Science and psychology dominate how we approach the development, care and education of children, as well as our overall understanding of childhood. In this essay I will discuss how science and psychology have influenced our view of childhood and explain the relationship between these understandings. Not only that, but I will explain the different approaches to childhood and the psychological approaches linked to them, supporting them with case studies as evidence. Many social scientists have had an influential role to play in how we understand childhood today, such as Bowlby, with his theory of aggression, Freud's Id, Ego and Superego theory and Skinner, the contemporary theory of conditioning, which I will talk about in this essay. plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Children have been treated very differently throughout history than they are treated today. Until the 17th century, children were considered no different from adults. Before 1800, problems were addressed by parents and teachers increasingly became the subject of scientific scrutiny. This had a huge influence on how children were treated in homes, schools, hospitals and nurseries. With his experiments “Darwin's work on the origin of species played a decisive role in establishing child psychology as a scientific discipline”. Darwin wrote details of his son William's development in the 1840s. The points that Darwin noticed in his son were physical movement, anger, fear, affection, ideas and reason. Because this was one of the first known experiments on a child's behavior, it helped shape our ideas today about contemporary childhood. Another psychological approach that influences our views on childhood is Freud's theory of the id, ego and superego. This approach allows us to understand the developmental ages and needs a child will have, allowing us to understand them more when we show the attributes of these stages. The id is the impulsive, unconscious part of our psyche that responds to basic urges to give immediate gratification regardless of the consequences. It is the first of the three phases to develop. This is the primordial impulse that gives us an animalistic trait. The ego is the mediator between the id and the superego as it allows us to make decisions influenced by our personality. This stage offers us reasonable ways to gratify our id-produced impulses, which usually develop by the age of three. The superego controls the impulses of the id, persuading the ego to turn to moralistic rather than realistic goals, which usually develop by the age of five. When an individual's crucial needs are not met at this young age, such as being raised by a parent, he may carry some attributes of the id, ego, or superego stage with him throughout his life, as he is not in capable of developing into the ES stage. next phase. This shows that a child's needs must be met for them to become a functioning adult, this allows us to better understand childhood through this psychological approach. The way science has influenced societies view on childhood is through brain development which has a related relationship with psychology. The brain is connected to the mind which is the subject of major research in psychology and allows us to understand why child development is the foundation of a sustainable society. It usually takes the brain five years to develop connections to the theoryof Freud since the superego is created in this period. Other psychological approaches included Bowlby's bobo doll experiment which was conducted once in 1961 and another time in 1963. This was conducted to see how children behaved. be affected if raised without maternal care and exposed to violence. In this experiment, children were forced to watch adults perform specific behaviors towards a doll. One was to show violent behavior towards the doll and the other was to ignore it and engage in other activities in the room. The children were then brought to the dolls after witnessing the adults' behavior to see how they would react. The results showed that children who witnessed the violence were significantly more likely to display violent behavior towards the doll, thus demonstrating that children can learn through observation. Even after the experiment ended, 40% of the children showed the same behavior after 8 months. After this was discovered, it was shown that the environment also has an impact on behavior during childhood. This affects the way we view childhood, as we now know the importance of how we behave in front of children. This is because they look up to the adults in their lives and are very easily influenced at an early age. Exhibiting a certain type of behavior will influence them into similar behaviors, which is supported by Bandura's observational learning theory. We also view children as having more knowledge than they were given credit for. Recent studies have shown that infants and toddlers know, observe, explore, imagine and learn more than we previously thought. An experiment was conducted by Fei Xu and Vashti Garcia at the University of British Columbia. In this experiment their goal was to demonstrate that a child can understand probability. The eight-month-old babies were presented with a box full of ping pong balls mixed with red and white balls inside, but with a larger amount of white balls than red ones. The children were more surprised, looking at the experimenter more attentively and for longer when four red and one white ball were taken out of the box, which was an unlikely result. Individual learning styles have been introduced to facilitate children's learning needs and strengths, rather than fitting into a single category or one-size-fits-all education system. This has been developed since the 1950s. The education system has also changed with new school systems emerging such as grammar schools. The riding model created in 1991 proposed two different dimensions involving constructs from other researchers. These different dimensions constituted the overall analytical style, meaning whether an individual processes information in whole or in parts. The other is called verbal imagery style, meaning the individual will represent information while thinking verbally or in mental images. He "found that for pupils who showed learning difficulties a discrepancy between their preferred styles and the learning task could be more influential than a discrepancy would have for competent students." After analyzing both style dimensions it was found that verbalizers from the full list were less willing to concentrate for long periods of time on unstimulating learning tasks, but were much happier working in groups. On the other hand, they found that analytical imagers were more likely to persist with the task and much preferred to work alone. A test was carried out to evaluate the work and the.