Chapter 10 Introduction

10Development

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Tooga/Getty Images

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  • Prenatality: A Womb with a View

    • Prenatal Development
    • Prenatal Environment

  • Infancy and Childhood: Becoming a Person

    • Perceptual and Motor Development
    • Cognitive Development
    • HOT SCIENCE A Statistician in the Crib
    • THE REAL WORLD Walk This Way
    • Social Development
    • Moral Development

  • Adolescence: Minding the Gap

    • The Protraction of Adolescence
    • Sexuality
    • Parents and Peers

  • Adulthood: Change We Can’t Believe In

    • Changing Abilities
    • Changing Goals
    • Changing Roles
    • OTHER VOICES You Are Going to Die

His mother called him Adi and showered him with affection, but his father was not so kind. As his sister later recalled, “Adi challenged my father to extreme harshness and got his sound thrashing every day.” Although his father wanted him to become a civil servant, Adi’s true love was art, and his mother quietly encouraged that gentler interest. Adi was just 18 years old when his mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and he was heartbroken when she died.

Adi painted in many styles, including the precise and well-structured watercolor shown here.
(painting) Interfoto/Alamy; (easel) Maksym Bondarchuk/Shutterstock

But Adi had little time for grieving. As he later wrote, “Poverty and hard reality compelled me to make a quick decision. I was faced with the problem of somehow making my own living.” Adi resolved to make that living as an artist. He applied to art school, but was flatly rejected. Motherless and penniless, Adi wandered the city streets for 5 long years, sleeping on park benches, living in homeless shelters, and eating in soup kitchens, while trying desperately to sell his sketches and watercolors.

Ten years later, Adi had achieved the fame he desired, and today collectors pay significant sums to acquire his paintings. In fact, just last year one of his paintings sold at auction for $40,000. But that isn’t because Adi was a great artist; it is because his full name was Adolf Hitler.

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WHY IS IT SO DIFFICULT TO IMAGINE THE GREATEST mass murderer of the 20th century as a gentle child who loved to draw, as a compassionate adolescent who cared for his ailing mother, or as a dedicated young adult who endured cold and hunger for the sake of art? After all, you didn’t begin as the person you are today, and odds are that you aren’t yet in finished form. From birth to infancy, from childhood to adolescence, from young adulthood to old age, human beings change over time. Their development includes both dramatic transformations and striking consistencies in the way they look, think, feel, and act. Developmental psychology is the study of continuity and change across the life span, and as you’ll see, most human lives have plenty of both.

developmental psychology

The study of continuity and change across the life span.

From infancy to childhood to adolescence to adulthood, people exhibit both continuity and change.
Courtesy of Daniel Gilbert
Sidney Harris/The New Yorker Collection/cartoonbank.com

We’ll start by examining the 9-month period between conception and birth and see how prenatal events set the stage for everything to come. Then we’ll examine childhood, during which children must learn how to think about the world and their relationship to it, to understand and bond with others, and to tell the difference between right and wrong. Next, we’ll examine a relatively new invention called adolescence, which is the stage at which children become both independent and sexual creatures. Finally, we’ll examine adulthood, the stage at which people typically leave their parents, find mates, have children, and watch Jeopardy.