain set of social roles) with what is statistically normal for his peers.

The concept of social age is based on those social changes that occur in the psyche. This, on the one hand, life events, that happen to each of us at a certain age (we go to school, make a professional choice, get married, start working, etc.), and, on the other hand, age changes, determining the worldview of a person, his attitude to life. If they lag behind the normative ones, they say that the social age is less than the chronological one, if they are ahead, then more.

All of these categories imply some kind of objective, external dimension. But there is also subjective, experienced age personality, having an internal reference system. We are talking about age self-awareness, depending on tension, event-filled life and the subjectively perceived degree of self-realization of the individual.

Here it is based on self-awareness person, i.e. to what chronological age he ascribes himself, to what point on the chronological axis he projects. Accordingly, his subjective age may be less than, greater than or equal to the chronological age.

The second frame of reference is social - age processes And social - age structure of society, described in terms such as "age stratification", "age division of labor", "age strata", "age groups", "generation", "cohort differences", etc.

The third frame of reference - age symbolism, those. ideas about age processes in culture, how they are perceived and symbolized by representatives of different socio-economic and ethnic communities and groups (“age rituals”, “age stereotypes”, etc.).

The norm of development, according to modern concepts, is not only a quantitative, but certainly a qualitative assessment of the features of the functioning of the organism, ensuring its adaptation to environmental conditions.

At each age stage, there are more or less certain criteria for assessing the maturity of the child's body, which allows us to talk about the existence of an age norm. But it is very difficult to define and operationalize, to present the concept of a norm in general and age in particular in a form accessible for measurement.

The main parameters of the characteristics of age. Among the parameters, two groups are distinguished: the foundations of development and the results of development.

TO foundations for development relate:

Social development situation;

Circle of relations;

Leading type of activity;

Sensitivity.

Among development results taken to highlight:

Neoplasms of personality;

Forms of communication;

Emotional-volitional sphere;

General and special abilities;

New type of activity.

The description of changes in personality development according to these parameters gives us a complete description of age.

Upon closer examination, it turns out that it is very difficult to define and operationalize the concept of a norm in general and age in particular, that is, to present it in an accessible form for measurement. The following approaches to the definition of the concept of "norm" are distinguished.

Statistical approach. It is based on measuring individual differences in certain indicators (for example, height, weight, IQ). The values of features measured on a certain scale are always in a certain range. The distribution of most of the properties inherent in people, or signs, obeys the normal law. Such a distribution can be represented graphically as a Gaussian curve, or a frequency curve, which is shaped like a bell and is sometimes called a bell curve.

A characteristic value is considered normal if it falls within the average or a specified measure of distribution, usually expressed as a standard deviation. Indicators that go beyond the established (according to statistical rules) boundaries are considered abnormal. Thus, statistical methods make it possible to assess the homogeneity of a sample and population in terms of the variability of a certain quantitative trait of an individual.

The advantages of the statistical approach are that the norm can be expressed as a specific quantitative indicator. In addition, as the maximum frequency of occurrence of a certain indicator, it corresponds to the generally accepted notion of normality. However, the statistical interpretation of the norm encounters a number of serious difficulties and diverges from the real facts. The disadvantages are as follows:

Rarely occurring values of the studied trait are considered as abnormal; in particular, with a statistical approach, giftedness should be considered as a deviation from the norm, that is, as a pathology;

The statistically determined norm is situational; it gives an idea of the sign "here and now" and, strictly speaking, does not allow transferring the results to another population, other conditions, and another time;

A statistically determined rate is applicable if one representative indicator is used; the presence of two or more indicators will lead to the fact that the distribution curves for each will give their own version of the limits of the norm, and their combination will narrow the range of the norm, taken simultaneously for two or more indicators;

The statistical definition of the norm does not provide a meaningful interpretation of the concept itself in relation to the trait under study;

All functions, processes and phenomena that cannot be expressed in a quantitative form cannot be evaluated in terms of the statistical norm.

Functional-system approach. In the theory of functional systems, a fundamentally different approach to the concept of a norm is substantiated. In this case, the norm is understood not as a set of standard criteria, but as a gap that determines the functional optimum of the activity of a living organism.

Medico-biological approach. This approach is based on empirical experience underlying the assessment of the functional state of the body, including the CNS. It is believed that the norm of the functioning of the body and the human psyche can be judged by generally accepted indicators of the structure of the body, functional measurements of various organs and systems of the body at rest and in interaction with the environment, according to the norms of mental reactions and behavior. Of course, the standards themselves, which have age, gender, ethnic and other characteristics, undergo constant changes under the influence of internal and external circumstances (social conditions, the development of science, etc.).

In other words, the concept of a norm is a dynamic category, functioning, however, within certain limits, which, in turn, reflect the presence of structural and functional prerequisites for the normal functioning of the body and psyche. As a result of many years of observations carried out in medicine and age-related physiology, quite definite and fairly clear ideas about age-related developmental norms have developed, which are largely based on statistical estimates of age-related changes, i.e., statistical norms.

It is generally accepted that the level of development of body functions typical for each stage of ontogenesis determines the average normative indicators, and standard deviations - their range, while the age dynamics of both corresponds to the main direction of development. Most individual variations in development are due to temporal shifts in the formation of physiological systems. Deviations from the average are due to individual differences in the level of maturity of these systems. Thus, the norm can be considered as a range of fluctuations, as a specific historically determined system of indicators of a given population, within which there is a variety of individual development options; the latter can be grouped into types and form typological norms.