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Psychology of development and developmental psychology. Lecture notes: briefly, the most important

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Table of contents

1. Developmental psychology as a branch of psychology
2. Age development of a person
3. Development: stages, theories, laws and patterns. Prenatal and perinatal development
4. Concept of character
5. The main directions of the mental development of the child
6. Formation of an internal mental action plan
7. Communication at preschool age as an indicator of successful personality development
8. Formation of the psyche in preschool age
9. Memory development in preschool children
10. Crisis 6-7 years
11. Activity approach to personality formation. Formation of self-esteem
12. Studying the development of memory processes
13. Emotionality of speech and the development of the structure of its understanding and generation
14. Development of the child's speech
15. Childhood problems
16. The influence of sign-symbolic means on the development of the human psyche in ontogenesis
17. Children's fears
18. The influence of family and upbringing on the formation of personality
19. The development of the psyche in ontogeny. The driving forces of the development of the child's psyche
20. Change of leading activity
21. Conditions for the development of personality and changes in psychophysiological functions
22. Reasons that adversely affect the development of the child
23. The main types of improper upbringing of the child. Mental differences in children as a consequence
24. The role of nutrition, environment and society in child development

LECTURE No. 1. Developmental psychology as a branch of psychology

Developmental psychology - a branch of psychology that studies the age dynamics of the development of the human psyche, the ontogeny of mental processes and the psychological qualities of a person. Developmental psychology can be called "developmental psychology", although this term will not be entirely accurate. In developmental psychology, development is studied only in connection with a certain chronological age. Developmental psychology studies not only the age stages of human ontogenesis, it also considers various processes of mental development in general. Therefore, it would be more correct to consider that developmental psychology is one of the sections of developmental psychology. Almost all researchers believe that development is a change over time. Developmental psychology answers the questions of what and how exactly changes; as subject developmental psychology studies the natural changes of a person over time and the related phenomena and features of human life.

Currently, there are many textbooks on child psychology in the world. The science of the mental development of the child - child psychology - originated as a branch of comparative psychology at the end of the XNUMXth century. The objective conditions for the formation of child psychology, which had developed by the end of the XNUMXth century, were 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 little man has become one of the main ones. The desire of the child to understand himself as an adult has prompted researchers to treat childhood more closely. They came to the conclusion that only through the study of the psychology of the child lies the way to understanding what the psychology of an adult is. The starting point for systematic research in child psychology is the book of the German Darwinian scientist Wilhelm Preyer "The soul of a child". In it, he 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 before 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 XNUMXth century. He, for example, considered the mental development of the child as a particular variant of the biological one. 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. As a rule, developmental psychology studies the patterns of mental development of a healthy person and is a branch of psychological knowledge. On this basis, allocate child, adolescent, youth psychology, adult psychology and gerontopsychology.

Ontogenesis (from the Greek on, ontos- "existing, birth, origin") - the process of development of an individual organism. In psychology ontogenesis - the formation of the basic structures of the individual's psyche during his childhood; the study of ontogeny is the main task of child psychology. From the standpoint of Russian psychology, the main content of ontogeny is subject activity и child communication (first of all joint activity - communication with an adult). In the course of internalization, the child “cultivates”, “appropriates” social, sign-symbolic structures and means of this activity and communication, on the basis of which his consciousness and personality are formed. Common to Russian psychologists is also the understanding of the formation of the psyche, consciousness, personality in ontogeny as social processes, carried out in conditions of active, purposeful development.

Thus, at the center of study and research is people - a creature that embodies the highest stage of development of life, the subject of socio-historical activity. Man is a system in which the physical and mental, genetically conditioned and formed in vivo, natural, social and spiritual form an indissoluble unity.

Man acts as an organism endowed with a psyche; an individual (which means that he belongs to the genus homosapiens); individuality (characterizing the difference of one individual from another); the subject (producing changes in the surrounding world, in other people and in himself); carrier of roles (sexual, professional, conventional, etc.); "I-image" (representation system, self-assessment, level of claims, etc.); personality (as a systemic social quality of an individual, his personalization, reflected subjectivity in other people and in himself as in another).

A person is the subject of study of a number of sciences: anthropology, sociology, ethnography, pedagogy, anatomy, physiology, etc. Almost all psychology is addressed to the problem of a person as an individual included in social ties, his development in the processes of education and upbringing, his formation in activity and communication . The objectively existing variety of manifestations of man in the evolution of nature, the history of society and in his own life created his images, which explicitly or covertly exist in culture at certain stages of its development.

In sociological, psychological and pedagogical representations, there are the following "images of manthat have a direct impact on research and practical work with people:

1) "feeling man" - a person as a sum of knowledge, skills and abilities; man as a "device for processing information";

2) "human consumer", i.e., a person in need, as a system of instincts and needs;

3) "programmed person", i.e. in the behavioral sciences a person appears as a system of reactions, in the social sciences - as a repertoire of social roles;

4) "active man" - this is a person who makes a choice;

5) man as an exponent of meanings and values.

Pedagogy proceeds from the image of a "sensing person", and the concept of a person is reduced to the sum of knowledge, his actions are regarded as a product of past experience, and the process of education is replaced by convictions, persuasion, i.e., purely verbal influences.

As a result of the prevalence of this approach in training and education, the process of "impoverishment of the soul when enriched with information" occurs.

The image of a person as a receptacle of needs, instincts and drives was established in a number of areas of psychology, primarily under the influence of psychoanalysis. Many of the founders of the directions (individual psychology - A. Adler, neopsychoanalysis - E. Fromm and others) proceeded in their concepts from the image of a "person in need", deriving psychological patterns from a study of the dynamics of implementation and satisfaction of various needs.

The image of a "programmed person" determines the ideas about him in sociobiology, which studies human development as the deployment of genetic programs in behaviorism, reflexology and neobehaviorism, sociological and socio-psychological role concepts of a person (behavior is considered as playing role programs and life scenarios learned during socialization).

If the interpretation of a person in psychology is based on the image of a "programmed person", then the impact in one way or another comes down to a successful selection of stimuli and reinforcements, to which living social automata must obediently respond.

The image of a "man-actor" is the basis for building a cultural-historical psychology, a systemic-activity approach to understanding a person, humanistic psychoanalysis and existential logotherapy. Here he is understood as the subject of a responsible choice generated by life in society, striving to achieve goals and upholding this or that social way of life by his actions.

Both specific actions in relation to him and theoretical schemes for analyzing his development depend on the images of a person in culture and science. The predominance of the images of a "sensing person", "a needy person" and a "programmed person" largely determined the real fact of the discrepancy between the individual, personality and individuality and the isolated formation of bioenergetic, sociogenetic and personogenetic orientations of human knowledge.

In their isolation, a metaphysical scheme of the determination of human development is manifested under the influence of two factors - environment и heredity. Within the framework of the historical-evolutionary approach, a fundamentally different scheme for determining development is being developed. In this scheme, the properties of a person as an individual are considered as "impersonal" prerequisites for development, which in the course of a life path can become a product of this development. The social environment is also a source, not a factor that directly determines human behavior. As a condition for the implementation of activities, the social environment carries those norms, values, roles, ceremonies, tools, systems of signs that the individual encounters. The basis and driving force of human development are joint activities and communication, through which movement is carried out in the world of people, introducing it to culture.

LECTURE No. 2. Age development of a person

Age-related psychology as a scientific discipline in Russia began to take shape in the middle of the twentieth century. The idea of ​​upbringing based on knowledge of the laws of spiritual and bodily development of a person, which gained popularity, brought physiology and psychology to the fore. At the initial stage, the main task was to prove the significance of psychology and pedagogy. It was necessary, on the basis of information about the spiritual and physical development of the child, to try to answer a number of fundamental questions. An attempt to solve them found the most vivid embodiment in the works N. I. Pirogov, K. D. Ushinsky, N. Kh. Wessel и P. D. Yurkevich, L. S. Vygotsky.

L. S. Vygotsky chose psychology of consciousness. He called her "top psychology" and contrasted it with three others: deep, superficial и 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.

Traditionally, it is customary to divide the beginning of the life cycle into the following periods: prenatal period, childhood, adolescence, adolescence.

prenatal period divided into 3 stages:

1) pre-embryonic stage - is two weeks;

2) germinal stage - up to two months of development. At this stage, the formation and development of various organs occurs;

3) fetal stage - lasts until the baby is born.

Detstvo also divided into several periods:

1) childhood (from 0 to 12-14 months);

2) early age (from 1 to 3 years);

3) preschool age (from 3 to 6-7 years);

4) primary school age (from 6-7 to 10-11 years).

Detstvo - 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.

Adolescence includes two stages: teenage, or pubertal development (lasts up to 15 years. A teenager begins to form a new worldview, a new idea of ​​\uXNUMXb\uXNUMXbthe world around him and about himself), and youthful, or juvenile (lasts up to 22-23 years).

Youth - the period in human development corresponding to the transition from adolescence to independent adulthood. The chronological boundaries of youth are defined in psychology in different ways, most often researchers distinguish early youth, i.e. senior school age (from 15 to 18 years old), and late youth (from 18 to 23 years). By the end of adolescence, the processes of physical maturation of a person are completed. The psychological content of this stage is associated with the development of self-awareness, the solution of problems of professional self-determination and entry into adulthood. In early youth, cognitive and professional interests, the need for work, the ability to make life plans, and social activity are formed. In adolescence, the dependence on adults characteristic of the previous stages of ontogenesis is finally overcome and the independence of the individual is affirmed. In relations with peers, along with the preservation of collective-group forms of communication, the importance of individual contacts and attachments is growing. Youth is a tense period in the formation of moral consciousness, the development of value orientations and ideals, a stable worldview, and civic qualities of a person. Responsible and complex tasks facing an individual in adolescence, under adverse social or macrosocial conditions, can lead to acute psychological conflicts and deep feelings, to a crisis course of youth, as well as to various deviations in the behavior of boys and girls from prescribed social standards.

Aristotle offered as age periodization criterion degree of development of the soul. He proposed a classification according to "weeks" (for 7 years).

Age periodization was also proposed by Jan Amos Comenius (age periods of 6 years):

1) from 6 to 12 years old - adolescence - the child attends a native language school;

2) from 12 to 18 years old - youth - teenagers study at the school of the Latin language;

3) from 18 to 24 years old - puberty - a young man can enter the academy.

Classification J.-J. Russo:

1) from birth to 2 years - the period of physical development;

2) from 2 to 12 years - there is a dream of reason;

3) from 12 to 15 years old - active mental development;

4) from 15 years and older - a period of storms and passions.

Periodization criteria adopted in psychology:

1) internal criterion.

Blonsky proposed as such a criterion sign of the appearance and change of teeth:

a) toothless childhood;

b) childhood milk teeth;

c) the appearance of permanent teeth;

d) wisdom teeth;

2) external criterion.

Complex criteria for age periodization:

a) the following criteria are accepted in Russian psychology:

- social situation of development;

- leading type of activity;

- personal neoplasms;

- the nature of the crisis;

b) periodization Z. Freud: at the basis of the classification he saw the development of sexuality.

He considered several age periods, believing that the developmental criterion is based on the sexual development of the child:

- oral. From birth to early childhood;

- anal childhood. Problems arise: wastefulness, hoarding;

- passive-sexual stage (5-6 years). Children fall in love for the first time;

- latent age stage. During this period, children lose interest in the sexual topic;

- active genital. The period of active sexuality (from 11-12 to 15-16 years).

c) in periodization E. Erickson 8 phases of development are distinguished:

- childhood, first year of life. The first phase is characterized by the child's trust or distrust of the world around him;

- early childhood, 2-3 years of a child's life. The second phase is characterized by autonomy or shame and doubt;

- preschool age, 4-5th years of a child's life. The third phase is characterized by initiative or guilt;

- school age, from 6 to 11-12 years old. The fourth phase is characterized by a sense of value and industriousness or low value;

- youth, from 13 to 20 years old. The fifth phase is characterized by personal individuality, identity or identity diffusion;

- youth, from 20 to 30 years. Characterized by closeness, intimacy and solidarity or isolation;

- maturity, from 30 to 40 years. Characterized by creativity, integrativity or stagnation;

- older adult plus old age. It is characterized by the integrity of the personality or duality, despair;

d) periodization is adopted in domestic psychology D. B. Elkonina. He classified the periods and stages of child development as follows:

1) early childhood stage consists of two stages. The first stage, infancy, opens with a neonatal crisis. It is during the neonatal crisis that the motivational-need sphere of the personality develops. The second stage is early age. The beginning of this stage is the crisis of the first year of life;

2) stage of childhood. The beginning of this stage is the crisis of 3 years, which opens the beginning of preschool age. The second stage begins with a crisis of 6-7 years. This crisis is the initial stage of primary school age;

3) adolescence stage is divided into two stages. The first is the adolescence stage. The beginning is a crisis of 11-12 years. The second - the stage of early youth, begins with a crisis of 15 years.

D. B. Elkonin believed that the crises of 3 and 11 years are relationship crises, after which new orientations in human relations are formed. Crises of the 1st year, 7 and 15 years are worldview criseschanging orientation in the world of things.

The problem of periodization of the development of the human psyche is an extremely interesting and extensive topic, research work is ongoing at the present time. Periodization is of great interest among modern researchers. V. I. Slobodchikovawhich was developed in the 80s. XNUMXth century

V. I. Slobodchikov studied what exactly changes in the process of development. He proposed a scheme - "age matrix", in which each stage is a relatively complete development cycle, built in the logic of the development process, a horizontal sequence of periods (formation and implementation) and stages (critical and stable):

1) stirring up. At this stage of development, a birth crisis occurs: the 7th month of embryonic development - 3 weeks after birth. Acceptance stage: newborn - 0,5-4th month of life. Neonatal crisis: 3,5-7th month. Development stage (infant): 6-12th month;

2) animation. At this stage of development, a crisis of infancy occurs at 11-18 months. Acceptance stage - early childhood: 1 year 3 months-3 years. Crisis of early childhood: 2,5-3,5 years. Development stage - preschool childhood: 3-6,5 years;

3) personalization. At this stage of development, a childhood crisis occurs: 5,5-7,5 years. Acceptance stage - adolescence: 7-11,5 years. Crisis of adolescence: 11-14 years. Development stage - youth: 13,5-18 years;

4) individualization. At this stage of development, a youth crisis occurs: 17-21 years. Acceptance stage - youth: 19-28 years. Crisis of youth: 27 years-33 years. Stage of development - adulthood: 32-42 years;

5) universalization. At this stage of development, a crisis of adulthood occurs: 39-45 years. Acceptance stage - maturity: 44 years - 66 years. Crisis of maturity: 55-65 years. Development stage - old age: 62 years.

In this periodization, the sequence of steps is a change in the mode of individual life. The beginning of a new stage is a new birth into a new form of life, a crisis of birth is a crisis of self-identity (“it’s impossible to live like this”) and the search for new forms of being at the stage of acceptance.

LECTURE № 3. Development: stages, theories, laws and regularities. Prenatal and perinatal development

Human life begins from the moment of fertilization. This is confirmed by numerous studies. From the moment of fertilization in the body of a woman, the embryo lives its own life, reacts to voices, to the mood of the mother, to external stimuli. There is a hypothesis that the fetus begins to react even before the central nervous system is formed, because the cells of a living organism can detect changes in the chemical composition of the mother's blood. And such changes inevitably appear in connection with any positive or negative emotions of a woman.

Almost immediately after fertilization, i.e., after 30 hours, the human embryo becomes two-celled. After another 10 hours, the embryo consists of 4 cells, after 3 days - of 12 cells. The first cells (blastomeres) are in close contact with each other, they are larger than ordinary somatic cells of the human body. At this time, the embryo is called "morula" (from Latin morum - "mulberry"). This name arose because the embryo looks like a berry.

The nervous system of the embryo is formed from the 3-4th week of intrauterine life, develops throughout the entire subsequent intrauterine period. Although the nervous system develops very early, the brain will continue to develop for many years after the birth of a child. But the central nervous system begins to function already in the mother's body. American scientist T. Verni states that a person's personality is formed before he is born. The child feels the thoughts, experiences, emotions of the mother, it is these impressions that will subsequently form his character, behavior, psyche. The 28-week-old fetus already has mimic reactions. The fetus expresses its relationship to the taste of the food the mother eats. Grimaces of displeasure arise at salty and bitter, and, conversely, sweet causes an expression of pleasure in the fetus. The fetus reacts with a special facial expression to the mother's crying, screaming, anger.

Numerous studies have shown that the activity of the nervous system is of great importance in the development of the fetus. If for some reason the brain is damaged in the fetus, the length and weight decrease, then the fetus may die during childbirth. The movements of the fetus in the mother's body are determined by the activity of the developing nervous system. Swallowing and grasping movements are expressed, limbs are mobile. The grasping effect first appears at the age of 11,5 weeks of intrauterine life.

Experts in the problems of early brain development, the environment and mental health have proven that the child feels the negative emotions of the mother, and they affect him in the strongest way. The main characteristics of the brain depend not only on heredity, but also on the quality of the contacts of the fetus with the environment. If the unborn child was not desirable for the mother, during pregnancy she was embittered or annoyed, then the fetus felt all this. The hormones produced in the woman's body had the most negative effect on the child.

The act of birth is accompanied by great stress for both the mother and the newborn. After the baby is born, the nervous system is deeply shaken by everything that has happened. This gives reason to talk about the psychological trauma of birth.

Understanding the fact that the child feels and is aware even before birth makes it possible for a pregnant woman to realize that she can influence the personality of the child, can direct his development in one direction or another with the help of her thoughts and feelings. This does not mean that any fleeting worries or anxieties can harm the child and qualitatively affect his character, in some cases it can even play a positive role in the development of the child. This means that the mother of the child has the opportunity to qualitatively improve his emotional development.

The discovery of the fact of intrauterine personality formation was facilitated by a number of discoveries, among which the discovery of the existence of a system of communication between a mother and a newborn child, called "affection".

Importantly, the findings provide a new insight into the role of a loving husband's presence next to a pregnant woman. For her, communication with him is a constant source of emotional support and a sense of security, which, in turn, is transmitted to the child.

Returning to the topic of the psychological trauma of birth from the point of view of these discoveries, it becomes obvious that it is very important for a child to be born in a warm, sincere environment that gives rise to feelings of safety and security.

However, all these discoveries do not mean that the child in the womb has a fully formed emotional and mental base. He cannot understand the intricacies of adult conversation, however, he understands this conversation in terms of emotions, picking up on the slightest changes, not limited to strong and pronounced ones, such as love or hate, but also recognizing emotions such as insecurity or duality of feelings.

The child in the womb is a very capable student. One of the main sources of information for him is his feelings. So, for example, if the mother of a child smokes, he experiences negative emotions (presumably this is due to the fact that he lacks oxygen during smoking). And even if the mother just thinks about smoking, the child will experience excitement (rapid heartbeat, increased activity) - the so-called conditioned reflex to a negative event.

Another source of information for the child is speech. It is no secret that each person has an individual rhythm of speech. And it has been proved that the source of the drawing of a person's speech is the speech of his mother, the sound of which he copied. Moreover, the learning process begins even in the womb, this is proved by the fact that the child moves to the rhythm of her speech. An infant at the age of 4-5 months has a well-developed hearing and can distinguish not only the voices of its parents, but also music. If you turn on calm music, then even a rather restless child will calm down, in the case of fast and loud music, there will be a sharp change in the behavior of the fetus in the direction of increasing its activity.

Doctor Dominique Purple, professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, who is head of the National Institutes of Health brain research section, the exact time for the formation of the personality of a child in the womb was indicated as the period between the 28th and 32nd weeks of pregnancy. Starting from this period, information enters the brain and is transmitted to individual parts of the body. A few weeks later, the baby's brain signals become more pronounced and can be picked up by devices that tell when the baby is sleeping and awake.

The birth of a child dramatically introduces new emotions, new impressions, often not always pleasant, into his worldview. And the way the child behaves in the first minutes after birth, in most cases, will show what his behavior will be like in later life. So, a child who was born and ended up in the hands of an obstetrician can turn around, or can remain in the position of the embryo, familiar to him in the womb. In the first case, the child will be active and active, and in the second case, he will psychologically withdraw and withdraw. To ease the crisis of the transition from the prenatal to the perinatal period of development, it is necessary to create conditions at birth and immediately after it close to those that the child had in the last nine months: put him immediately after birth on the mother’s stomach, then in a bath with warm water, etc. d.

Psychology of age development is a branch of knowledge that considers the dynamics of age-related changes. In the psychology of age development, 2 types of development are distinguished: preformed, unpreformed.

Preformed type of development - development in which the stages that the body will go through for some time are predetermined and fixed, for example, embryonic development.

unpreformed type - this is a type of development when the process is set not from the inside, but from the outside.

Development occurs due to the influence of the environment on the body.

Evolutionary change in the psyche - this is a long and rather slow development, as a result of which stable changes in the body occur, the vocabulary of a person is enriched.

Revolutionary changes - these are fast, deep transformations of the psyche and human behavior. Occur during age-related crises, accompany them.

Situational changes - these are quick, but not sufficiently stable changes in the psyche and behavior that require reinforcement. There are organized and unorganized.

Organized - involve the development of the provision of a teaching influence on a person, are carried out in the system and are purposeful.

unorganized situational changes are, as a rule, random in nature and do not imply systematic work on training and education.

In situational changes, psychotraumatic circumstances play a special role, leaving a significant imprint on personality change.

Child development - unpreformed type of development. This is a qualitatively unique process, which is determined by the form of development of society and the society directly surrounding the child in which the child is.

Driving forces of mental development These are the factors that determine the progressive development of the child. These factors are the causes and contain motivating energy sources of development.

Conditions for mental development - these are internal and external constantly operating factors that influence the development process, directing its course and shaping the dynamics and the final result.

Laws of mental development - these are general and particular patterns with which you can describe mental development and based on which you can control the course of mental development.

L. S. Vygotsky noted that different aspects of the mental activity of the child develop unevenly. For example, speech development occurs rapidly in early childhood, and logical thinking develops in adolescence.

The law of the metamorphosis of child development is that development is not limited to quantitative changes in the psyche, it is a chain of qualitative changes.

Law of cyclicity is that age as a stage of development is a certain cycle, each cycle has its own content and its own pace.

On the problem of development, the opinions of most foreign and domestic psychologists differ. Many foreign psychologists, for example, J. Piaget, believe that learning is development-oriented, that is, when learning, it is necessary to proceed from the fact that the child masters information in accordance with the level of development of cognitive processes in a given period of time. Accordingly, it is necessary to give the child what he can "take".

In Russian psychology, the view on the problem of the relationship between training and development is fundamentally different. L. S. Vygotsky spoke of the leading role of learning in the development process, i.e., he noted that learning should not trail behind development. It should be somewhat ahead of him.

Vygotsky characterized learning as a social moment of development, which has a universal character.

He also put forward a theory (idea) about the existence of a level of actual development and a zone of proximal development.

L. S. Vygotsky understood the concept of development as the process of the formation of a person or personality and the emergence at each stage of development of new qualities specific to a person and prepared by the course of previous development. It should be noted that these qualities exist in finished form at the previous stages of development, there are prerequisites for them.

The founder of the study of the evolutionary development of all living things and specifically man is Charles Darwin. Based on his teachings, a law was developed that ontogeny is a brief repetition of phylogenesis. J. Hall transferred this law to a person, to his psyche. Man during his life repeats all stages of human development. As part of this work F. Getcheson, W. Stern and other scientists.

F. Getcheson used the method of obtaining food as the main criterion. He believed that a child throughout his life goes through all stages of human development: gathering, farming, domestication of animals, housing construction and the trade and economic stage.

W. Stern focused on the mastery of a person a certain cultural level. He noted that a person at the initial stage of his development resembles mammals, at the next stage - a monkey, then he masters cultural skills and by the beginning of training becomes a cultured person. This theory was criticized for the fact that it is inhumane to force a person to repeat all stages of the development of human society. She was also criticized for being speculative, that is, based on external resemblance. However, the theory recapitulation - this is the first attempt to create an evolutionary theory.

Representatives normative approach were N. Geizell и U. Termel.

Based on a long-term study of the features of social adaptation of children, their speech development and a number of other indicators using special equipment, cinema, video, as well as an impenetrable Gazell mirror, psychological portraits of individual age groups were compiled and normative indicators of mental development were determined.

Termel researched child prodigies. Supporters normative approach laid the foundation for the development of child psychology as a normative discipline. They traced the dynamics of the development of a child's mental functions from early childhood to adolescence, to the onset of adulthood.

Of great interest is theory of three stages of child development by K. Buhler. In fact, Bueller's theory is a kind of hierarchy of individual components of child development. On the first step is instinct, at the second stage - training (skills), the third stage - intelligence. Within the framework of this theory, a combination of internal biological factors (inclinations) and external conditions is found.

K. Buhler He believed that the defining factors for human development are:

1) complication of interaction with the environment;

2) development of affective processes;

3) brain maturation.

Under development of affective processes Buhler understood the emergence and experience of pleasure by a person.

At the first stage, pleasure comes from the completed activity. For example, a baby gets pleasure after feeding.

At the second stage (training), the child enjoys the process of activity. For example, a child enjoys a role-playing game.

At the third stage (intelligence), a person enjoys the anticipation of activity. The main trend: in the process of development, there is a transition of pleasure from the end to the beginning of the action.

Buhler's theory was criticized for the groundlessness of the described steps and the criterion for their selection. In fact, studying development within the framework of zoopsychology, Buhler transferred it and characterized child development on the same principle.

Gradually, in the process of development, the socialization of the individual occurs. This process has been experimentally studied by many psychologists.

Socialization - the process and result of the assimilation and active reproduction of social experience by an individual, carried out in communication and activity. Socialization can occur both under conditions of spontaneous impact on the personality of various circumstances of life, sometimes having the nature of multidirectional factors, and in the conditions of education and upbringing of a purposeful, pedagogically organized, systematic process and result of a person’s development, carried out in the interests of him and (or) society, to to which it belongs. Education is the leading and defining beginning of socialization.

Conceptsocialization" was introduced into social psychology in the 40s and 50s. XNUMXth century in works A. Bandura, J. Kolman and others. In different scientific schools, this concept has received a different interpretation: in neobehaviorism, it is interpreted as a social doctrine; in the school of symbolic interactionism - as a result of social interaction; in humanistic psychology - as self-actualization.

The phenomenon of socialization is multidimensional, and each of these areas focuses on one of the sides of the phenomenon under study. In Russian psychology, the problem of socialization was developed within the framework of the dispositional concept of regulation of social behavior, which presents a hierarchy of dispositions synthesizing the system of regulation of social behavior depending on the degree of inclusion in society.

The formation of value orientations is also a complex process that depends on many factors, both internal and external. Value Orientations - reflection in the mind of a person of the values ​​recognized by him as vital strategic goals and general worldview guidelines. The concept of value orientations was introduced in post-war social psychology as an analogue of the philosophical concept of values, but there is still no clear conceptual distinction between these concepts. Although landmarks were considered as individual forms of representation of supra-individual values, the concepts of values ​​and value orientations differed either in the "general-individual" parameter or in the "actually acting - reflexively conscious" parameter, depending on whether the existence of individual psychological forms of existence was recognized. values ​​other than their presence in consciousness. Now more accepted is ascending to K. Klackhonu definition of values ​​as an aspect of motivation, and value orientations as subjective concepts of values ​​or varieties attitudes (social attitudes).

The basis of mental development in early childhood is formed in the child by new types of actions of perception and mental actions. This period is full of impressions. The child actively learns the world, and the most vivid images are deposited in his memory. Therefore, the fantasy is very developed and rich. Children love to listen to fairy tales, they develop their imagination. A little later, they themselves try to compose them. They reproduce the once seen image themselves, without realizing it, while thinking that they are composing themselves. Children's compositions are entirely based on memory, but at the same time the child combines images, introduces new ones.

At this time, the child begins to form a character, that is, some character traits. In psychology, character is defined as follows.

LECTURE No. 4. The concept of character

Character (from the Greek charakter - "seal, chasing, notch") - a personality substructure formed by an individually peculiar complex of stable personality traits (features, dispositions) that determine the typical forms and methods inherent in the personality to achieve goals (instrumental manifestations of character) and self-expression in communication with other people (expressive manifestations of character).

Etymologically, the word "character" is used in three meanings:

1) in relation to any objects and phenomena (the nature of the process, the nature of the landscape) as denoting their "figurative originality", something "characteristic" of them;

2) in relation to animals and humans as denoting their spiritual (mental) originality;

3) applied only to a person as characterizing him not only from the psychological side, but also from the moral and ethical side (good or bad, strong or weak character, "with character" or characterless).

The science of character in the psychological sense of the word - characterology - has as long a history as psychology itself. For millennia, characterology as a field of science, art and worldly wisdom has sought to solve two main tasks: the typology of characters (temperaments) and the definition of character (or temperament) by various external signs (or "psychognostics") (W. Stern).

Differences in human characters, as the most essential properties and characteristics of a person that determine his appearance and behavior (individual differences in the broad sense), have attracted the attention of philosophers and doctors since ancient times.

The oldest known typology of characters, based on 12 astrological signs, which denote the characteristics of life and related properties of the behavior of different animals, is attributed to the ancient Babylonian sage Akkader (XXX century BC). Astrological typology was further developed in the work K. Ptolemy "Tetrabiblos", which stated that the position of the stars at the time of a person's birth has a decisive influence on his individual characteristics and determines his fate throughout his life, while all the diversity of characters and destinies was described by the same 12 main types, which practically did not change before present tense.

The foundations of the concept of character as a type of social behavior were laid by Plato, who, based on his theory of the structure of the soul, described 5 main types of characters: normal, timo-cratic, oligarchic, democratic, tyrannical.

The typological tradition of Plato was continued and developed by a student of Aristotle Theophrastus (IV-III centuries BC) in the famous "Characters" - a treatise, considered the first real study of characters. Starting from one dominant trait, Theophrastus described the type of character: a mocker, an empty talker, a saint, a chatterer, a dumbass, a rude person, a grumbler, a coward, etc. Theophrastus was extended into modern times in the XNUMXth century. his translator and popularizer labruyère in their own "Characters".

The ideas of medical natural science about the types of characters are closely intertwined with the doctrine of temperament and constitution as a somatic type of structure of the human body. A specific type of temperament, as well as character, could be explained, for example, by the predominance of a certain "humor" (Hippocrates, Galen), blood composition (Aristotle), the influence of cosmogonic factors (Paracelsus), type of addition (Kretschmer), features of the will (Klages), etc. Typologies of characters, which are based on the doctrine of temperaments laid down in antiquity, which combined in its foundations the ideas morphological (constitution) and physiological (“juices”, blood, etc.) of the conditioning of the mental originality of a person, more than 2000 years before the present, have not undergone anything essentially new.

In modern times, the actual psychological understanding of character as the mental (internal) originality of a person was established. The idea was affirmed that individuals differ from each other not by external socially significant signs of behavior, but, first of all, by invisible properties that are their cause and form the character of a person.

Since the XNUMXth century characterology acquires the features of a systematic scientific discipline designed to study the essential differences of a person, reducing them to some simple form (type) or focusing on the uniqueness of their combination in a particular individual. By the beginning of the twentieth century. the palette of explanations of characterological differences and understanding of the essence of character has expanded enormously. The understanding of character not as a type, but as the uniqueness of a particular individual was formulated in German characterology. The understanding of character as a type in French characterology was built mainly on a morphophysiological basis. Since the XNUMXth century the problem of objectively measurable formal human differences (both simple - intellect, memory, attention, etc., and more complex - creative and organizational abilities, professional suitability, etc.) is separated from a more speculative characterology. Developed in the works of the British Ch. Darwin, G. Mendel, Galton, American J. M. Kettela, Germans G. Ebbinghaus, W. Wundt etc., French A. Binet, A. Simona methods, having received a theoretical justification in the works V. Stern (1911), formed a separate discipline - differential psychology. The immediate forerunner of differential psychology was psychognostics, the main task of which was, firstly, to establish relations between externally perceived states, movements and appearance of a person and his individual mental originality, and secondly, to recognize on the basis of these connections the characters of individual individuals. The empirical direction of psychognostics is represented by the constitutional approach, physiognomy, phrenology and graphology, as well as philosophical and literary characterology.

physiognomy practiced already Pythagoras (VI century BC). Anaxagoras selected his students according to the shape of his hand. The founder of European physiognomy is considered Aristotle. A more specific method of determining character was by referring to constitutional and physiological factors. Already Hippocrates when explaining temperaments, he partly relied on the structural features of the body. The constitutional-characterological approach received its final expression in the works E. Kretschmer (1921) and W. G. Sheldon(1927). In the XNUMXth century appears "physiognomy of functions", according to which the character is manifested in unconscious expedient and functionally conditioned movements. This position is widely represented in German characterology through the analysis of facial expressions (F. Lersh, A. Wellek), speech (I. B. Riffert), general expression (L. Klages), gait, etc. Currently, this area is developing in line with socio-psychological studies of attraction, non-verbal communication, attribution theory, etc.

A common shortcoming of all psychognostic methods is the arbitrary selection of one of the many groups of external signs as the only means of knowing character.

With development in the 10-30s. XNUMXth century psychology of personality faced the problem of the relationship between the concepts of personality and character. AT post-war American academic psychology the concept of character has practically fallen into disuse, remaining only in clinically oriented approaches as denoting belonging to one or another type. At the same time in European psychology (Germany, France), the concept of character is preserved as one of the important general psychological concepts, and in the German tradition it includes elements of spirituality in its definition, and in the French it is interpreted as a set of characteristic forms of affective response inherent in the personality.

В Russian psychology the foundations of the doctrine of character were laid A. F. Lazursky, who interpreted character as a set of spiritual inclinations inherent in a person. Later, in the 50s. XNUMXth century the character was identified with the individual-peculiar in the personality, as opposed to the socially typical.

A new surge of interest in the problem of character arose in the 80s. XIX century, when a number of authors began to consider it as a substructure of personality, based on the ideas L. S. Vygotsky, who opposed the traditional idea of ​​character as an invariable type, the idea of ​​it as a dynamically developing functionally expedient structure participating in the processes of adaptation of the individual to the world and formed in the course of this adaptation.

According to modern domestic views, character acts as a form of personality manifestation in the narrow sense of the word (content or semantic sphere of personality), as a person’s readiness to carry out certain fixed forms or ways of behavior in more or less typical situations under certain conditions. It acts as a protective shell that mediates both the impact of the external environment on the personality (mitigating or exacerbating them) and the impact of the personality on the environment, giving the subject's actions certain instrumental or expressive properties (assertiveness, gentleness, impulsiveness, openness, caution, etc.). ).

Concepts of character in clinical psychology, in particular in the context of the problem of psychopathy, develop mainly in the traditions of typologically oriented characterology (P. B. Gannushkin, K. Leonhard, A. E. Lichko).

Social psychology also uses the concepts social и national character.

Concept social characterintroduced E. Fromm, means a set of stable personality traits inherent in members of a certain social group and formed as a result of the main experience and way of life common to this group. concept national character means a set of features that characterize representatives of one nation or ethno-cultural community in contrast to another. The problems of the national character were devoted in the 50-80s. XNUMXth century a large number of experimental studies in which it was not possible to find significant and stable characterological differences between nations; thus the problem of the national character passed into the plane of socio-psychological stereotypes.

Features of behavior lie in the fact that a person acts, obeying only impulses, absolutely without thinking about actions. This distinguishes children from adults, who, in turn, act consciously. The child can be easily distracted. If a couple of minutes ago he cried bitterly from pain, then the next minute he can laugh with joy, picking up his favorite toy. It is at this age that a child begins to form love for loved ones - for his mother, father.

In preschool age, communication between boys and girls plays a special role. The child begins to feel that he belongs to the female or male sex. Boys try to imitate men, and girls try to imitate women. In families, they are instilled with generally accepted norms of behavior. They depend specifically on the national culture of education. In general, girls are expected to be kind, sincere, while boys are allowed to show more aggression. This is further enhanced by involvement in activities. Children begin to understand that boys should do "man's" work, and girls - "women's".

The psychological acquisition of gender begins precisely at preschool age, but develops throughout life.

First, the child begins to appropriate, copy the behavior of adult men and women, their interests. It has been experimentally proven that starting from the age of four, children are aware of their belonging to the female or male sex. And this awareness is very important for the further formation of personality, and therefore a role model is necessary: ​​for girls, this is mom, for boys, dad, with whom children could identify themselves.

The thinking of children during this period is at the level of concrete operations, that is, it is visual-figurative.

LECTURE No. 5. The main directions of the mental development of the child

Child development - this is a process that is implemented in any situation of the child's interaction with the outside world, with parents, teachers, adults, other children. As states S. V. Malanov in his book "The Development of Skills and Abilities in Preschool Children. Theoretical and Methodological Materials", if joint activities and ways of jointly performing various actions play a central role in learning processes, then in the processes of personal development, samples, means and methods of communication and organization of interpersonal interactions. In domestic psychology, various authors single out the following series of mental neoplasms as the most important, which are formed at preschool age (this is indicated by L. F. Obukhova in the study "Child Psychology: Theories, Facts, Problems"):

1) the emergence of an integral children's worldview;

2) the emergence of primary ethical instances;

3) the emergence of subordination of motives;

4) the emergence of arbitrary behavior;

5) the appearance of an internal plan of mental actions;

6) the emergence of personal consciousness.

As the main lines of development of the child, which determine his inclusion in a new type of activity - educational activity, it is customary to indicate:

1) the formation of arbitrary behavior;

2) mastering the means and standards of cognitive activity;

3) the transition from egocentrism to decentration (the ability to see the world from the point of view of another person, to take into account the interests of other people);

4) motivational development of cognitive activity.

It is believed that these lines of development of the child determine his readiness for schooling.

Researchers identify a number of areas of educational activity and skills that are an indicator of development in children of preschool and primary school age:

1) the development of skills to engage in worthy forms of communication and interaction with other people, as well as the ability to take into account the interests of other people.

2) development of speech skills and abilities:

a) phonemic and grammatical skills:

- the ability to differentiate the sound composition of speech;

- the ability to coordinate words in sentences;

- set the meaning of words;

b) regulatory functions of speech:

- performing actions according to verbal instructions;

- organizing the actions of another person with the help of speech;

- performance of actions based on independent speech planning;

- the ability to obey the rules and follow this;

at) communicative functions of speech:

- verbal description of any objects;

- the ability to convey the content of any impression, event, fairy tale;

- joint planning of actions in speech communication;

- understanding the meaning of messages;

d) communicative-personal and reflexive functions of speech:

- the ability to talk about the behavior of another and explain it;

- the ability to talk about the experiences of another and explain them;

- the ability to talk about their behavior, experiences and explain their causes;

3) formation and development of skills to perform sign-symbolic actions and skills to perform actions in the internal mental space:

a) the ability to designate and replace phenomena, processes and events with various signs;

b) the ability to breed the designated content and means of designation;

c) the ability to "fill" conditional sign schemes and models with content;

d) the ability to perform simple actions of schematization and modeling;

e) the ability to objectify ideas;

f) the ability to use speech as a means of transforming the external form of orientation into a mental action;

4) development of simple logical and mathematical skills and abilities - differentiation of qualitative and quantitative characteristics of objects:

a) the ability to compare many objects;

b) the ability to identify and classify the properties and characteristics of objects on various grounds;

c) the use of measurement standards in order to compare objects and their quantity;

d) the ability to use simple mathematical signs;

e) the ability to perform sequences of mathematical actions according to verbal instructions.

5) Development of motor skills and abilities:

a) the ability to perform actions that require orientation of the body in space;

b) the ability to orient locomotor actions in external space;

c) the ability to perform precise, "targeted" actions in a spatial field with objects;

d) the ability to change, maintain and voluntarily regulate muscle tone;

e) development of "fine motor skills" of manipulative actions;

f) the ability to be aware of the actions performed (tell about the action being performed);

g) the ability to perform sequences of actions in accordance with the verbal instruction and the planned plan;

6) development of artistic and visual skills and abilities. Skills related to the technique of using tools of artistic and visual activity:

a) the ability to use a pencil;

b) the ability to use a brush and paints;

7) skills related to the imaging technique:

a) the ability to navigate in the space of a sheet of paper;

b) the ability to convey the image in color;

c) the ability to maintain proportions between the depicted objects and use "depth".

8) the ability to talk about the idea of ​​​​the future image and transfer it to the external plan of the drawing:

a) the ability to tell about the plot of the presented image;

b) the ability to talk about your plot depicted and list the elements of the plot;

c) the ability to reflect the plot and its elements in the drawing in accordance with the plan;

9) development of musical and expressive skills and abilities:

a) the ability to navigate the rhythmic characteristics of music;

b) the ability to navigate in pitch relationships;

c) the ability to tell about the objective features of a musical work;

d) the ability to talk about the experiences and images that a piece of music evokes;

e) the ability to express one's emotional and value experiences, attitudes and ideas through musical works;

f) the ability to independently reproduce and intotone melodies, songs;

g) the ability to move in accordance with the nature of the music.

LECTURE No. 6. Formation of an internal plan of mental actions

Mastering the ability to use language in various activities and communication, and later other sign-symbolic means, ensures the formation and development of the child's internal plan of mental actions. Often this mental formation in psychology is called consciousness. In the mental plane, a person can perform actions on ideas and concepts in the absence of real objects or phenomena. According to S. V. Malanova, while the internal plan of mental actions underlies the totality of all the skills and abilities of a person that are associated with abstract forms of thinking, with arbitrary forms of regulation and planning of one's behavior and activities, with the possibility of acquiring various knowledge based on verbal communication, etc. Skill to perform simple actions in the internal, mental plan is considered one of the necessary conditions for the readiness of the child for educational activities.

The content of mental images, ideas, concepts and their mental transformations are generated in the course of the implementation of various types of external objective practical actions, as well as perceptual actions as they move into the internal plane of thinking (consciousness). Both subject content and methods of action with it can be transformed into a mental form. In numerous psychological studies on the formation of visual, auditory, tactile images and representations, it has been convincingly shown that external practical objective motor-executive actions based on perceptual actions that are implemented by the senses are, as it were, likened to the structural features of perceived objects and phenomena. Further, the sequence of motor and perceptual actions and operations unfolded in time is folded into a simultaneously monitored structure - an image. Following this, such a structure, already as a representation, begins to function as an indicative basis for performing a certain range of actions.

As S. V. Malanov points out, the formed images become the source material for a higher level of psychological orientation in the internal plan of representations. An abbreviated fixed sequence of perceptual cognitive-oriented actions and operations “to oneself” arbitrarily reproduced by a person becomes a method of internal mental orientation and is subjectively perceived as a representation.

The formation of sign-symbolic functions and their inclusion in mental orientation leads to the formation and development of an internal plan of action. It is believed that this happens as a person masters speech. Speech, and later other sign-symbolic means, begin to designate integral, rather discrete figurative structures and their signs, as well as ways of their transformations and ways of establishing connections and relationships. Sign-symbolic means allow:

1) to abstract individual elements from perceptual experience (images and representations) and arbitrarily establish connections and relationships between them for various reasons; this leads to the formation of concepts of a higher level of generalization;

2) to carry out subsequent psychological orientation, organized by sign-symbolic means.

In psychology, there are effective methods of teaching, which are based on the arbitrary and controlled use of sign-symbolic means, and which allow you to intelligently and purposefully form and develop in a child the ability to perform actions in the internal mental plane. Such methods of teaching various actions were developed under the guidance of P. Ya. Galperina and received the name of the systematic phased formation of mental actions. The basic laws of this method are used with great success to understand and develop knowledge in the process of teaching children various skills. The basis of the method is the organization of a consistent mental orientation. Such orientation first proceeds in an external perceptual-motor form using either real objects, the knowledge of which is acquired by students, or based on sign-symbolic means replacing them. At the same time, the central role is given to speech pronunciation, in which the sequence of perceptual-motor actions performed and the connections and relationships established on their basis are recorded in the most expanded form. When such a method of external extended orientation begins to be performed without difficulty and is sufficiently reliably fixed in speech form, it is gradually replaced by orientation in terms of representations, removing external objects and sign-symbolic supports, while maintaining external speech pronunciation.

The mental orientation organized by speech, i.e., the system of speech actions, which makes it possible to establish properties, connections, relationships, is then gradually reduced, passes under the control of speech "to oneself", and then ceases to require reduced speech control for its implementation. A mental action is formed, which acquires an abbreviated, schematized (simultaneous) form and includes in its composition the methods and results of performing perceptual-motor and speech orientation. Automation of the performance of such a mental action leads to the formation of a mental operation, a mental skill, a mental scheme, which become methods of preliminary orientation in the performance of certain actions, as well as an intellectual means of performing various other mental actions.

Such a psychological mechanism for the formation of mental actions is called interiorization. The process of internalization can proceed both spontaneously, unorganized, and relatively purposefully regulated by the subjects of educational activity. In connection with such a general psychological regularity in the formation of mental actions, already in childhood, they usually try to teach children to use speech as a means of transforming an external form of orientation into a mental action. To do this, play and learning interactions with children include joint with adults, as well as independent stories of the child:

1) about the various actions performed following their implementation;

2) about the actions and sequences of their implementation before the implementation of such actions;

3) strive to indicate the main, essential guidelines that are important for the correct performance of certain actions (Based on the materials of S. V. Malanov).

LECTURE No. 7. Communication at preschool age as an indicator of successful personality development

Communication - this is a specific form of interaction of an individual with other individuals, as members of society.

The communication process consists of several components:

1) the need for communication - an individual needs to influence the interlocutor, learn or communicate some information, for this he needs to start the process of communication;

2) orientation in the purposes and situations of communication;

3) orientation in the personality of the interlocutor - for communication it is necessary to understand some qualities of the interlocutor, at least on an intuitive level;

4) planning the content of the message - when communicating, the interlocutors often consciously (or unconsciously) think through their further statements;

5) the choice of means - like the planning of content can be conscious and unconscious - is a reflection on specific semantic and stylistic structures for constructing a message;

6) response analysis - perception and evaluation of the interlocutor's reaction to the message expressed. Analysis of the effectiveness of the chosen direction and style of communication;

7) adjustment of the direction, style, methods of communication - is a consequence of the analysis of the response.

When communicating, the main carrier of information is facial expressions and gestures - 60%, therefore, the child's speech, which does not contain complex semantic structures, but is filled with mimic content, is perceived by adults and, in most cases, is adequately recognized.

The early preschool age of a child is characterized by the acquisition of speech as a means of developing self-awareness and the personality of the child as a whole. Through verbal communication, the child receives the information necessary for his development as a person. Speech itself contains the means of reward or punishment, self-control and discipline. It also conveys to the child the norms and rules adopted in the society around him. In the process of mastering speech in a child, there is a qualitative breakthrough in the possibility of self-control and self-realization, confirmed by the enhanced development of personal indicators. Therefore, it is not surprising that at an early age a child experiences qualitative changes in the psychology of thinking.

Communication consists of two components: the so-called "speaking" и understanding of. Understanding allows you to learn the norms and requirements for the child from adults or peers. It allows you to adjust your behavior depending on the learned information. And the more developed the child, that is, the more complex structures he is able to understand, the more subtly he will be able to respond to the influences exerted through communication. "speaking" allows the child to make adjustments to the behavior of others, clarify the requirements for him, and form a dialogue in a form that corresponds to his personal development.

The need for communication is based on the desire of the child to know himself and other people. Successful communication with adults and children affects his self-esteem. At the age of 3-5 years, the child develops an extra-situational-cognitive form of communication with others, which is based on "theoretical" cooperation between the child and adults. Such cooperation is replacing cooperation "practical".

"Theoretical" collaboration - this is a joint discussion with adults of events, phenomena, relationships of the surrounding world. The child actively manifests cognitive activity, there is a desire to learn more new things. At the age of 3-5 years, the child has a need for the respect of an adult.

During this period, children have a lot of questions about objects and their various relationships. A feature of communication in preschool age is out-of-situation. The child is actively interested in objects and phenomena, even if they are not connected with him at the moment. During communication, children learn their own qualities and the qualities of other people. According to research, preschool children understand questions about a person's personality traits and can spot their shortcomings. Most often, the self-esteem of preschool children is not stable, but at the moment this is a positive factor, because a critical attitude towards oneself speaks of the successful development of the child's self-consciousness.

Since the child begins to need respect from adults, there may be a special resentment, expressed in the cessation of a particular activity after comments from adults. And, on the contrary, the praise of an adult causes a special delight in a child.

At preschool age, communication between children and adults is especially often of a cognitive nature. An adult teaches a child something, gives him new information. In this regard, in the view of the child, the adult looks like a source of special information.

After 3 years, the child has a need to communicate with peers, which is selective. R. A. Smirnova indicates that children aged 3-7 years prefer to communicate with peers who treat them kindly. Researchers identify several complexes of children's manifestations towards peers, which makes it possible to classify them as types or variants of communication with peers.

The first complex. The child seeks to carry out joint activities with peers. He actively helps his peer, gives him advice, shares his suggestions, etc. This complex is based on three manifestations:

1) the child learns something from a peer. In this case, the child acts as the youngest in communication;

2) the child himself offers a scenario of activity to a peer, acts as an organizer, but at the same time accepts the proposals of a peer. In this case, children are equal partners;

3) the child acts as an elder, teaches a partner something, directs his activity. The first complex shows how much the child strives for joint activities and cooperation with others. The child talks about his actions: "We did", "We built", "We succeeded", etc.

Second complex. It manifests itself in the fact that the child begins to separate himself from his peers. The child strives in every possible way to demonstrate his true or imaginary talents. The child declares: “I did it”, “I did it”, etc. The child is critical of his peers, evaluating their abilities and skills: “Can you do it?”. Researchers define child behavior as a phenomenon of competitive imitation. The child does the same as others, but declares that the results of his activity are the best. In this case, the child seeks to seize the initiative from peers, does not want to agree to the proposals of others. Orders given by peers are ignored. The child seeks to command himself, does not want his actions and words to be discussed, but he actively criticizes his peers.

If peers do not agree with the child, he stops communicating with them, shows resentment. This complex shows the need for preschool children to gain the respect of their peers. The behavior of children manifests a desire to highlight their own personality, awareness and high appreciation of their skills, constant comparison of themselves with their peers, criticism of others. Researchers attribute this behavior to a child's need for recognition and vanity.

Third complex. It is based on the fact that peers are constantly in the field of attention. The child seeks to share his impressions, emotions, etc. with his peers. He seeks to predict the partner's actions. When a child tells something, he watches his partner and his reaction, wants to see what impression his story makes. The third complex reflects the need for empathy from peers.

Fourth complex. It is based on the fact that the child's behavior moves from serious to fantasizing. The child composes fables, develops jokes and fantasies of peers. The approval of the interlocutor causes the child to have an even greater surge of imagination. This reflects the child's desire for co-creation with peers.

It is at preschool age that the child's sensory experience is enriched, he masters specific human forms of perception and thinking. Speech, imagination, memory are actively developing.

LECTURE No. 8. Formation of the psyche in preschool age

The formation of the psyche in preschool age is a very complex and diverse process. Therefore, it would be wrong to think that only a change in the general structure of activity, which occurs as a result of emerging connections, motives of a new higher type, exhausts the content of this process. According to A. N. Leontieva, this change characterizes it only from one side and, moreover, only in the most general form.

Nevertheless, the identification of this change in the structure of the child's activity is decisive. It allows us to understand and establish the relationship between those specific psychological changes that are observed in preschool age, and to approach these changes as a single process of psychological development of the child's personality. And this is the only way to approach the question, because the real subject of development, of course, is the child, and not his individual mental processes in themselves. The development of the ability to control one's behavior is one of the essential moments that form the psychological readiness of the child to study at school. Education at school requires from the child that he not only possess a certain range of ideas and knowledge and have a certain level of development of physical strength, but also makes certain demands on the development of his psyche, on the characteristics of his memory, on perception and on many other processes. For example, from the very first days of schooling, a child must monitor his external behavior: line up correctly and sit at a desk, obey certain rules of behavior during breaks. All this presupposes the ability to restrain one's impulsive motor reactions, the ability to control one's behavior, to control one's movements.

It is far from always easy for a child of 6-7 years to fulfill these requirements. These skills are brought up, and by no means formed by themselves. It is necessary to properly educate them in a preschool child in order to prepare him for school from this side.

At first glance, it may seem that this problem does not deserve the attention of a psychologist, that it does not raise any significant psychological questions. This, however, is not the case. This is not about instilling purely mechanical skills, not about simple training. This was also emphasized K. D. Ushinsky. Speaking about the ability to control one's motor behavior, we mean a relatively very complex process. "Managed" behavior is not just fixed in a habit, but consciously controlled behavior, and this control should not require special attention directed to it. The student must behave properly in the lesson - sit correctly at the desk, not turn around, not touch the objects lying in front of him with his hands, not dangle his legs - in a word, not be forgotten for a single minute, no matter how absorbed his attention is by what he tells in classroom teacher.

Experimental studies, specially devoted to the study of the arbitrariness of the child's motor behavior, have shown that the formation of arbitrariness, beginning at the early preschool age, passes through a number of qualitatively unique stages. At the same time, the development of the voluntariness of motor behavior is one of those special forms in which the change in the general structure of the child's activity, which we spoke about above, finds its expression.

The methodology of this study consisted in the fact that the children were given the task of arbitrarily holding a certain posture (the posture of a sentry). Children aged 3 to 7 faced this task in various conditions, which made it possible to reveal not only the actual course of development of the ability to control their behavior, but also some important psychological prerequisites for this process.

It turned out that if the task of arbitrarily maintaining a posture is put before a child in the form of a direct task, then the smallest preschoolers practically do not cope with it, even when they accept it willingly. This task has a certain motive for them, which consists in their attitude to the requirements of an adult, which makes it quite meaningful for them. This means that the reason that they do not cope with this task and after a few seconds involuntarily break the pose is not due to the fact that they do not internally accept it. As a more detailed analysis shows, they are not able to control their movements for a long time, to control them not from the side of the external result that needs to be achieved, but from the side of the motor process itself, as it proceeds.

Another thing is older children. Already children of middle preschool age easily subordinate their activity to this peculiar task. For them, however, maintaining the posture is indeed a special task, requiring a special inner activity, and it absorbs them whole. Therefore, it is enough to introduce some distracting moments so that the task of maintaining immobility is not completed and the required posture is violated. A. N. Leontiev argues that the process of controlling one's posture in children of older preschool age proceeds differently. They are also able to control their posture if their attention is diverted to something else: their motor behavior can become truly controlled, they can truly control themselves.

On what basic psychological moments does the development of the process of voluntary control of one's behavior depend?

This question was answered by studies that were structured in such a way that the task of arbitrarily maintaining the same posture of the sentinel arose from the play role that the child assumed. Under these conditions, even 4-year-old children, to whom the task of voluntarily maintaining a posture for any length of time was inaccessible under the conditions of the first series, coped with it perfectly. This is explained by the fact that, under conditions of play, the relationship between the goal—to maintain the posture—and the motive to which it is subordinated is psychologically simpler for the child. The very task of behaving "like a sentry" for the child already contains the task of standing "well"—not allowing sudden movements that violate the accepted posture, etc. One directly follows from the other here. On the contrary, the task of maintaining a pose and the motive to perform as best as possible for an adult are psychologically in a much more complex relationship. This explanation has been carefully tested by comparing experimental data obtained in other studies specifically conducted for this purpose. A. N. Leontiev points out that the immediacy of the relationship that connects the motive that encourages the child to complete the task, and the new goal that stands out in it - to take care of himself, plays a decisive role only at the stage of the initial formation of the voluntariness of motor behavior. For older children, in whom the mechanism of voluntariness has already been formed, this circumstance is not of decisive importance. The control of their behavior becomes free for them not only in the sense that it does not occupy all their attention, but also in the fact that it is not limited by the framework of certain subject-semantic connections.

The study of the development of the voluntariness of motor behavior in preschool age makes it possible to discover the internal connections of this process with the general course of the child's development in two directions.

First of all, behavior is associated with the formation of higher mechanisms of the movement itself. Special Studies A. V. Zaporozhets and its supporters, devoted to the study of the motor sphere, allow us to conclude that its general restructuring, observed at preschool age, is not the result of the independently occurring maturation of the corresponding nervous mechanisms, but is carried out due to the fact that the child begins to consciously single out in his behavior and set special "motor goals". In other words, the higher mechanisms of movement are formed in him precisely in connection with the development of controllability of his motor behavior.

Already in the above study Z. V. Manuylenko this connection was made abundantly clear. For example, in younger children who consciously directed their activity towards the goal of maintaining the required posture, the very mechanism of self-control was still built according to the type of control of external objective actions: it passed under almost continuous visual control. This, by the way, explains the child's enormous "connectedness" and the immediate loss of self-control as soon as something outside distracts him. Thus, at first, the conscious and voluntary control of one's posture relies on the mechanism of conscious control of movements aimed at externally objective goals, which is formed much earlier. At the next stage, the development of self-control is transferred to other nervous mechanisms. Management is carried out under the control of motor sensations. Of course, these sensations previously played a decisive role in movements, in their coordination, but now they begin to serve precisely voluntary, conscious control, albeit in a special form. Previously, the actual folding of new internal connections and relationships in activity takes place on the same neurological basis, and then the basis itself is rebuilt, and this, in turn, opens up new opportunities for further development of the control of one's behavior.

Remaining controlled by consciousness and completely arbitrarily regulated, control at the same time acquires the features of an automatically flowing process: it does not require continuous effort and does not occupy consciousness. This is exactly what self-management becomes in older preschoolers, and it is precisely such control that is required of a child at school.

Connections of another kind, as research shows, are connections between the ongoing restructuring of motor behavior and the changes that occur during preschool age in the internal, mental processes of the child - changes in his memory, perception and other processes. (Based on the materials of A. N. Leontiev.)

LECTURE No. 9. Development of memory in preschool children

Memory - this is a feature of a person, which is determined by the ability to accumulate, store and reproduce the experience and information gained; the ability to reproduce events that occurred in the past, specifying the place and time of the event, as well as all the emotional experiences accompanying this event, in combination with the events of the surrounding world occurring at that moment in time.

The components of memory are the following processes:

1) creation - the emergence of the very fact of the presence of information that needs to be remembered;

2) preservation - fixing information in memory cells;

3) reproduction - the process of "playing" the event (fact) that was remembered;

4) concealment - always relative, since some information is stored in our memory throughout our lives, but we can no longer "reproduce" it without outside help. Only the occurrence of any events resembling the required fact can cause its recall in memory.

Memory also has qualitative and quantitative characteristics:

1) duration - the period of time during which the memory stores information and retrieves it at the right time without outside interference;

2) accuracy - an indicator of the reliability and detail of the recalled information;

3) volume - the amount of memorized information per unit of time;

4) rapidity - the rate at which information moves from the "creation" state to the "storage" state.

5) readiness for reproduction - the speed at which the necessary information is retrieved from memory.

All these characteristics depend on the personality of the person. A person who is attentive and painstaking will have high accuracy, but the speed of memorization will be low. And an impulsive person will memorize quickly, but the detailing of information will be much lower than that of the first.

There are three opinions on the issue of memory of preschool children. The first opinion, expressed by a number of psychologists, speaks of the existence of two types of memory in children, where the first is a physiological component, and the second is a psychological (spiritual) one. According to the second opinion, the child's memory reaches development at an early age, after which its activity decreases sharply. A third opinion is expressed by supporters of the culminating idea, who argue that the development of memory reaches its apogee at the age of 10, after which it gradually declines.

P. P. Blonsky expressed his theory about the structure of a child's memory, dividing it into four temporal components. The very first - motor (motor) - represents conditioned reflexes, starting with the first movements of the newborn. The next component is emotional the memory of the child, which is based on the memorization of information and its assimilation in the form of emotions caused by this information. In the course of the formation of consciousness and the development of the imagery of the child's thinking, his memory becomes figurativewhere information is stored in the form of images and concepts. And as the child develops such a mechanism as communication, memory becomes verbal.

Research Z. M. Istomina, devoted to the development of memory in preschool children, showed that the main feature of the memory processes that occur during this period lies precisely in the fact that the processes of memorization, recall from involuntary turn into intentional, arbitrary. And this means that the child has a conscious goal to remember, to recall, and he learns to actively achieve this goal. A completely similar restructuring of the process occurs, as the data show. N. L. Agenosova, and in the processes of perception, which also become manageable at this age, acquire the features of genuine arbitrariness.

A. N. Leontiev indicates that the very fact of the formation of arbitrary memory in preschool age is not unexpected, but the most important thing is how this process proceeds and what it is internally determined by.

Z. M. Istomina, studying the memory of preschool children of different ages, from the smallest to the oldest, changed their motives for memorization. She showed that the restructuring of children's memory also stands in connection with the development of the general internal structure of the child's activity, which we spoke about above, and that the turning point in this respect also usually falls at the age of about 4 years. She showed that the child's active identification and awareness of the goal to remember, to recall, is recognized earlier under such conditions when the meaning of this goal for the child directly follows from the motive that stimulates his activity. Under the conditions of this study, such were the conditions of the game, which required memorization of the instruction and its recall, which directly followed from the play role assumed by the child. In other cases, of course, these may be the conditions for some other meaningful activity for the child. Children experience great difficulties when the goal stands in a more abstract relationship to the motive, as is the case in the case of memorization under laboratory conditions.

The changes that take place during preschool age in processes of various nature are internally connected with each other and have a common nature. Obviously, this commonality of changes is created by the fact that they are associated with the same circumstances.

The data obtained in the studies make it possible to understand the relationship of the studied changes with one central fact. This fact consists in the fact that the child, in the course of his development, actively penetrates into the world of human relations around him, assimilating - initially in a very concrete and effective form - the social functions of people, socially developed norms and rules of behavior. This initially obligatory concreteness and effectiveness of the form in which the child masters the higher processes of human behavior necessarily require that the tasks that the educator sets for the child are meaningful for him, so that the connection between what he has to do and what he acts, and the conditions of its action were not formal, not conditional and not too complicated, but perhaps more immediate and close. It is only under this condition that new higher internal connections and correlations can initially be established in the child's activity, corresponding to the complex tasks that the socio-historical conditions of his life pose for a person.

A. N. Leontiev believes that at the initial stages of mastering a new task for a child, education should not go along the line of strengthening the motive itself. This path does not lead to success. The strength of the motive itself and the striving evoked by it in the child is not a decisive factor at these stages, but what is really decisive here is the conscious semantic connection between the child's impulse and the action that he must subordinate to this impulse, this motive.

The further process of development goes precisely in the direction of overcoming such limitations, and this should also be taken into account in education. Therefore, for example, if at the first steps in the development of the voluntary-motor sphere of a preschool child, they justifiably use "subject-role", as they are sometimes called, tasks ("walk like a mouse", "jump like a horse", etc. .), then further tasks should also be given for movements of the gymnastic type, i.e., motor tasks that are much more abstract. The same is true in other areas of education. After all, the higher demands that the school will present to the child in the future will set such tasks for him and force him to strive to achieve such goals that by no means always directly and directly follow for the child from his general desire to learn and are by no means always directly related to his consciousness with concrete motives stimulating his teaching. (Based on the materials of A. N. Leontiev.)

LECTURE No. 10. Crisis 6-7 years

At the age of 6, the child develops a readiness for learning. L. S. Vygotsky singled out the crisis of 6-7 years. According to the studies of L. S. Vygotsky, the older preschooler is distinguished by mannerisms, capriciousness, pretentious, artificial behavior. The child manifests stubbornness, negativism. Investigating these features of character, L. S. Vygotsky explained them by the fact that children's spontaneity is being lost. During this period, meaningfulness also arises in one's own experiences. It suddenly becomes clear to the child that he has his own experiences. The child understands that they belong only to him, the experiences themselves acquire meaning for him. This is due to a very specific neoplasm - a generalization of experience, that is, the child's attitude to the world around him changes.

According to L. I. Bozovic, the crisis of 6-7 years is caused by the appearance of a neoplasm - the so-called internal position. Until the present age, the child practically did not think about his place in life. But at the age of 6-7 years, these questions become relevant for him. At this age, children have an awareness of their social "I". Children imitate adults, strive to assert their significance.

L. I. Bozhovich pointed out that a child at the age of 6-7 years has a need for activities that ensure his social position. The internal position is in conflict with the social situation in which the child is at the moment. From the point of view of adults, he is still small, and therefore helpless and dependent. But in their own eyes, the child is already an adult, and therefore can carry out socially significant activities. According to Bozhovich, at the heart of the crisis of 6-7 years is a conflict that arises from the collision of new needs that have appeared in the process of development and the child’s lifestyle that has not changed and the attitude of the people around him. The relationships of the surrounding adults do not allow the child to satisfy the needs that he has. This leads to the emergence of frustration, deprivation of needs, which are generated by the mental neoplasms that have appeared by this time.

At the senior preschool age, children can be divided into two groups:

1) children who, according to internal prerequisites, are already ready for educational activities;

2) children who, according to internal prerequisites, are not yet ready for learning activities, are at the level of play activity.

For children belonging to the first group, the crisis of 6-7 years becomes a consequence of the need to replace play activity with educational activity. Children belonging to the second group will not have negative symptoms if they do not try to start learning activities too quickly. If the children belonging to the second group begin to study from the age of 6, then there will be a violent demolition of activity. This will become noticeable in the manifestations of the crisis. Accordingly, some of the children come to school "out of the crisis", and some - "in the crisis."

L. S. Vygotsky studied stable and critical ages. He pointed out that stable ages consist of two stages. At the first stage, there is an accumulation of changes, the formation of the prerequisites for a new age. At the second stage, the already existing prerequisites are realized, i.e., they lead to significant personality changes. Vygotsky believed that all critical ages have a tripartite structure, i.e. they consist of the following phases: precritical, proper critical, postcritical.

The crisis of 6-7 years can be considered according to the knowledge of these phases.

On the subcritical The child's phase is no longer satisfied with "pure" play as the leading type of activity. The child does not yet realize what this dissatisfaction is connected with. There are already all the prerequisites for moving from playing activity to learning. At the subcritical phase, the period of modification of the game begins, its adaptation to new tasks of mastering the norms, motives, and goals of activity. The game changes, approaches the imitation of activity. The relationship between the child and the people around them changes significantly for the better (meaning the improvement of communication skills). There is an active process of preparing the child for schooling. During the subcritical phase, the prerequisites for the transition from playing to learning activities are still not sufficiently formed. The child is quite satisfied with the game, he is satisfied with the position that he occupies in society, that is, the child is not burdened that the surrounding adults consider him small. Nevertheless, in the process of communicating with school friends, in the process of preparing for school in kindergarten or at home, and also under the influence of other reasons, the child develops a subjective desire to go to school.

After the modification of play activity, the child shows a noticeable interest in non-play forms of activity, for example, in designing, modeling, drawing, and then gradually the child moves on to activities that are positively evaluated by adults. For example, a child seeks to do something around the house, fulfills instructions from adults, wants to learn something, etc. During this period, the child develops a desire to go to school, he already has a certain idea of ​​\uXNUMXb\uXNUMXblearning activities. But for an older preschooler, the very transition to school is an event that is possible only in the future. Accordingly, the preschooler enters latency period. The child is ready to learn, but the learning process itself has not yet begun. The farther apart the dates of readiness and opportunity to go to school are, the more negative symptoms appear in the child's behavior.

Critical the phase is characterized by discrediting the motives of play activity. They are practically no longer of interest to the child, he has a desire to go to school. The child perceives himself as an adult. He is burdened by the discrepancy between his social position and his aspirations. This phase is characterized by psychological discomfort and negative behavioral symptoms. Often it seems that the child has a difficult character. Negative symptoms have a function - to draw attention to themselves, to their experiences, as well as internal causes - the child is moving to a new age stage. The critical phase is associated with the beginning of schooling. The child may feel that he is quite ready for school. He may be interested in preparing for school, it is quite possible that the child has some success in preparing for school. But during the beginning of training, the child has problems. They can be both serious and not very serious, for example, teacher's remarks, failures in completing assignments, etc. After several failures, the child already refuses to go to school. He is experiencing a discrepancy between the position of the student and his desires and capabilities. Gradually, the child has more and more reasons for not wanting to go to school. It may be difficult for the child to sit and do the tasks of the teacher, he is not satisfied with the daily routine established for the student. Accordingly, the child loses interest in learning. Often in this case, parents complicate the situation with additional classes that they conduct on their own at home. Negative additional symptoms, whims, stubbornness appear in the child's behavior. Only gradually, thanks to the play activity, which is very important for the child in such a period, and thanks to the educational activity that the child gradually masters, the prerequisites for the transition to educational activity are prepared.

Postcritical the phase is characterized by the fact that with the beginning of schooling, the child has an awareness of his new social position. Negative crisis symptoms disappear, the child understands that the attitude towards him has changed. He is already an "adult", he has occupations and responsibilities.

For some children, the crisis begins at the very beginning of schooling. In this case, the pattern of the crisis will be different. The postcritical phase is possible only with the gradual development of learning activities. The child gradually realizes the correspondence of his abilities to the requirements at school, motivation is created. The first successes lead to the fact that the child begins to feel comfortable at school.

Inattention to the child during the crisis of 6-7 years can lead to the risk of neurosis.

LECTURE No. 11. Activity approach to personality formation. Formation of self-esteem

The actions of a person, his activity differ significantly from the actions of an animal.

The main distinguishing feature of the human psyche is the presence consciousnesses, conscious reflection - this is such a reflection of objective reality, in which its objective stable properties are distinguished, regardless of the relationship of the subject to it.

Any joint work of people implies the division of labor, the performance by each person of an individual set of operations. Some of them mean by the result a certain good that is biologically useful for a person. Some do work, the purpose of which is to bring a certain object to an intermediate stage for its further processing. In any case, each person, as a separate subject of the group, is aware of his activity as a certain component of the whole process, while at the same time assuming a certain completion of his, individual goal, which is achieved through the performance of a certain type of activity.

activity - this is an active interaction of a person with the environment in which he achieves a consciously set goal that has arisen as a result of the appearance of a certain need, motive.

One of the first activities that occurs in the process of human development is communication. It corrects and directs the speech interaction of people, contributes to the formation of the child's personality, allows you to realize yourself as an individual. Game, teaching и labor are also activities that contribute to the development of the individual, the goals of which are also the acquisition of certain benefits, in the case of teaching - information, labor - material and spiritual benefits, and in the case of a game - this is a kind of state of interest and enthusiasm.

In understanding A. N. Leontiev activity it is not the dispatch of some purely internal - mental or physiological - mechanism, but is a process organized by objects of the external environment. These items do not represent a source of purely external physical or cultural influences on the body. As indicated D. I. Feldshtein, the subject is only that aspect of a certain factor of the external world, which can be included in the structure of activity at a certain stage.

Objective activity is neither a manifestation of the initially internal genetic properties of the organism, nor the effect of external environmental influences. In the course of activity, which includes the pole of the subject and the pole of the object, there are processes "objectification", the subject embodies his ideas, i.e., ultimately, his psychological qualities, in the subject, and "disobjective", i.e. the subject assigns the qualities of the object of activity. It is activity that ensures the adequacy of the mental reflection of activity.

Being always associated with a certain need of the object, activity is characterized by plasticity and similarity, being closely associated with the "groping" of the need of one's object, which leads to its objectification, the formation of a specific motive for activity. External object and internal activity are distinguished by a common structure and functional connection, expressed in mutual transitions and mutual transformations. Therefore, when studying external activity, psychology has the opportunity to penetrate into the internal activity of a person, which is formed in the process of interiorization external activity. L. S. Vygotsky, like French scientists, understood internalization primarily as socialization, the formation of social structures of the child’s cognitive processes as a whole.

According to D. I. Feldstein, the peculiarity of activity lies in the fact that the results of its constituent actions under certain conditions turn out to be more significant than their motives. The general mechanism for changing activities can be illustrated by an example from children's play activities. In the game, a preschool child improves game actions, as well as a number of mental functions, the level of development of perception, memory, will, etc. increases. etc. Initially, such an acquaintance appears only as a specific goal of an action motivated by a game situation. But gradually, in older preschoolers, the significance of the results of such cognitive activity, as it were, outgrows the play motives that determine this action, and the child begins to be interested in information about the environment on its own, outside the situation of the game. There was a shift of the motive to the goal, and thus the action of "familiarization" acquired a different character. Thus, the active position of activity consists in the formation of new motives, their purposeful restructuring. The goal, even the closest, takes a person beyond the immediate present, builds a project for the future, that is, what still needs to be done for the satisfaction of a need delayed in time. This provision applies both to the actions of an adult and to the actions of a child, with the only difference being that in the process of mental development the child gradually moves from simple and close goals to more distant and promising goals.

Unlike motives, which are far from always realized, being expressed indirectly, existing in the form of striving for a goal, experiences, desires, the goal of an activity act as an obligatory conscious component and carry a particularly active load. Each expanded activity involves the achievement of a number of specific goals that stand out from the overall goal. When the role of such a common goal is played by a conscious motive, it turns into a motive-goal. In motives certain human needs are objectified. Personal development involves the formation of a hierarchical motivational-need structure dominated by higher spiritual needs. D. I. Feldshtein emphasizes that the process of development of activity, its expansion and complication proceeds most intensively in a growing person, determining his formation as a personality. Moreover, this is not a simple movement, carried out in the form of a transition from one sum of private activities to another with their accumulation and interpenetration, but a natural development, the process of which ensures that the child masters both actions, operations, and motives, goals, social norms, leading to the mastery of the world of things and at the same time developing an appropriate position in the world of people, presenting the condition for the development of the individual, the way to implement the social form of movement.

Each period in the development of a child is characterized by its own type of subjectivity, inherent only to it. Thus, in infancy, subjectivity appears in the form of "prama", i.e., some undifferentiated sense of one's community with an adult, a vague opposition of this community to the rest of the world, as L. S. Vygotsky points out.

E. Z. Basina argues that at an early age, the individual activity of the child is formed, he becomes a relatively independent subject. But awareness of oneself as a subject of activity arises later - only towards the end of an early age, during the crisis of 3 years. Throughout preschool age, this awareness remains very little differentiated. As indicated V. S. Mukhina, the child is aware of himself only in the most general, non-individualized categories: "I am a good boy (good girl)". In the type of subjectivity of the child, changes occur during the crisis of 7 years. L. S. Vygotsky suggested that it is at this age that self-esteem begins to take shape - a generalized (i.e., stable, out-of-situation) and at the same time differentiated attitude of the child towards himself. Self-esteem mediates the child's attitude to himself, integrates the experience of his activities, communication with other people. This is the most important personal instance that allows you to control your own activities in terms of normative criteria, to build your holistic behavior in accordance with social norms.

R. BurnsAnalyzing a large number of studies, he notes that on the verge of preschool and primary school age, there is a qualitative leap in the development of the "I" concept. However, a broad interpretation of this concept deprives the conclusions of specificity, does not allow a sufficiently meaningful characterization of the ongoing changes.

As E. Z. Basina states, the problems associated with self-esteem and the image of "I" are traditionally considered in Russian psychology in the context of the study of self-consciousness (L. S. Vygotsky, S. L. Rubinstein, V. V. Stolin, I. I. Chesnokova).

The following understanding of these problems dominates: they are formations of a cognitive nature and ascertaining nature, i.e., they fix the child’s ideas about his available qualities and capabilities (E. I. Savonko, M. I. Lisina, A. I. Silvestra). In special experimental studies, children's self-assessment in specific types of activity is mainly studied. Analysis of research results shows that by the age of 7 children's self-esteem begins to gravitate towards adequacy or already becomes such (I. I. Chesnokova, E. I. Savonko).

The data characterizing the formation of a child's cognitive ideas about himself, the measure of the success of self-knowledge and the adequacy of self-esteem in activity, are studied in the context of the development of the cognitive sphere of the psyche. However, the child's idea of ​​himself is not limited to purely cognitive aspects, especially since true self-knowledge is hardly inherent in childhood. E.Z. Basina argues that there are fundamental differences between the ability to more or less adequately evaluate oneself in a specific activity with external provocation of self-esteem (under experimental conditions) and the tendency to comprehend oneself independently, spontaneously, and not in the sphere of specific activities, but in general. It is such a holistic view of oneself that is as close as possible to the concept of "important personal instance", because it mediates the relationship of the subject with himself. It is quite obvious that self-evaluation does not exist in isolation from the idea of ​​the evaluated qualities themselves. Therefore, self-esteem should be considered in terms of a general idea of ​​\uXNUMXb\uXNUMXbthe self. According to the data available in science, the composition of the substantive ideas of the subject about what he is does not include value-neutral qualities that are devoid of personal meaning for the subject. These qualities are endowed by the subject with a high positive or negative value.

According to E. Z. Basina, the difference between the general idea of ​​oneself - the image of "I" - and its aspects: content ("I"-concept) and evaluative (self-esteem) is also seen as quite legitimate. The developed image of the "I" must be preceded by the child's awareness of his individuality, himself as an individual: the idea of ​​physical separateness, separation from the world, subjectivity, of himself as a subject of activity and mental experiences. A higher level of awareness of oneself as an individual (individuality) should correspond to the idea of ​​what this individual is like (what individuality consists of). The image of the "I" in this sense can be seen as an answer to the question: "What am I as an individual being, an individual subject?"

Affective comprehension of oneself, emotional self-awareness, well-being arise in ontogenesis before a meaningful idea of ​​oneself, one's own individual qualities, and are more associated with self-esteem than with the "I" concept.

At the same time, it seems legitimate to believe that affective self-perception does not merge with self-esteem, is not identified with it, because experimentation and phenomenology provide very extensive data on their qualitative discrepancy. There are fundamental differences in the genesis of these two mental formations. Affective self-awareness is hardly initially associated with the attitude towards oneself as an object of reflection. Rather, it represents the child's assimilation of the attitude of the people around him, their treatment of him. It can be assumed that the period of transition from preschool age to primary school age is characterized not by the appearance of an affective attitude towards oneself (it develops earlier, during the preschool age itself), but by the formation of generalized meaningful and evaluative ideas associated with the maturation of cognitive prerequisites for reflective self-understanding.

If we consider the child's ideas about himself only as stating the current level and nature of his individual capabilities, then it is natural to assume that they are composed mainly of the child's judgments about his skills, knowledge, etc. However, the child's ideas about himself as an individual can also be anticipatory. character, as well as the adolescent's ideas about his personal characteristics. The development of the human psyche is accomplished through the process of internalization, the "appropriation" by the child of relations that are social in nature. The system of relations between a child and adults is built, first of all, precisely on their expectations, which anticipate the formation of individual mental qualities in him. Therefore, it can be assumed that the early image of the "I" is characterized mainly by anticipatory ideas about the self. Apparently, they play a very important role in the child's mental development: they project the value orientations of children concerning the qualities of human individuality and personality, which have a significant formative influence on the child's personality. (According to the materials of E. Z. Basina.)

LECTURE No. 12. Studying the development of memorization processes

The problem of memory development has long occupied a central place in psychology. The scientific development of this problem is directly connected with the study of the psychological nature of memory processes, with the characterization of the age-related characteristics of memory in children, with the elucidation of ways and means of its education. According to P. I. Zinchenko, has long been behind the terms "mechanical" и "logical" memory was fixed not only as a characteristic of certain features of the memorization process, but also as an age characteristic. That is why these two types of memory usually acted as two genetic stages in its development. In classical associative psychology, the problem of memory development was actually removed. The reduction of memory to mechanical imprinting by the brain of various influences ruled out from the very beginning the assumption of any qualitative changes in it. It was only about quantitative changes associated with the gradual accumulation of individual human experience. But already within empirical psychology, the conditions for the emergence of the concept of two forms of memory - mechanical and logical. The understanding of consciousness as a simple associative set of sensations and ideas, and memory as a simple function of brain plasticity did not satisfy many psychologists, since it did not reflect the actual complexity and, above all, the activity of human consciousness processes. Attempts to overcome the passivity, the mechanistic nature of classical associative psychology followed different paths, but converged on one thing: an active, active principle of consciousness was added to the mechanistically understood activity of the brain. At W. Wundt was such a start apperception (1912), H. Geffding - will (1904). E. Meiman tried to supplement the mechanistic ideas about memory with the activity of attention, the formation of auxiliary associations, the desire for observation, for imprinting, and others (1909, 1913). However, all this acted as various spontaneous forms of manifestation of the activity of consciousness. They were simply added to the mechanistically understood activity of the brain as special forces that could use this activity in their own way.

The representatives of the so-called functional psychology, along with the representatives of the Wurzburg school, especially contributed to the formalization and consolidation of the concept of mechanical and logical memory.

The concept of mechanical and logical memory was strengthened as a result of the preservation of the mechanism of associations for the lower forms of memory in the old classical sense of it and the superimposition of various forms of activity of consciousness over it (arbitrariness, meaningfulness, etc.) - for higher forms of memory. Associative, allegedly non-semantic connections and semantic, allegedly non-associative connections, were a specific form of expression of this concept in memory.

Mechanical and logical memory and their pointed forms - physiological and spiritual (A. Bergson) - were considered as two forms of memory of a fundamentally different nature, both in content and in mechanisms. The issue of these two forms of memory continues to be debated.

In recognizing mechanical and logical memory, at least two sides must be distinguished.

A person deals with material of varying degrees of complexity, which is fixed in memory in various forms of reflection: in single and general representations, in concepts of varying degrees of generalization, etc. Different material also imposes requirements of different degrees of complexity on the mental activity of a person, on the processes of his memory to its physiological foundations. The material thus acts as one of the important conditions for the success of memory. It is known that material that is related in its content, causing more or less complex processes of understanding, comprehension, is remembered much more efficiently than a set of incoherent elements. In the latter case, the importance of the processes of comprehension during memorization decreases, and the role of repetitions increases. From this point of view, one can speak conditionally about mechanical memorization as opposed to meaningful, logical. This purely empirical difference in memory processes, which is determined by the characteristics of the material, is of great practical importance, since it is associated with different conditions of memorization and its different success. It is one thing to memorize a series of meaningless syllables, and another thing to memorize a system of thoughts, facts expressed in a coherent text.

The concept of mechanical and logical memory in various forms has become widespread not only in foreign, but also in domestic psychology. It determined the content and direction of many studies and for a long time hindered the development of both the general theory of memory and the problem of its development. In studies of the so-called mechanical memory, the attention of psychologists was directed to identifying the ability of the brain to imprint, to form traces, to preserve them in isolation from the meaningful activity of a person with certain material. The study of logical memory was of the same character. They were aimed at discovering the ability of consciousness to grasp and retain meaning, thoughts, in isolation from brain activity.

The subject of many studies, as P. I. Zinchenko, there was a study of differences in the productivity of logical and mechanical memory, changes with age in the volume of one or the other, differences in the amount of memory for objects that are different in meaning. In this kind of research, facts were established that were important for characterizing such aspects of memory as its productivity in relation to different material, the connection of memory with understanding, attention, emotions, etc. However, they did not study the processes of memory themselves, their composition, the emergence and development. In this regard, the facts of research often could not receive the necessary theoretical disclosure and correct assessment. From the standpoint of the concept of mechanical and logical memory, for a long time, a largely false characterization was given to the age-related features of the development of children's memory. The memory of not only preschoolers, but also younger schoolchildren was extremely impoverished. Known statement Meiman that memory before adolescence is predominantly mechanical. In a different form, but the same idea was carried out by other authors (W. Stern, 1922; Lobzin, 1901; Polman, 1906; Brunswick, Goldscheider и Pilek, 1932, etc.).

As P. I. Zinchenko points out, the broad possibilities for fruitful research into memory processes were for a long time limited by serious errors in understanding Pavlov's theory of higher nervous activity. Under these conditions, neither classical associationism nor idealism in the interpretation of the essence of memory and its development could be completely overcome. Errors of both types continued to persist in the position that was established in Russian psychology that two kinds of connections constitute the basis of memory processes - associative and semantic; associative connections were considered mechanical, not semantic, and semantic - not associative. The division of connections into associative and semantic retained, first of all, serious errors in the interpretation of the physiological foundations of memory. Conditioned reflexes were considered the physiological basis of associative processes, allegedly characteristic only of lower memory. As the basis of semantic connections, allegedly characteristic only of the highest form of memory, some as yet unexplored laws of nervous processes were assumed, fundamentally different from the laws of formation of conditioned reflexes.

Associative and semantic connections were opposed in terms of their psychological content. Associations were interpreted as purely external, mechanical connections. It was believed that their formation does not depend either on the content of the connected objects, or on the meaning, meaning for the subject. The lowest form of memory was deprived of meaningfulness. Memory allegedly acquired a meaningful character only at the highest stages of its development due to the participation in it of the expanded processes of understanding and thinking. This led to the opposition of the lower and higher forms of memory in terms of the development of its meaningfulness.

P. I. Zinchenko points out that Russian psychologists correctly associated memory with the active activity of a person, with its goals, motives and methods. However, in the interpretation of the activity of the subject in the processes of memory, serious errors were made, arising from the recognition of two types of connections - associative and semantic. In characterizing the conditions for the formation of associations, only the need for coincidence or successive action of objects in time was emphasized. The determining role of the conditions of life, the relationship of the subject to these conditions, and in connection with this, his activity in the formation of ties was ignored. Such an interpretation of the processes of formation of associations was associated with an incorrect assessment of conditioned reflex activity as a mechanical activity. It came into clear conflict with the conditions for the formation of temporary nerve connections, which are disclosed in the teachings of Pavlov, and, first of all, with the need to reinforce conditioned stimuli, to show orientation towards them, etc.

The division of connections into associative and semantic was one of the reasons for underestimating the theoretical and practical significance of involuntary memorization. Involuntary memory was usually compared with associative connections, arbitrary - with semantic ones. Since associative connections were understood as not semantic, random, not requiring the activity of the subject, but based only on the contiguity of acting stimuli in time, involuntary memory was also characterized as passive and random memory. Meanwhile, involuntary memory, which is the only form in animals and does not lose its significance in man at all stages of his historical and ontogenetic development, cannot be accidental. It cannot be passive either, since the formation of temporary connections is included in the active life of the subject.

The division of connections into associative and semantic ones is antigenetic. It excludes continuity in the development of the physiological mechanisms of memory and the characterization of the main features of memory at different stages of its development. The lowest form of memory, based on associative connections, loses its meaning. Associative connections are not associated with understanding, with the initial forms of thinking, they are opposed to semantic connections. The latter, like understanding, break away from their genetic origins, therefore, the possibility of studying their gradual complication and development at different stages of phylogenesis and ontogenesis is excluded. The activity of higher forms of memory also breaks away from previous stages of development. For the same reasons, genetic continuity is excluded in the characterization of voluntary and involuntary memory in terms of the physiological foundations and psychological characteristics of these types of memory. The reduction of lower memory to mechanical associations has given psychologists the appearance that they know this memory. The main attention of researchers was directed to the study of higher forms of memory. However, this study could not be completely fruitful for the simple reason that the higher, more complex cannot be properly understood without understanding the lower, more simple. Semantic, logical memory was built on top of the mechanical one. Pavlov's position on the universal nature of conditioned reflex connections that underlie associations as their physiological mechanisms, a broad biological interpretation of the essence of these connections and the conditions for their formation completely exclude the opposition of associative connections with semantic ones. All connections that memory operates at all stages of its development are associative, conditioned reflex in nature and conditions of education, and at the same time semantic in their content and vital meaning. (Based on the materials of A.I. Zinchenko.)

LECTURE No. 13. Emotionality of speech and the development of the structure of its understanding and generation

The expressiveness and emotionality of speech is its important component. Often the child's speech contains many exclamations, abrupt interruptions, multiple constructions, an accelerated rate of speech - in a word, all turns of speech expressing emotionality. Such turns are not a sign of a well-thought-out stylistic device or means, they are indicators of the emotionality of the child’s speech, which, through the listed means, is trying to convey a picture filled with emotions to the listener. He is not constrained by behavior patterns that indicate the need to restrain his emotions in society. In his speech there are no clearly established rules for constructing a sentence, just as there is no motivation to restrain his emotionality. And instead of ordering and semantic construction of the sentence comes emotional construction: the emotional component of the word brings it to the fore, pushing the other, thus building a structure that does not meet any rules, but nevertheless is informationally and emotionally filled. In the future, as the child grows older, he looks closely at the people around him and begins to copy their manner of speech, notices differences, including reducing his excessive emotionality, making his speech more regulated, which means that the brightness and expressiveness of speech decreases, becomes more smooth. As a result, the opposite situation arises: after the excessive expressiveness of speech subsides - if parents do not pay attention to this - the child's speech can become extremely inexpressive.

One of the means of expression, often found in communication, is intonation. Listening to the intonations of the parents, the emotional child begins to copy them, and pleading, angry and many other intonations appear in his speech. Often, excessive emotionality of speech is manifested in its acceleration. Wanting to tell as much as possible, some children begin to speak very quickly, which leads to the effect "lubrication" speech.

The area of ​​research into the emotionality of children's speech has interested many linguists in the last decade of the XNUMXth century. This linguistic category has great prospects in the interpretation of many unexplained facts and phenomena in children's speech. This interest is due to a number of reasons. First, emotional means are a way of expressing verbal expression of feelings in children; secondly, there are no universal schemes and criteria that would make it possible to study the emotional behavior of children.

In psychology, there are and are actively developing two areas in the study of emotions and their manifestations in children:

1) emotional children's thinking;

2) the ratio of emotions and thinking as the basis for the formation of children's language and intelligence. In the process of personality development, life experience finds its intellectual and linguistic expression, both consciously and unconsciously.

With the advent of a new branch of science - ontolinguistics - the thesis about the relationship between emotions and thinking can explain the processes of formation and development of emotional competence, the linguistic picture of the world and the linguistic personality of the child.

The manifestation of certain forms of behavior depends on the mental development of the child and confirms the thesis that thinking and emotions are in a balancing ratio. Thus, the child's behavior in a particular situation depends on the motivation due to emotions or rational knowledge. L. S. Rubinstein wrote that mental processes are not only cognitive, but also affective, emotional-volitional.

Exploring the structures and functions of emotional processes in a child, A. V. Zaporozhets и Ya. Z. Neverovich came to the conclusion that emotional processes at all genetic stages retain a central character. They also found that in children under 6 years of age there is a delayed emotional correction, that is, the child constantly needs to encourage the results of his own actions.

Taking into account all of the above, as well as the results of L. S. Vygotsky’s research on the crisis of 7 years, when children develop self-esteem and the logic of feelings, we can conclude that the age limit in children 6-7 years old is marked by the activation of cognitive processes. It is at this age that the cognitive processes of the child's consciousness begin to control not only the child's assimilation of the surrounding world, but also his emotional sphere. At the same time, the emotional thinking of the child, to a greater extent than rational, influences the formation of his personal linguistic picture of the world and plays a decisive role in the choice of speech means to designate it.

The development of the speech function in ontogenesis is currently understood as the development of the language ability. Language Ability is considered as a complex generalized psychological system that correlates with the language system. As indicated N. I. Chuprikova, at present, a lot of evidence has been accumulated showing the formation and development of language ability in children. These facts, taken together, show that all components of the language ability develop from the primary common initial nucleus - the germ. It follows from the facts that the linguistic ability does not consist of the sum of independently developing components, but that, on the contrary, the components are only gradually separated from the primary fused integral and grossly global primitive formations.

There are a lot of facts about the development of various components and aspects of the language ability, and all of them clearly demonstrate the universality of the law of development from the general to the particular. According to modern research, a child masters many speech functions even at the pre-verbal stage of development, when not words or sounds of the language, but the so-called protosigns - body movements, facial expressions, gestures, sounds that are not related to verbal speech. Researchers have identified up to 7 communicative functions observed in children even before they begin to master verbal speech. These are: instrumental - to meet material needs; regulatory - to control the actions of adults close to the child; interaction - to achieve and strengthen contact with them; personal - to express one's own individuality and a number of others. One of the researchers M. Halliday, believes that these functions are universals of human culture, and he considers mastering them in the pre-verbal period a necessary prerequisite for mastering speech. Thus, as N. I. Chuprikova points out, an essential result of the study of the pre-verbal period of speech is to substantiate the position that some primary, still very rough and primitive, but precisely the system of the most general communicative functions and pragmatic skills, within which In the future, the sound speech of the child will develop, and which itself, as it develops, will become more and more rich, subtle, and differentiating.

At first, the child is sensitive to regular melodic forms, perceives utterances as a single sound whole, relying on non-phonemic acoustic features. And when mastering active speech, roughly approximate articulation complexes are first produced, corresponding to large elements of speech (phrases, words), and then, on the basis of this, their individual components (syllables, sounds) are refined.

There is a lot of evidence that the child does not differentiate the intonational and phonemic components of speech for quite a long time. Replacing the vocabulary of adult demands addressed to him, while maintaining their rhythmic-melodic intonation structure up to a certain age, does not cause changes in the child’s reactions developed to these demands, and a change in intonation with the content of statements unchanged, on the contrary, leads to a complete absence of reactions developed to the word. The separation of intonational and phonemic content in the originally unified, continuous sound occurs only at the age of 10-11 months.

There is a lot of evidence that the development of the phonemic structure of a language proceeds as a multi-link hierarchical differentiation, the splitting of some initial phonemes, of which at first there are only 2, then 3, 4, etc. The process of mastering the phonemic structure of a language by a child is very complex and depends on many factors. The order of appearance of individual phonemes in his speech is influenced by such circumstances as the frequency of their occurrence in the language and the ease of their perception and pronunciation. But nevertheless, under all these external circumstances, the features of an internally regular path of development based on the principle of differentiation clearly appear in this process.

The development of a child's active speech, which performs a signal-significative function, begins with single-word utterances, from the stage of individual words-sentences. From the side of content, the first words-sentences refer to a holistic situation, and from the side of form, the subject and predicate, nomination and predication, elements of semantics, grammar and syntax are merged in an inseparable unity. Here there is neither a division of the situation, nor a division of the speech form. All this is combined into a single indissoluble whole. At the same time, most researchers agree that one-word sentences-utterances contain the beginnings of everything that a child has to develop when they learn an adult language, that a one-word sentence is the initial construction in many respects. The development of one-word statements into two-word and multi-word sentences is natural, largely universal for different languages, and goes along several internally related directions. One of them is the sequence of occurrence of words of different grammatical categories. According to many data, the word-situation is first of all divided into words-objects, then words-actions, words-signs, words-relationships appear. This grammatical division of speech testifies to the cognitive division of holistic situations in which such components as objects and agents of actions, their properties, the actions themselves, the results of actions, relations are consistently distinguished.

Another direction of dividing single-word utterances, inextricably linked with the appearance of words of different grammatical categories in speech, is the isolation from the flow of speech and the use of specific language means (ending, word order, auxiliary words) to express grammatical and syntactic relationships between words. From the content side, behind this is the isolation and delimitation of various spatial, temporal and other relationships between the phenomena of reality. The sequence of appearance in the child's speech of different grammatical categories and grammatical means fully corresponds to the law of development from the whole to the parts, from the general to the particular. In the fundamental classic work on the development of children's speech A. N. Gvozdev came to the conclusion that at first more general grammatical categories are assimilated, that diverse grammatical forms arise from initially broader undifferentiated forms, which gradually become more and more specialized. In modern psycholinguistics, this position is called D. Slobin by superregularization. Its essence is that the rules intended for broader classes of linguistic phenomena are formed earlier than the rules related to subclasses, i.e., general rules are learned earlier than private ones.

As states N. I. Chuprikova, the meanings of a child's words go through a long developmental path before they coincide with the normative meanings of an adult language, and many aspects of this path can be understood from the point of view of principle of differentiation. In the process of ontogenetic development of meanings, several directions of differentiation are inextricably intertwined, which, however, can still be tried to a certain extent to isolate and theoretically separate from each other.

The first direction of differentiation is the gradual release of words as independent signals of certain meanings from an inclusive setting context. As you know, at about the 8th month of life, children give a number of adequate reactions to the words of adults addressed to them. In response to the question: "Where is mom?" and "Where's daddy?" the child turns towards the person being asked about; in response to requests "Show your nose" or "Show your ears", the child makes the required movement. In response to the call "Make patties," he begins to clap his hands animatedly. As many observations show, at this stage of development, the word is only a component of an integral complex stimulus, composed along with the word by many elements of the situation in which it is used. In other words, what can be called meaning is not yet the meaning of the word as such, but the meaning of a complex signal consisting of several stimuli, including the word. Only gradually does the meaning shift more and more to the word, and the role of the setting accompanying elements of the complex is leveled.

The second direction of differentiation in the development of the meanings of words is their gradual "objectification", the liberation of the meanings from the child's own activity associated with them. This direction is the main content of the theory of early conceptual development and language acquisition, according to one of the researchers, K. Nelson.

The other two directions of differentiation of the meaning of words are connected with the establishment of their clearer content. Thus, in particular, the syncretism of the meanings of the first words of the child is overcome, which manifests itself in two slightly different forms. One form of syncretism in the meanings of words is that word-naming does not refer to any one specific object, but to several different objects, if they enter into some kind of integral situation common to them. For example, a child calls the word "kitty" both a cat and fluffy toys that remind him of a cat. Overcoming this type of syncretism is ensured by the assimilation of different words related to different elements of situationally-holistic images of perception. The second type of syncretism in the meanings of the child's first words results from the combination of relevant and irrelevant, from the adult's point of view, features of objects called certain words.

The second direction in the development of the meanings of words consists in the narrowing of the initially excessively wide, generalized zone of their objective meanings. Here the principle of development from the general to the particular, from the whole to the parts, is clearly expressed. One of the clearest examples of this way of differentiating the meanings of words is the development of a system of naming colors. According to the conclusions of N. I. Chuprikova, the names of colors in the active speech of a child appear relatively late, not earlier than 2, and more often not earlier than 2,5 years. At the same time, children who spontaneously do not yet use color names answer the question about color, although sometimes incorrectly, with the name of the color itself. They may use one term for many colors, or respond simply by repeating the word "color", but do not use any other adjectives referring, for example, to the shape or size of objects. When a child already knows several color names, he uses them randomly for a long time (from 2,5 to 4 years), and only at about 4-7 years old do they begin to be used correctly. In this case, at first the correct names are established in relation to the primary colors, and then to the intermediate ones. N. I. Chuprikova points to such data that at first the child stops confusing the names of the colors of the warm and cold parts of the spectrum, although the names can be mixed inside them. Thus, it can be seen that the general semantic field of color names was identified verbally much earlier than it was differentiated into separate components.

Another example of the course of development of meanings according to the same type of their gradual narrowing is the development of meanings in associated pairs of antonym words. Children often confuse the meanings of the prepositions "above" and "under", the verbs "on - give", "lost - found", adverbs "tomorrow - yesterday", etc. Considering similar cases of mixing the meanings of the word, T. N. Ushakova considers them to be the cause of the fact that both opposite words have a common global (situational) meaning. From here, the way of forming the exact meanings of words in such associated pairs becomes clear.

According to the theory E. Clark, the meanings of many words of a small child differ from the meanings of words of an adult in that they include a smaller number of features of objects, and these are the most general features related to broad semantic connectives. New additional features, more and more specific and characterizing narrower classes of objects, enter into the composition of meanings later, and where at first there was only one word, several appear.

According to the conclusions of N. I. Chuprikova, the assimilation of the meanings of words to a large extent depends on which words the child hears most often, which of the named objects most attract his attention and become objects of research activity and practical activity. But with all the influence of these external factors that leave their imprint on the course of development of the meanings of words, the action of the general universal law of the development of systems is still clearly visible: from the general to the particular, from the whole to the parts.

After the child has accumulated a certain vocabulary of words and mastered some general grammatical rules, words are divided into smaller meaningful elements - morphemes. In words, roots, prefixes, suffixes and endings are distinguished, capable of entering into various new combinations as independent units. This is evidenced by children's neologisms noted by all researchers. The use by children of words that are not found in the speech of adults and are a free combination of roots and affixes, indicates the division of words into more fractional sound values ​​that are their elements. Although children's word creation fades with age, it is recognized that morphemes, as minimal sound-meanings, are stored in long-term memory along with words, and that the morpheme lattice plays an essential role in the understanding of speech and can be used in some cases also for the synthesis of a word when it is generated. (According to the materials of N. I. Chuprikova.)

LECTURE No. 14. The development of the child's speech

One of the main skills that a child needs to master when learning speech is the ability to combine words. Many researchers, for example, Koltsov, Rybnikov, Gvozdev, Lublinsky, note as a characteristic stage in the development of children's speech the fact that the first phrases of the child are completely stereotyped and represent the reproduction of phrases most often repeated by people around them. These are phrases like the following: "come here"; "give me", etc. M. M. Koltsova indicates that for children of the 2nd year of life, such phrases are non-segmented units of speech, only at the age of 2 years and older does the child begin to use words in a phrase more freely, combining them in various ways.

N. I. Chuprikova states that in this way one more direction of differentiation in the development of a child’s speech can be noted, which is characteristic of the stage of two-word sentences: the selection of individual words from initially integral integral statements. Only under this condition can words be combined as relatively independent units into new diverse statements. And in older children, the stereotype and inseparability of integral speech formations are again found, now larger, corresponding to some complete texts. Studies show that children have great difficulty in breaking down texts into separate semantic elements. Only at the age of about 6 do all children begin to correctly answer various questions, isolating the corresponding elements of the text, which indicates a higher degree of analytically dissected perception of the text.

As N. I. Chuprikova points out, at an early age, the child’s speech is directly related to the practical activities carried out by him and to the situation of communication. Only gradually does speech free itself from a specific situation, and the child develops the ability to convey in speech many contents that are not related to the direct activity of him and his interlocutors, and also not related to directly observed events.

Hence the selection of two forms of speech - situational и contextual. According to the conclusions of N. I. Chuprikova, situational speech does not fully reflect the content of thought in speech forms. Its content is understandable to the interlocutor only if he takes into account the situation that the child is talking about, as well as taking into account gestures, movements, facial expressions, intonation, etc. Contextual speech is characterized by the fact that its content is revealed exclusively by speech means in the very context of statements and therefore understandable to the listener regardless of this or that situation. Despite the fact that in all age groups, under certain conditions, features of both speech can be observed, the indicators of situationality decrease markedly during preschool age, while the indicators of contextuality, on the contrary, increase. Thus, the process of separating the actual speech means from the original complex, which combines speech and non-speech means of transmitting the content of messages, is underway. This is also related to the differentiation of speech into dialogical и monologue, the selection of monologue speech from dialogic, which is the primary form of the child's speech.

Contextual and situational speech cannot be opposed to each other. Any speech in one form or another has a context, even if not as clear to the listener as understandable to the narrator himself, and any speech has some degree of situationality, either in the form of a description of a particular situation, or in the form of an understanding of some general, abstract situations, like the emergence of a certain flow, etc. These two components of speech are always interconnected, and in the course of the development of the child, as he masters the possibilities of contextual and situational speech, depending on the situation, one component of speech becomes more pronounced, not while overlapping the second, acting as a complementary element.

The communication of a child in the early stages of his development is reduced to communication with parents and relatives, and on very specific topics - the satisfaction of emerging needs. In this regard, the speech of the child - in the initial stages - is situational, since the child speaks about a specific place, a specific subject and its specific application. And as the child grows up, less specific needs arise, thought processes become more and more complicated, and in communication he can already give examples, add detailed descriptions, that is, include context in his speech. And as the child grows older, the child’s speech will not cease to be situational, and if he talks about a specific event, contextual turns will be added to the turns of speech necessary to directly describe the time, place and action - examples, analogies, descriptions, etc.

The transition to contextual speech, as the main one, in a child occurs gradually. At first, he sees no need to explain anything. He said, and if he was not understood, he would repeat the same thing that he said. As he grows older, he begins to understand the need to be understood. Therefore, he adds clarifying turns, at first on a primitive level - instead of "She will play" already "Let her - this girl - play." The child intuitively builds his speech, based on the false idea that everyone knows the same thing as him. Accordingly, everyone should understand that "she" is a "girl", and "he" is a "ball". But gradually he begins to analyze the behavior of the listeners and realizes the need to be understood, and makes refinements to his speech.

As the speech function develops, another major differentiation of its two forms occurs, which was convincingly based L. S. Vygotsky in his polemic with Piaget on the nature of egocentric speech. In several convincing experiments, Vygotsky showed that, contrary to Piaget's opinion, the so-called egocentric speech of the child is in fact socially oriented speech, i.e., he substantiated the thesis of the initial sociality of children's speech. Vygotsky also formed the idea of ​​the primary initial fusion in a small child of two forms of speech that are clearly differentiated in adults: speech for others (external sound speech) and speech for oneself (internal silent speech). Vygotsky spoke about the age-related differentiation of these two speech functions, about the isolation of speech for oneself and speech for others from a common undifferentiated speech function that fulfills both of these functions at an early age in almost exactly the same way. From this point of view, what Piaget called egocentric speech is inner speech already to some extent separated in a functional and structural sense, which, however, in its manifestation has not yet completely separated from social speech. In other words, egocentric speech is a mixed, transitional form. In its function, it is already to a certain extent separated from social speech. On the psychological side, this is also already an independent form of speech, but not completely, since it is not yet recognized as inner speech and is not distinguished by the child from speech for others. As development progresses, the structure and mode of activity of inner speech become more and more definite, and it differs more and more from external speech. In the end, its external sounding side dies off, and egocentric speech finally turns into an internal one. Thus ends the rather lengthy differentiation of the two types of speech from their common source. (According to the materials of N. I. Chuprikova.)

Speech as the main mechanism of interaction with society performs the following functions:

1) communicative is a function of speech, reflecting its role in communication. Through speech, a person communicates, starting from childhood, when his speech is situational and expresses the necessary minimum of information, often incomprehensible to others, ending with full-fledged adult speech, which is a flexible mechanism for communicating with individuals and with society as a whole;

2) planning - from the point of view of this function, speech acts as a means of planning and regulating the behavior of the child;

3) iconic - speech makes it possible to replace the missing object with a certain symbolic meaning that reveals the functional purpose of the specified object;

4) expressive - the emotionality of speech, its earliest and most important component. A small child, who does not yet know how to hide his emotions and does not see the need for it, fills his primitive speech with an emotional context that allows adults to intuitively understand what is being said. The expressiveness of speech makes it expressive, more intuitive and interesting.

LECTURE No. 15. Problems of childhood

One of the main problems that arise in communicating with a child in the process of his development is child aggression. In psychology, the problem of aggression has been studied by many specialists. Its development was and is being carried out within the framework of various directions. Therefore, there are many different concepts, the developers of which offer their own methods for correcting this psychological phenomenon.

Aggressiveness can be defined as the desire of one being to harm another. In the animal world, it is a means of asserting one's dominance among one's own kind, recognizing the strength, power and authority of one or another individual. This is its biological meaning. In humans, aggression has always been assessed as a negative phenomenon. A person should not live by making others suffer and even more so by enjoying it.

Children's aggressiveness - a phenomenon specific and by no means inevitable. One way or another, psychologists distinguish 3 forms in which aggressive behavior can manifest itself:

1) aggressive actions;

2) verbal aggression;

3) aggressive thoughts, intentions that develop in two directions - on oneself and on others.

In preschool children, the first two forms (aggressive actions and verbal aggression) are more common than others. Parents and teachers try to punish and re-educate children who direct their aggression towards others, that is, fighters, bullies, ignorant, foul-mouthed. But in practice there are other forms of manifestation of aggression.

It is undoubtedly necessary to react to the manifestation of aggression in young children, but it is also possible to prevent the formation of such a character trait in them. To do this, there are a lot of different methods and developments. But first of all, you need to try to find the cause yourself.

Children have a limited choice of sources of behavior patterns, this is, first of all, a family that can develop an aggressive behavior in a child, develop it and consolidate it. Often this is caused by the psychological rejection of the child by the parents, the unwillingness to participate in its development and upbringing, which the child perceives on a subconscious level and, in turn, tries to overcome it using any available means, including aggression. Also, the family instills the norms and rules of behavior both in a formal form, through communication, and in an informal way - by their own example. And the aggressive behavior of one of the parents can be perceived by the child as the norm.

Peers can be another source of behavioral model. There are two scenarios for the emergence of aggressive behavior. The first situation is when the child realizes the benefits of aggressive behavior, the permissiveness and impunity of which can lead to the consolidation of this feeling in the subconscious. The second situation is revenge, when, through aggression, the offended person tries to punish the offender. With some contributing factors, the second model can develop into the first, i.e., the offended person can become an offender, having understood all the privileges of this position and feeling the possibility of consolidating the status of "strong" among his peers around him.

The third source of an example of aggressive behavior is the so-called symbolic images - television, books, toys, the influence of which is no longer disputed.

The main problem that arises in such situations is the inability of parents to prevent aggression on the part of the child and determine its cause.

Physical punishment is often used for educational purposes. However, the child, following the example of his parents, begins to use force towards weaker children in order to achieve his own goals. And if this is not stopped at the very beginning, he can continue to use force to achieve his goals.

However, the opposite of physical punishment is the excessive pampering of the child, who is allowed everything, and along with such feelings as intolerance, selfishness and permissiveness, aggression also appears, in this case directed both at the weaker child and at the parents.

But can any child be called aggressive? There are a number of indicators of a child's aggression:

1) in most situations, control of emotions is not exercised;

2) all emotions are weakly manifested, except for anger;

3) not responsible for their actions, a tendency to blame others for their mistakes;

4) hypertrophied self-esteem;

5) a sharp reaction to a negative assessment of their actions;

6) physical, verbal threats to others;

7) cruelty towards animals;

8) deliberate display of disobedience;

9) excessive envy and jealousy.

Children's tears is a quite common phenomenon. This is a kind of language, learned by a child in infancy and successfully used at a later age. But even such a familiar phenomenon as tears becomes a problem for parents and others. Crying only adds to the arsenal of human means of communication, making it more diverse, flexible and universal. Another thing is that not everyone has access to his techniques, since they are difficult to understand and correctly interpret. It is then that the first results of unsuccessful interaction with adults are supplemented and distorted by shades of resentment, disappointment, and a desire to strengthen the evoked reaction.

The reactions of a child at a crisis age are sometimes revealed with great force and sharpness, especially if they are brought up incorrectly. Usually a child who has been denied something or who has not been understood shows a sharp increase in affect, often ending with the child lying on the floor, starting to scream furiously, refusing to walk, kicking the floor, but no loss of consciousness, no enuresis, no there are no other signs characterizing epileptic seizures. It is only a tendency (which makes the reaction hypobulic), sometimes directed against certain prohibitions, refusals, etc., and is expressed, as it is usually described, in a certain regression of behavior; the child, as it were, returns to an earlier period (when he throws himself on the floor, flounders, refuses to walk, etc.), but he uses this, of course, in a completely different way.

Any person cries when he feels bad, when something greatly upsets him, tears are an external manifestation of frustration. Often it is difficult for an adult to hold back tears, and a child does not even have the motivation to hold them back, not to mention the opportunity. Children do not know that they need to hide their suffering and feelings, on the contrary, they very often cry too loudly in order to draw the attention of their parents to their grief and arouse pity and compassion in them. And it is not qualitatively correct to demand that the child stop crying, because there are reasons for this, and the child expects help, pity and love from you, and not screams, and even more so punishments. It is necessary to explain to the child that everything can be corrected, to switch his attention to another object, and most importantly, first of all, to talk affectionately.

Children's crying has many shades and meanings: crying-fear, crying-offense, crying-pain, crying-desire, crying-grief, crying is a way to attract attention, crying-discontent, crying-whim, crying-manipulation, crying-demand freedom, crying of discomfort, crying of misunderstanding by others, crying of disappointment, crying of not achieving the desired, crying - awareness of the impossibility of something, etc.

Each of these reasons for a child is a very important aspect of life - he fell, got hurt, a toy broke, did not go for a walk - for him it's all irreparable and in his eyes there is no way out of this situation, since he lives today: "I want today and now." And if one of the parents finds a way out of the situation that caused tears - the toy can be repaired, go for a walk tomorrow and not just walk, but to the zoo, etc. - then the tears will subside, and he will forget about them in a minute.

Only for an outsider's ear, crying is an unpleasant irritant, a kind of cacophony of sounds - from sobs and intermittent breathing to howls and roars. Close people are able to isolate in it not only a call for help, but often a specific reason that gave rise to tears. By the timbre, loudness, modulations of crying, they are able to determine that the child fell and hurt himself, that he was offended unfairly, or he did not have time somewhere.

Therefore, it is very important to be able to understand what he wants from the crying of a child, since a crying baby speaks with difficulty, if at all capable of it, and his facial expressions are distorted by the general expression of suffering. If adults by any means try only to stop this process, since the tears, screams, crying of children get on their nerves, then they risk not only increasing the distance between themselves and the child, but erecting a real wall of indifference and misunderstanding.

We can distinguish several general categories of crying in terms of the reasons that give rise to them, and give options for stopping crying.

Cry-despair - when an event happened in the understanding of the child that he cannot influence: fright (something scared him, and there is a person nearby who can complain about it), loss (lost his favorite toy), prohibition (forbidden to climb on the table). In this case, it is necessary to switch the child's attention to a completely different subject, which will certainly be interesting for him.

crying pain - there can be a lot of reasons for pain, but it's one thing when a child falls and hits - such pain passes quickly, and another thing when he gets sick and his stomach hurts, or his teeth grow - such pain will last for a long time. In the first case, you just need to gently calm the child, sit with him, tell something, just pay attention to him, and the tears will pass. In the second case, it is necessary to relieve the pain as soon as possible and, most importantly, in no case scold him, you cannot demand to stop crying, this will cause the child even more frustration, because there will also be resentment against the person who does not want to help him. In this case, you can read him a fairy tale about a fearless hero (heroine) who endured pain (or imprisonment), and compare the child with this hero (heroine), tell him that he is just as brave and strong.

Crying resentment - Children, like adults, can suffer not only from physical pain, but also from loneliness, unfair treatment, indifference, and much more. And crying in this case is more like sobbing. Here, too, a method of distraction can be used, however, a child’s feelings of resentment can accumulate, the task of parents is to recognize the signs of resentment in time and either change something in their behavior or explain to the child that there is no reason for resentment.

Crying caprice - it is a mistake to think that the crying of a child is an intentional and well-thought-out action. He cries from the fact that he wants something very much, but this something is not given to him. He begins to get upset, because all his thoughts are occupied by the desired object, and nothing else interests him now, as a result of which he begins to cry, and if measures are not taken in time, his crying can turn into hysteria. The only possible way out in such a situation on the part of the parents is to remove the child's concentration on the desired object.

The crying of a child up to a certain age is a natural state, because there is always something that causes him resentment, pain, fear, etc. However, there are children who obviously cry more often and more than others. A well-known Czech psychologist figuratively calls them "a vale of tears." They shed tears for any reason, sympathizing with the characters of their favorite fairy tale or movie, seeing a dead bug or bird, hearing loud, irritated exclamations, facing difficulties or injustice, weeping inconsolably, having experienced physical pain or entering into a conflict interaction with someone.

The fathers and mothers of such children experience constant unrelenting anxiety for them. But how can you help these children?

There is no single answer here and cannot be. However, it can be said with certainty that sensitivity and vulnerability are signs of a specific mental make-up of such children, properties of their nervous system. You cannot change these innate features at will. And even more so, such means of educational influence as persuasion, reproaches, punishments, ridicule will not help. Any violent measures will only cause greater tension, excitement, which means that they will weaken the child’s nervous system even more, take away his strength, self-confidence. Even the most loving parents cannot protect their children from all life's troubles.

Therefore, the best tactic in dealing with hypersensitive children is to give them the right to remain as they are, not to show their irritability in response to their incessant tears, roars and cries. But to be with them, to let them feel your readiness to help - this is very important for such children. You can try to switch the baby's attention to something else, but not abstract, but purely concrete (a different type of activity, a different social circle, give him a simple but clear subject task). As a rule, excessively high sensitivity passes with time. It is unlikely that someone will remain tearful, emotionally insecure for life. When the child begins to actively form the mechanisms of volitional regulation of his behavior (usually this happens by the age of 10-15), then the undesirable effects will disappear by themselves, without special efforts on the part of adults.

The best advice to parents and grandparents is patience and more patience. And do not forget that high emotional sensitivity is closely related to responsiveness, kindness, cordiality, readiness to help, stand up for the weak, and these are very valuable human qualities.

Therefore, no matter how strange this call sounds - listen to the children's crying, delve into its meaning, and do not try to interrupt it as soon as possible, dry the children's tears. Crying and tears are the language of children's communication, so do not be deaf to it just because you have forgotten how to speak it yourself.

LECTURE No. 16. The influence of sign-symbolic means on the development of the human psyche in ontogenesis

As a person learns the signs of a language, they acquire the following characteristics:

1) subject binding - signs replace the designated object, absorb its characteristics, are its speech model.

2) value - concentrate, summarize in themselves generalized concepts that are similar in their functional purpose.

Any object is an object of a certain set of operations, values, methods that a person uses, perceiving, using or referring to this object. It represents a certain value formed in the human mind, attributed to this subject. An object cannot exist in the human psyche regardless of its meaning, but the meaning can replace the object, have its functions and properties.

Meaning develops in ontogenesis, is improved and filled with new knowledge. Initially, the meaning acquires meaning as a result of direct acquaintance with the object, phenomenon, a certain sign-symbolic image is attributed to it. Further, as one gets acquainted with the properties and attributes of an object, phenomenon, the value absorbs the acquired knowledge. Later, as new signs are learned, certain meanings are assigned to them, they form new meanings. The images, united in a structured system, form a figurative-symbolic system of representations of memories of the past or a possible future.

The cognitive functions of a person are properly developed using sign-symbolic representations, his thinking acquires figurativeness, versatility. Thanks to the accumulation in the mind of a person of images, symbols and their inherent meanings, properties and functional features, a person has the ability to analyze the information received, draw analogies, make assumptions, and ultimately think, presenting in his mind a complete picture created from cognized images, grouped in due order.

In order to develop the ability to cognize new phenomena, objects, concepts in a child, it is necessary to acquaint him with the real carrier of the meaning of this phenomenon or concept or their image. Parents (teachers) can comment on the actions that the child needs to perform, thereby setting the right path for researching this phenomenon. Over time, it is necessary to transfer the function of speech accompaniment of the process to the child, switch it to independent work. After that, as a task, ask the child to comment on the work done already in the absence of the phenomenon, based on memories, images formed in the mind. Then you can ask to draw analogies, make assumptions about the possibility of transferring the acquired skills to work with another phenomenon. Subsequently, when analyzing the work done, the child will remember the actions performed and the conclusions drawn in the form of a complex of images associated with this phenomenon.

G. A. Glotova in the study "Man and Sign" formulated theoretical provisions that explain the facts and phenomena associated with the development of the human psyche. They are referred to S. V. Malanov in his book "The development of skills and abilities in preschool children. Theoretical and methodological materials."

The mechanisms for maintaining all the basic forms of life in animals and humans are determined, formed, fixed and transmitted by various means and methods:

1) in animals, the main forms of life activity are determined mainly by the genetic program that is embedded in the animal's body. In humans, the main forms of life activity are determined by sign-symbolic codes that are outside of a person and which a person must master;

2) animals have the ability to slightly modify hereditarily-genetically predetermined forms of life. In humans, genetically fixed elements of life activity can only slightly modify the forms of life activity given from the outside;

3) in animal species, development proceeds along the path of differentiation and the formation of sign-symbolic formations and means.

The concept of language and sign can have three interrelated meanings. Accordingly, three main types of sign-symbolic actions should be distinguished:

1) in a broad sense - the entire reality surrounding a person, the real acts of a person's life, in which he acquires the mechanisms of his own individual life (other people, tools, consumer goods, etc.). Mastering the mechanisms of sign-symbolic actions of the first type is based on the vital activity of the organism itself - the mechanism of respiration, digestion, etc.;

2) in an intermediate sense - such properties of other people and objects that form the mechanisms of the analyzer-orientational activity of a person on the basis of natural anatomical and physiological formations of the human body (natural speech, facial expressions, gestures, visual images, smells, emotional experiences, etc.). ). Mastering the mechanisms of sign-symbolic actions of the second type is based on the analyzer (sense organs) level of vital activity;

3) in a narrow sense - specially selected objects external to the human body (sign-symbolic means), maximally adapted to fulfilling and increasing the efficiency of the reflective function and having only one application - to reflect something qualitatively different (writing, mathematical, chemical and other sign-symbolic systems). Mastering the mechanisms of sign-symbolic actions of the third type is based on the inclusion of a person in active forms of communication and activities with other people. The historical development of languages ​​and signs, as well as their assimilation by man in ontogenesis, goes in the direction from signs in the broad sense through signs in the intermediate sense to signs in the narrow sense.

Man, as a material carrier of the ways and mechanisms of human life, is genetically the primary "sign" for an infant. In interaction with other people, each person implements four main interrelated functions that may be unconscious or conscious:

1) to be familiar to another person - patterns of behavior, self-regulation, lifestyle;

2) to be familiar to oneself - orientation in the mechanisms of one's behavior;

3) treat another person as a sign - orientation in the meaning and sense of the behavior of another person;

4) treat oneself as a sign - orientation in the meaning and meaning of one's own behavior.

Objects cognized by man and sign-symbolic means begin to represent a certain single class of objects: "object-reflector". This allows the use of sign-symbolic means for the knowledge of all other objects of this class.

At every historical moment, behind every sign formation there are mechanisms of the best and most effective ways of working with certain objects. Such modes of activity can be internalized by the subject in various forms:

1) in the forms of schemes of actions with objects;

2) in the form of action schemes with images of objects;

3) in the form of action schemes with external sign formations;

4) in the form of action schemes with images of symbolic formations.

Such schemes of action can be learned by a person:

1) at the level of their reproduction and functioning;

2) at the level of their creative use, development and improvement.

The internalization mechanism includes:

1) the transition from collective forms of activity to individual ones: the formation of stable individual internal mechanisms for the implementation of external practical activities in the process of implementing such activities together with other people;

2) the transition from material forms of action to ideal ones: the process of transition from actions with objects to actions with their images, as well as actions with substitutes for such actions and images - signs and symbols.

LECTURE No. 17. Children's fears

By the end of preschool age, the child's behavior begins to change dramatically. If earlier the baby carelessly indulged in games, running around, and the desire to move, make noise was one of his main desires, if he was very little interested in the events taking place around him, and he still did not catch the relationship between phenomena, and the patterns by which phenomena flow are still quite were inaccessible to him, then gradually the child comprehends the world with its laws, interdependencies, mutual transitions, contradictions and complexities. And this first comprehension of the world is largely stimulated by feelings that are called intellectual. These feelings arise in the process of learning about the world around us, in the process of solving the problems that a person faces in life. This is both surprise at a complex or incomprehensible phenomenon, and the desire to learn something new, not yet known, and doubt about the correctness of the solution found, and joy about the discovery made, confidence or uncertainty about the validity of a particular conclusion, etc. The listed feelings are far from unambiguous, they differ in their content, in complexity, and therefore, naturally, they do not immediately arise in a child. Some of them are formed and manifest already in preschool age, others can be observed only in an adult.

But still, the baby begins to experience surprise at the incomprehensible and unknown, joy in solving even the simplest, but already a problem, an inquisitive desire to learn, a feeling of pleasure from his first, still timid intellectual actions. By 4-5 years earlier, almost indifferent to everything, except for games, the baby suddenly begins to literally bombard us with questions: "Why is the Moon now round, now it becomes sharp?"; "Where do the stars come from?"; "And who shakes the trees?"; "What is the border, why is it being guarded, who lives abroad, what kind of border is it?"; "Why do fish live in water, and why do they die if they are pulled out of the water? And how does it die? What do fish eat? Is an octopus also a fish? Is a whale not a fish, and how can it be?". In a preschool child, in the process of cognizing reality, an emotional component is included that makes this process excitingly interesting. Therefore, the child does not just observe events - he wants to know their cause, he is interested in finding out what is happening around him and why this way and not otherwise.

The child is full of confidence in the words of an adult, convinced that mom, dad, grandmother know everything, and no matter what they are asked, they can give an exhaustive and clear answer.

Everything excites the child, he longs to hear the answer to everything, and therefore he teases the adult: “Why?”, “Why?”, “Why?”. And here the position of an adult should be absolutely clear: either an accurate, clear, understandable answer for a child of this age, or a reference to the fact that this phenomenon is still not entirely clear to adults, or a conscious veil of what the child should not yet know. Sometimes, at the same time, you yourself have to look into the encyclopedia or into the relevant reference books, books, go to the library in order to explain to the child what he is so insistently asking about.

But still, in those situations where the content or cause of the phenomenon can be easily established by the child himself without the help of an adult, our insistent demands are simply necessary: ​​“And you think about it yourself”, “Look carefully for yourself, maybe you will guess”; "Try to do it yourself, you can already do it." It is in this way that we will stimulate in the child the desire to independently learn something, guess something, establish something general, natural, which will then be inextricably connected with intellectual feelings, and in the future will become the basis of interest, curiosity, and then creativity. But you can never answer a child’s questions: “Leave me alone,” “Don’t bother me with your stupid questions,” “I’m busy, then.” And "later" is no longer necessary, because if the interest in knowledge is not supported in time, warmed up and kindled, then it will be too late. It is good if the child himself strives for knowledge, he himself looks for something in books, asks others. And if he does not have this passionate desire to know? That’s when we will face: “I don’t want to learn this hated chemistry, I won’t solve problems, I’m tired”, “I won’t read War and Peace - just what I watched on TV is enough.” And we worry, we worry , nervous, horrified: "The son does not want to study! I would really like to finish 10 classes, but at least I made it to 8!"; "For no reason, my daughter does not want to finish the ten-year school, I rested - I will go to work in trade: it's more interesting than cramming all day!" Maybe the reason for this is - that indifference to the child's questions, to his interests, to his greedy and disinterested desire to know, which we so thoughtlessly suppressed when he was small?

It is necessary to support this nascent sense of knowledge in the child, to stimulate curiosity, to awaken a sense of surprise at the unknown, the ability to see the new, to understand the incomprehensible, to arouse an independent desire to understand the unclear, to make the unknown known to oneself. Such feelings will further stimulate the intellectual search of the child. Already at preschool age, the process of thinking begins to develop, and then it will occupy an increasing place in the child's psyche, and therefore intellectual feelings, inextricably linked with the process of thinking, will be more and more necessary for the child. They will become the basis of his interests, and hence his life goals, they will stimulate not only educational activities and the process of cognition, but also creativity. “No matter how unstable and shaky the mental life of a child may seem to us (especially in the early years), we still must not forget that the child “from two to five” is the most inquisitive creature on earth and that most of the questions with which he addresses us, is caused by the urgent need of his tireless brain to comprehend the surroundings as soon as possible, "writes K. I. Chukovsky.

But if intellectual feelings are only formed at preschool age, then moral ones already reach a certain “maturity”. We have already said that by the age of 6, a child quite definitely manifests a feeling of compassion, that he already experiences this feeling and, under its influence, acts accordingly in relation to the people around him. In preschool children, a sense of shame also begins to take root, the first elements of conscience are formed as an acute feeling of guilt, a feeling of sympathy for a peer develops into a stable attachment, the child is acutely experiencing separation from his mother, father, and loved ones, he misses being deprived of communication with peers, may be offended, feel jealous in relationships with friends, i.e., the palette of his feelings becomes more and more bright and multi-colored. All this indicates that the child gradually masters all those emotional states that are characteristic of a person. In communicating with peers, relatives, acquaintances and strangers, the child experiences various feelings: joy, resentment, anger, fear, sadness, compassion, pity, shame, etc. Some of them are fleeting, transient, others leave some trace in the child’s psyche , others are firmly and thoroughly fixed and can make themselves felt after a long period of time. Especially often this happens with a sense of fear. In the special pedagogical literature, the facts of the manifestation of a feeling of fear in children are described in sufficient detail, and in the medical literature, the nervousness of children as a consequence of such fears. The first manifestations of this feeling (or maybe not feelings yet?) appear in a very young child: he may be frightened by some sharp sound, he may experience fear in some new and unusual conditions for him, he may even be frightened the unexpected appearance of a known object. As the child develops, the feeling of fear does not disappear, it only changes and switches to other objects. Yes, indeed, some fears go away when children get older, but some remain, and remain for a long time.

From the memories of adults, we can better understand our own baby and learn some lessons for ourselves. First of all, the fact that the fear experienced by the child is not such an innocent feeling, and if the baby cries, rests, if he comes into an affective state, it is worth considering whether it is necessary to drag him right now for vaccination, whether it is necessary for a long and thorough to scold or beat for some act, whether it is necessary to keep in eternal fear. After all, in some unknown way, the often experienced fear, and especially if it is the fear of punishment, gradually "spreads", fetters the initiative, the will of the child, restrains his freedom, kills independence and self-confidence. A strong feeling of fear can forever "pierce" into the child's psyche, a person will experience acute attacks of fear not only in real situations, but also in imaginary ones. Of course, there are many situations in which a child can be frightened and which, unfortunately, we, parents, are simply unable to foresee: a dog suddenly attacked a child, he saw a snake in the forest, he was frightened of a thunderstorm, he became scared in a dark room. But there are also situations that are subject to us. Of course, it’s not worth punishing a child because of every trifling incident, let alone beating him; you shouldn’t subject a child to severe punishment because of every bad grade, it’s better to try to find out the reasons for poor progress. It is worth considering whether to leave a small child alone at home, especially in winter, when dusk comes early. There is no need to intimidate the child with injections, doctors, police - such a measure is unlikely to give positive results. Still, we ourselves cause a lot of fears in children, either due to a lack of understanding of what can frighten a child, or because of our cruelty, or because of simple carelessness. Think about whether there is something in your behavior towards your child that gives rise to his fears. There is a lot of evidence that the cause of such ailments in children as neurosis, stuttering, insomnia, irritability, that such character traits as cowardice, timidity, lack of confidence in oneself and one's abilities, lies in those acutely affective experiences of fear that the child experienced in his life. communicating with people or in their perception of the surrounding reality.

Parents very often turn to a neuropsychiatrist and explain that the child began to stutter or became “nervous” after a huge dog jumped out from behind the fence and barked loudly; another began to wake up at night, calling for his mother, screaming after a goat chased him; the third is naughty after the older brother changed into an inside-out sheepskin coat and roared like a bear. For a long time it was believed that the cause of neurosis in a child is exclusively fright, especially in an impressionable, sensitive child with a weak nervous system. However, although a neurosis in a child develops for the most part after a psychic trauma or fright, the causes of a nervous breakdown are more complex and are connected with the entire process of education. It makes sense to dwell on these reasons in more detail, since it turns out that many of them are caused by mistakes in education. There are enough events that can cause fear in a child, but it is interesting that not every child can recognize the same event as a feeling of fear, and, moreover, it is often not the event itself that causes fear, but that frightening assessment given to him by adults. That is why a calm reaction of parents is necessary even in those cases when the situation can really cause a feeling of fear in the child. After all, children are braver than us adults: they are not afraid to fall from the balcony, hang from the railing of the stairs, not at all afraid to roll over, fly high on a swing. Children are not afraid simply because they are not yet aware of the dangers - they do not assess distances, do not anticipate pain, do not understand that they can fall. A child can calmly stand near the fire, but it is enough for him to experience the pain of a burn at least once, so that he becomes afraid of everything hot. Of course, we must warn possible dangers in advance: "do not approach the stove", "do not touch the matches", "get off the windowsill, otherwise you will fall", "do not tease the dog - it will bite." We say all this calmly, explaining to the child in a friendly and accessible way. But as soon as we show our horror, discover anxiety, anxiety, and the child after us can experience an affective state of fear. Doctors advise, in order to protect children from nervous breakdowns, to treat as calmly as possible any kind of incident that can frighten a child, explaining that there is nothing terrible in them, not to intimidate children, try, if possible, to fulfill a reasonable request of the child, expressed in a calm manner, and in at the same time, watch carefully that nervous manifestations never bring him any benefits.

The medical literature also describes the so-called obsessive fears in children. But if the child does not experience an acute condition with all the symptoms of affect (trembling, pallor, dilated pupils, cold extremities, etc.), then you can not really be afraid - there is nothing neurotic here. But if the fear is really intrusive, and the child cannot get rid of it, if he trembles with horror every time he encounters objects that cause him a feeling of fear, then it is necessary to consult a neuropsychiatrist. This is also important because soon the child will go to school.

Personality crises of 1 year, 3 and 7 years are of great importance for the further development of the child. Therefore, it is very important that adults treat the child with understanding and patience at this time. To do this, it is recommended to avoid extremes in communicating with the child (you can’t allow the baby to do everything or forbid everything). It is important to coordinate the style of behavior with all family members. It is impossible to ignore what is happening to the child, but at the same time, one must try to explain to him that his parents and other relatives have other things to do than take care of him, and that he can help solve some problems. It is important to give the child to do tasks on his own so that he feels his autonomy. It is necessary to encourage his initiative, to encourage him (if not). But at the same time, the child should always feel the support and approval of a significant adult for him. It must be remembered that prohibition and raising the voice are the most ineffective means of education, and try to do without them.

When the child becomes a little older, it is important to expand the circle of acquaintances of the child, more often give him instructions related to communication with other adults and peers. At the same time, the child's self-confidence should be strengthened. But we must remember that the child imitates adults in his behavior and actions, and try to set him a good personal example. However, all this is possible only if the child has a close emotional contact with an adult (parent).

Going to school is considered a turning point in a child's life. If earlier, in the preschool period, children consider themselves practically free, then at school they are immediately presented with a number of specific requirements, primarily of an organizational nature. Their life is subject to a system of rules. The child must not only regularly receive new knowledge, new information, sometimes in a very large volume, but also bear a certain responsibility to teachers, parents and classmates. All this, of course, leads to stressful situations. All children experience this differently. Some people take a long time to get used to a new environment.

The main neoplasm of primary school age is abstract verbal-logical and reasoning thinking, as well as the ability of children to arbitrarily regulate their behavior and control it. The first helps the child to further master scientific concepts and operate with them. And the second becomes an important quality of the child's personality.

At preschool age, there is a conscious control of behavior, but volitional actions are often interspersed with unintentional actions. Also during this period, the ability to keep the goal in the spotlight is laid.

In addition, self-regulation develops, children learn to control their behavior to a certain extent. Reflection develops, that is, the child's ability to realize what he is doing and to argue for each of his actions. He has an internal plan of action. Skills of reading, writing, the ability to perform mathematical calculations are accumulated.

Self-confidence is also formed, or, conversely, in case of difficulties, self-doubt. At the same stage, the level of self-esteem is formed. There are new relationships in the team, class, new authorities. Most often it is the teacher. Games occupy a secondary position. At this time, the child should be actively involved in domestic and social work in order to master the skills of domestic work.

LECTURE No. 18. The influence of family and upbringing on the formation of personality

family education, as the main function of the family in relation to the child, is a system that forms and instills a normative, ethical, moral, mental base for the child being brought up.

The family at the initial stages of a child's life acts as the dominant structure that influences the entire life activity and development of the child. It performs the following tasks:

1) creating conditions for the optimal growth and development of the child;

2) protection of the child from socio-economic, psychological, aggressive-physical factors;

3) intuitive learning to create a family, maintain well-being in it, the correct attitude towards the elders and the upbringing of children using the example of the already existing order of this family;

4) education of self-respect, self-sufficiency, self-esteem.

Family education itself is also a complex system and has the following principles:

1) the child must be involved in the functioning and routine of the family as an equal member of it;

2) education should be carried out reasonably and humanely in a trusting environment;

3) the principles of education should not contradict each other (even if the principles are expressed by different members);

4) in the process of upbringing, each family member should help the child in necessary matters.

5) treat the child as a person with an unstable personal system of norms and orders, do not demand the impossible from him, protect his peace in every possible way, creating a healthy and calm atmosphere within the family.

In family education, in addition to principles, methods are distinguished. In the first place - a personal example. In addition to the example, methods include trust, love, assignment, traditions, control, humor, praise, empathy, discussion, empathy, etc.

The family carries out education and develops in the child the mental, physical, moral, moral, ethical sides of the personality.

The use of physical punishment as an educational measure is unacceptable. The use of force leads to the development of psychological, physical, moral complexes and injuries in a child, which can lead to a complication of the child's communication both with punishing parents and with other people. The child may become withdrawn, abrupt, incredulous. This phenomenon stands out as a separate phenomenon called child abuse syndrome.

In psychology, several types of families are traditionally distinguished:

1) a prosperous family;

2) a disintegrating family;

3) broken family;

4) the family is in conflict;

5) the family is incomplete.

Wealthy family - a family that implements hyper-custody. Children in such families, as a rule, are fastidious, capricious, infantile, poorly assimilating worldly principles.

The disintegrating family also characterized by overprotection. This breeds neglect; children do not develop social skills. These children grow up to be parasites.

disintegrated the family is characterized by emotional rejection (upbringing like Cinderella.) The child is not loved or does not show feelings for him in any way. Children become obsessive, some children become embittered, take revenge on adults. Such children go to the world of fabulous fantasies, in which they are surrounded by love.

conflict family characterized by conflicting upbringing. Children become two-faced, take the side of the parent whose point of view it is beneficial for them to support, and, ultimately, acquire a neurosis.

Incomplete family characterized by a dry and strict upbringing. Children become obsessive and hardened.

Any conflict in the family, not to mention its deformation, adversely affects the psyche of the child. There are two types of family deformation: structural и psychological.

Structural deformation - Violation of the integrity of the family, fragmentation and separation caused by the death of one of the parents, leaving the house of one of the family members, divorce of parents, etc.

Psychological deformation - violation of the integrity of the value system, the presence of non-normative attitudes, misunderstanding of each other by family members, may be caused by addiction of one of the family members to drugs or alcohol, joining a religious sect, boycott by parents to each other, etc.

The influence of the mother on the development of the child is fundamental. There are the following types of mothers:

1) mother"The Snow Queen" - mother is cold, impregnable, commanding, adamant;

2. XNUMX) "unter Prishibeev" - mother, constantly punishing, rude, often resorting to physical punishment;

3) mother-"hen" - guardian;

4) mother "Princess Nesmeyana" - a mother of principle, who loves to lecture, always worried about something, ironic;

5. XNUMX) "mad mother" - an eccentric mother, making an elephant out of a fly, neurotic;

6) mother-"eternal child" - constantly dramatizes the situation, dependent, touchy. Gives his child on bail to a stronger one, anyone who is ready to take responsibility.

In psychology, five styles of parenting are distinguished:

1) authoritarian - complete suppression of the will of the child, complete control of his actions by the parents, restriction of independence, the use of physical punishment. In such a family, a child can grow up morally depressed, lack of initiative, relying on others in everything. In the case when a child tries to resist this style of upbringing - he leaves home early, ceases to maintain relations with his family, is completely independent of them;

2) democratic - parents support any initiative of the child (within reasonable limits), he is given all possible assistance. The child acts as a full-fledged member of the family, however, in turn, he is required to be responsible for his actions, discipline, obedience;

3) permissive- condescending attitude to any actions and initiatives of the child. Giving it to yourself. No restrictions. Unwillingness to take part in the upbringing of the child, to support and patronize him, to share his experiences with him. The child perceives such an attitude as indifference, moves away from his parents, loses respect in him. It is possible to fall under the influence of a stronger person;

4) guardian - the adoption by the parents of all decisions for the child, excessive protection and guardianship. For parents, the child's life causes excessive anxiety, they try in every possible way to protect the child, solving all the difficulties that arise for him. In this connection, he grows up helpless, unable to make decisions on his own, spoiled, unable to fully communicate with peers. Strongly developed sense of egocentrism;

5) chaotic - unpredictability and fragmentation of educational measures. The lack of a single direction, disagreement in the requirements for the child. In such a family, the child's anxiety, self-doubt, impulsivity increase, self-esteem is lowered, self-control is sluggish, and a sense of responsibility is poorly developed.

LECTURE No. 19. The development of the psyche in ontogenesis. The driving forces of the development of the child's psyche

The impetus for the development of the human psyche is the presence of cultural, social, activity factors that surround a person in everyday life and are an integral part of the surrounding world. The development and formation of the human psyche takes him out of the category of animals into the category of intelligent thinkers. And the transfer of historical and cultural knowledge and experience of mankind, which make up the process of the formation of the psyche, radically change the structure of human activity, its personal component.

The process of development of the psyche implies the passage of the following stages by the human individual:

1) mastering the methods of manufacturing and using objects that increase the functionality of the human body (tools);

2) gaining the ability to use the cultural achievements of mankind;

3) the study and application of sign-speech means for the structuring of consciousness and the rational management of mental and emotional processes;

4) mastering the methods of personal organization, regulation of one's own behavior;

5) mastering the ways of interpersonal and social interaction.

The level of cognitive development of a person often implies the ability of a person to use the acquired experience to organize interpersonal and social interaction, apply the learned information in the form of sign-symbolic means.

A person who is able to set goals for himself with their subsequent achievement, using the acquired wide range of knowledge and developed interpersonal interaction, can be called a personally perfect person.

A person acquires a wide range of skills and knowledge in the process of education and upbringing.

In the course of the development of the child, under the influence of the specific circumstances of his life, the place that he occupies in the system of human relations changes. According to A. N. Leontiev, preschool childhood is a time of life when the surrounding world of human reality opens up before the child. It is now that he penetrates the world around him, masters it in an effective form. During this period, the child experiences his dependence on the people around him, the needs of life are satisfied by adults, and he must reckon with the requirements that the people around him place on his behavior. During this period of a child's life, the world of the people around him, as it were, breaks up for him into two circles. The first circle consists of those close people, the relationship with which determines his relationship with the rest of the world. The second circle consists of all other people, the relationship to which is mediated for the child by his relationships, which are established in the first, small circle. This happens not only in the conditions of raising a child in a family. Even if a preschooler who was brought up at home is sent to a kindergarten, and the child's lifestyle changes, psychologically, the child's activity remains the same in its main features. The relationship of children of this age to the teacher is peculiar, the child needs her attention personally to him, he often resorts to her mediation in his relations with peers. Therefore, we can say that the relationship to the teacher is included in a small, intimate circle of his communication.

A preschool child may be able to read well, his knowledge may be relatively large. But this does not and cannot erase the childlike, truly preschool in him. If the child's basic relationship to life is rearranged, for example, if he has a little sister in his arms, and the mother turns to him as her assistant, a participant in adult life, then the child's general mental make-up will change. In normal cases, the transition from preschool childhood to the next stage in the development of mental life occurs in connection with the child's entry into school. The significance of this event is very great, the whole system of life relations of the child is being rebuilt. Now he has duties not only to parents and educators, but also duties to society. These are duties, on the fulfillment of which his place in life, his social function and role, and hence the content of his entire future life, will depend. Usually the child knows about this long before the start of the teaching. However, these demands acquire a real and psychologically effective meaning for him only when he begins to study, and at first they still appear in a very concrete form - in the form of the teacher's demands. When a child sits down to prepare lessons, he feels busy doing something really important. The real place that the child occupies in everyday life, the adults around him, in the life of his family is changing.

A. N. Leontiev pointed out that the change in the place occupied by the child in the system of social relations is the first thing to be noted when trying to approach the solution of the question of the driving forces in the development of his psyche. However, in itself this place does not determine development; it only characterizes the stage already reached. What directly determines the development of the child's psyche is his life itself, the development of the real processes of this life, in other words, the development of the child's activity, both external and internal. Leontiev believed that in studying the development of the child's psyche, one should proceed from an analysis of the development of his activity, since it takes shape in the given specific conditions of his life. Only with such an approach can the role of both the external conditions of the child's life and the inclinations that he possesses be clarified. Life or activity as a whole is not made up mechanically of individual activities. Some activities are leading at this stage and are of greater importance for the further development of the personality, others are less important. Some play a major role in development, while others play a subordinate role. Therefore, it is necessary to talk about the dependence of the development of the psyche not on activity in general, but on the leading activity. A sign of the transition from one stage to another is precisely the change in the leading type of activity, the leading relation of the child to activity. A sign of leading activity is not purely quantitative indicators. Leading activity is not just the activity most frequently encountered at a given stage of development. Leading reality - this is a type of activity that is characterized by the following feature: it is an activity in the form of which other, new types of activity arise and within which differentiate. For example, learning, in the narrower sense of the word, which first appears already in preschool childhood, first appears in play, i.e., precisely in the activity that is leading at this stage of development. The child begins to learn by playing.

Leading activity - this is such an activity in which particular mental processes are formed or rebuilt. For example, in the game for the first time the processes of active imagination of the child are formed, in the teaching - the processes of abstract thinking. It does not follow from this that the formation or restructuring of all mental processes occurs only within the leading activity. Some mental processes are formed and rebuilt not directly in the leading activity itself, but also in other types of activity that are genetically related to it. For example, the processes of abstraction and generalization of color are formed at preschool age not in the game itself, but in drawing, color application, etc., i.e., in those types of activity that are only in their source associated with game activity.

Leading activity - this is the activity on which the main psychological changes in the child's personality observed in a given period of development depend in the closest way. For example, it is in the game that a preschooler defends social functions and the corresponding norms of people's behavior, and this is an important moment in the formation of his personality.

Thus, as A. N. Leontiev points out, the leading activity is such an activity, the development of which causes major changes in the mental processes and psychological characteristics of the child's personality at a given stage of his development.

The stages of development of the child's psyche are characterized not only by a certain content of the child's leading activity, but also by a certain sequence in time, that is, by a certain connection with the age of the children. Neither the content of the stages nor their succession in time is something once and for all given and unchanging. Like every new generation, so every individual belonging to a given generation finds certain conditions of life already prepared. They make possible this or that content of his activity. Therefore, although it is possible to note a certain stadiality in the development of the child's psyche, the content of the stages is by no means independent of the concrete historical conditions in which the development of the child proceeds. It depends primarily on these conditions. The influence of concrete historical conditions affects both the concrete content of one or another individual stage of development, and the entire course of the process of mental development as a whole. For example, the duration and content of that period of development, which is the preparation of a person for his participation in social and labor life - the period of education and training - historically was far from always the same. This duration varied from epoch to epoch, lengthening as the requirements of society for this period increased. This means that although the stages of development are distributed in a certain way in time, their age limits depend on their content, and this, in turn, is determined by those concrete historical conditions in which the development of the child takes place. Thus, it is not the child's age as such that determines the content of the stage of development, but the age boundaries of the stage themselves depend on their content and change along with changes in socio-historical conditions. These conditions determine what kind of activity the child becomes leading at a given stage in the development of his psyche. Mastery of the object-related activity that surrounds the child, play in which the child masters a wider range of phenomena and human relationships, systematic teaching at school, and then special preparatory or labor activity - such is the successive change of leading activities, leading relationships that can be ascertained.

The leading type of activity of the child and the real place that the child occupies in the system of social relations are interconnected. The change in this place and the change in the leading activity of the child are also closely interconnected. According to A. N. Leontiev, in the most general form, the answer to this question is that in the course of development, the former place occupied by the child in the world of human relations around him begins to be recognized by him as not corresponding to his capabilities, and he seeks to change it. . There is an open contradiction between the way of life of the child and his possibilities, which have already determined this way of life. In accordance with this, its activities are being restructured. Thus, a transition is made to a new stage in the development of his mental life.

Crises - the crisis of 3 years, 7 years, the crisis of adolescence, the crisis of youth - are always associated with a change of stages. They show in a vivid and obvious form that there is precisely an inner necessity for these changes, these transitions from one stage of the child to another. (Based on the materials of A. N. Leontiev.)

LECTURE No. 20. Change of leading activity

activity - these are processes that, carrying out one or another relation of a person to the world, meet a special need corresponding to them. These processes are characterized psychologically by the fact that what the given process as a whole (its subject) is directed at always coincides with the objective that induces the subject to this activity, i.e., with the motive. A. N. Leontiev pointed out that an important psychological feature of activity is that a special class of mental experiences is specifically associated with activity - emotions and feelings. These experiences do not depend on separate private processes, but are always determined by the subject, course and fate of the activity in which they are included.

According to A. N. Leontiev, processes called actions differ from activity. Action - this is such a process, the motive of which does not coincide with its subject (that is, with what it is directed to), but lies in the activity in which this action is included.

There is a peculiar relationship between activity and action. The motive of activity can, shifting, move to the subject (goal) of the action. As a result, the action turns into activity. This point seems to be extremely important. It is in this way that new activities are born, new relationships to reality arise. This process constitutes precisely that concrete psychological basis on which changes in leading activity arise and, consequently, transitions from one stage of development to another.

The change in the leading activity serves as the basis for further changes that characterize the development of the child's psyche. According to the conclusions of A. N. Leontiev, in order for an action to arise, it is necessary that its object (immediate goal) be recognized in its relation to the motive of the activity in which this action is included. The purpose of one and the same action can be recognized in different ways, depending on the particular motive in connection with which it arises. This also changes the meaning of the action for the subject. Let us assume that the child is busy preparing lessons and is solving a problem assigned to him. He is, of course, conscious of the purpose of his action. It consists for him in finding the required solution and writing it down. That is what his action is aimed at. How is this goal recognized, i.e., what meaning does the given action have for the child? To answer this question, it is necessary to know in what activity the given action of the child is included or, what is the same, what is the motive of this action. Perhaps the motive here is to learn arithmetic; perhaps in order not to upset the teacher; maybe, finally, just to get the opportunity to go play with comrades. Objectively, in all these cases, the goal remains the same: to solve a given problem. But the meaning of this action for the child will be different each time; therefore, his actions themselves will be psychologically different. Depending on the activity in which the action is included, it receives one or another psychological characteristic. This is the basic law of the process of development of actions.

Awareness - the child's comprehension of the phenomena of reality - occurs in connection with his activities. At each stage of a child's development, it is limited by the circle of his activity, which in turn depends on the leading relationship, on the leading activity that characterizes the given stage as a whole. As A. N. Leontiev points out, we are talking here precisely about awareness, that is, about what personal meaning this phenomenon has for the child, and not about his knowledge of this phenomenon.

According to A. N. Leontiev, the next group of changes observed in the process of child development are changes in the field of operations. operations is a way to perform an action. The operation is the necessary content of any action, but it is not identical with the action. The same action can be carried out by different operations, and vice versa, the same operations sometimes carry out different actions. This is because while the action is determined by the goal, the operation depends on the conditions in which this goal is given. An operation is determined by a task, i.e., a goal given under conditions that require a certain mode of action. It is characteristic of the development of conscious operations that, as experimental studies show, any conscious operation is first formed as an action and cannot arise otherwise. Conscious operations are first formed as purposeful processes, which only then can, in some cases, take the form of an automated skill. In order to turn a child's action into an operation, it is necessary to put the child in front of such a new goal, in which his given action will become a way to perform another action. In other words, what was the goal of this action must become one of the conditions for the action required by the new goal. (Based on the materials of A. N. Leontiev).

LECTURE No. 21. Conditions for the development of personality and changes in psychophysiological functions

Physiological functions carry out the highest form of life of the organism. This includes sensory functions, mnemonic function, tonic function, etc. According to A. N. Leontieva, no mental activity can be carried out without the participation of these functions. All these functions form the basis of the corresponding subjective phenomena of consciousness: sensations, emotional experiences, sensual phenomena, memory, which form, as it were, the subjective "matter of consciousness", sensory richness, multi-color and relief of the picture of the world in the human mind. As studies show, every function develops and restructures within the process that it performs. The development of sensations, for example, occurs in connection with the development of processes of purposeful perception. That is why sensations can be actively educated in a child, and their education cannot, by virtue of the above, consist in their simple mechanical training, in formal exercises. As A. N. Leontiev states, numerous experimental data obtained by various authors prove the fact that the development of functions depends on the specific process in which they are included. Studies have made it possible to establish that sharp shifts in the development of a function occur only if the given function occupies a certain place in the activity, namely, if it is included in the operation in such a way that a certain level of its development becomes necessary for the performance of the corresponding action. In this case, the limits of the possibility of shifts, in particular in the field of sensory functions, i.e., sensitivity, turn out to be extremely wide, so that the "normal" threshold values ​​established by classical psychophysics can be significantly exceeded. If we pass from laboratory factors obtained on adults to consideration of the facts of child development, then the process of the formation of so-called phonemic hearing in a child can serve as a sufficient illustration of what has been said. In the course of his development, the child acquires the ability to extremely finely differentiate phonemes, i.e., the significant sounds of a language, but precisely because their distinction is a necessary condition for distinguishing words similar in sound but different in meaning. The differentiation of sounds, the distinction of which is not a real way for the child to differentiate words according to meaning, remains much less perfect for him. Therefore, later, when he begins to study a foreign language, at first he does not hear at all the difference between similar phonemes that are new to him.

Thus, as A. N. Leontiev points out, the development of the child's psychophysiological functions is naturally connected with the general course of development of his activity.

With regard to the psychological definition of personality, we meet with great contradictions in science. About the concept personality different views and opinions were expressed depending on the direction in their basic views, which was held by various psychological schools.

Some of the English associationists, for example, J. Mill, understand personality as a series of representations, of which all, from the first to the last, are associatively linked to each other and can be reproduced by memory, forming, as it were, one conscious series. In this regard, memory and personality are considered as different phenomena of the same order.

On J. James personality is also a function of memory, but the essence of personality boils down to the fact that each thought is the owner of the content of all previous thoughts, and, not knowing itself, it will in turn be recognized after its obsolescence by a subsequent thought.

On B. Sidis, the pure "I" or personality, is not a series of thoughts, because an unconnected series cannot form a unity of personality; also, a person is not a simple synthesis of passing thoughts, because in each passing wave of consciousness there can be a synthesis or memory, but still not a person.

The central point of the "I" or personality lies in the fact that thought is realized and critically controlled in the very process of thinking, at the very moment of its existence. In a word, only the moment of self-consciousness makes consciousness a personality.

Other authors overly expand the concept of personality, identifying with this concept all the processes of mental activity. For example, professor Ya. A. Anfimov, speaking of the personality, or "I", notes that the characteristics of the personality include all mental processes that make up our mental abilities as a whole. Our "I" is not a separate entity in the mental life of a person: it is probably only a special function of consciousness that forms a complex picture of our spiritual world. From a strictly psychological point of view, it is a particular phenomenon in the life of consciousness, which may or may not exist. Psychology of Personality according to Anfimov, it includes in a practical sense everything that makes up the human mind, and in a scientific sense, all those most complex processes that are considered in psychology in the department of cognition, feelings and will.

Other authors saw in personality something unifying and synthesizing in mental life. By F. Janet Personality is nothing but the combination in the mental life of the individual of all the past, present and foreseeable future. Such a conclusion was made by him from an analysis of the dismemberment of mental processes in personality diseases. From his point of view, for the facts of doubling and tripling of the personality, one should recognize the coordination of mental processes as a distinctive feature. Unity of coordination and lack of coordination are the two extremes among which the personality revolves.

Some authors, who develop the same view, recognize the most complete harmony, the highest synthesis and unification as the hallmarks of personality, and consider personality itself as an expression of harmony and unity of mental functions. As indicated V. M. BekhterevIn addition to the unifying principle, personality should also be understood as the guiding principle that guides the thoughts, actions and deeds of a person. In addition to internal unification and coordination, personality as a concept contains an active attitude to the world around, based on the individual processing of external influences. In this definition, along with the subjective side, the objective side of the personality is also put forward. According to V. M. Bekhterev, in psychological matters one cannot use subjective definitions alone. Mental life is not only a series of subjective experiences; at the same time, it is always expressed by a definite series of objective phenomena. These objective phenomena, in fact, contain the enrichment that a person brings to the external world around him. Only objective manifestations of personality are accessible to external observation, and they alone constitute an objective value. By Ribotu the real person is the organism, and its highest representative is the brain, which contains the remnants of all that we were and the beginnings of all that we will be. It is inscribed with an individual character with all its active and passive abilities and dislikes, its genius, talent and stupidity, virtues and vices, immobility and activity. V. M. Bekhterev argues that from an objective point of view, a person is a mental individual with all his original features - an individual who appears to be an independent being in relation to the surrounding external conditions. Neither the originality of the mind, nor creative abilities, nor what is known as will, individually, nothing constitutes a personality, but the totality of mental phenomena with all their features, which distinguishes a given person from others and determines his independent activity, characterizes a personality from its objective side. . The mental horizon does not seem to be the same between differently educated persons, but not one of them loses the right to be recognized as a person in it, if only he manifests to one degree or another his individual attitude to the surrounding conditions, presenting himself as an amateur being. Only the loss of this self-activity makes a person completely impersonal; with a weak manifestation of self-activity, one can speak of a poorly developed or passive personality.

Personality from an objective point of view, there is nothing but an amateur individual with his own mental structure and with an individual attitude to the world around him. (Based on the materials of V. M. Bekhterev.)

Speaking of personality, they mean by it the already held and formed personality of an independent person. But it is logical to think about when this personality begins to form.

It is generally accepted to call the time of personality formation the age of 2 to 3 years. From the point of view of the behavior of the child, this is quite obvious. It is during this period of time that he begins to express his own opinion, different from the opinions of others, to try to show his own "I". However, is it possible to say that personality arises spontaneously? It is quite obvious that for such a sharp manifestation of the qualities inherent in a whole personality, a long process of latent accumulation of personal potential is necessary.

One of the main sources of obtaining the information necessary for the formation of the child's personality is the behavior and personality of the people surrounding the child. A great influence on the self-esteem of any person has the approval or disapproval of any of his actions. The personality of children whose parents often praised them, protected them, loved them, whose parents develop into the strongest and most independent personality, and children whose parents punished them did not pay due attention to them, acquire complexes and fears, receive inferior and poor-quality development. And subsequently, the lack of normal communication with parents leads to the rejection of any manifestation of attention by a person, he becomes withdrawn and sometimes rude.

After realizing himself as a person, separate from his parents, the child begins to compare himself, his qualities and the qualities of other people around him, which results in the child's desire to fulfill the requirements that parents unconsciously place on him in the first place. And depending on the success of reaching this level, he has a feeling of confidence, pride in case of success, or, on the contrary, some resentment and isolation in case of failure.

With the further development of the child's personality, he goes through several stages, such as a sharp increase in independence and deterioration in behavior. The independence of the child is logical, since he has become aware of himself, has realized his independence and is trying to show it to others, and perceives any attempt to intervene as an encroachment on his independence. Disobedience at an early age is caused by an abundance of information that the child began to understand. He is ready for more knowledge than his parents allow him, which results in deterioration of behavior, disobedience, since for a child in most cases this is the only possible manifestation of protest.

LECTURE No. 22. Causes that adversely affect the development of the child

V. M. Bekhterev indicates that the question of what influence the nature around him has on a person is very broad. In particular, there is no doubt that a temperate climate is more favorable for the development of a personality than the difficult harsh climate of the north and the hot climate of the tropics. Along with climate, geographical conditions are also important. Great deserts, unsuitable for human habitation, and all those areas where a person has to expend a lot of strength and energy to fight the surrounding nature, do not favor the development of the individual. In the same way, unfavorable soil and meteorological conditions, characterized by the endemic development of certain general diseases, cannot but have a detrimental effect on the development of the personality, undermining the physical health of the organism at the root.

Already in the anthropological features of the race lie the foundations that determine the development of the individual. Attention deserves another factor influencing the development of personality - the biological factor associated with the conditions of conception and development of the human body. Here, as V. M. Bekhterev points out, it is impossible not to note the importance in the development of the personality of those elements that are known as degeneration and which are rooted in conditions of unfavorable conception and fetal development. Whatever reasons these conditions depend on - from unfavorable psycho- or neuropathic heredity, physical deficiencies, mother's illnesses during conception and pregnancy, parental alcoholism, difficult physical and mental moments during pregnancy - their consequences are degenerative features of the offspring, which, in in the end, they boil down to the disintegration of the personality and its decline. It is quite clear that the development of personality as the highest manifestation of the psyche depends on physical conditions. It is impossible not to take into account the fact that only the harmonious development of the body and spirit ensures the correct improvement of the personality. If physical development is weak by nature, if a person from an early age is exposed to physical hardships and a whole series of common infectious diseases, especially with a protracted course, if at the same time he develops general painful lesions rooted in insufficient and malnutrition of the body, then the full flowering of personality will be delayed in one way or another. If then in adulthood physical hardships continue, then the decline of the personality is already quite clearly revealed.

General neuroses, especially hysteria and epilepsy, which develop mainly on the basis of unfavorable physical and mental moments, adversely affect the development of the personality. Some authors, not without reason, consider hysteria as a phenomenon that narrows the sphere of consciousness (F. Janet) or as an expression of personality decline (Dr. L. N. Radin). With regard to epilepsy, the influence of this neurosis on the development of the personality seems obvious already from the fact that the more severe forms of epilepsy are necessarily accompanied by the so-called degenerative epileptic character and a more or less obvious weakening of mental powers and even a state of clearly expressed dementia, leading to a gradual extinction and rebirth. personality.

Unfavorable economic conditions, which consistently lead to a physical weakening of the body, have a significant impact on the development of the personality. On the basis of this, a number of debilitating physical diseases develop, which undermine the nutrition of the body at the root and disrupt the proper development of the brain, and hence the personality. And besides these diseases, the malnutrition of the population, which undermines its physical strength and leads to the development of physical exhaustion and anemia, is a condition that contributes to the weakening of the nutrition of the brain, the rapid exhaustion of mental strength and, at the same time, prevents the full flowering of personality.

Other important factors affecting personality development are all chronic poisonings, especially those that primarily affect the brain. Alcohol, which has reached such a gigantic development in modern society, according to V. M. Bekhterev, is the evil that carries the germ of personality decline. Alcohol, paralyzing the sphere of feelings, intellect and will, undermines the fundamental foundations of the individual and is at the same time one of the most important causes leading to the development of mental illness, degeneration and crime.

Other aspects also play an important role in the development of personality. Here, first of all, we mean upbringing and education. Apparently, little attention is paid to education in general in the sense of the development of the personality, but meanwhile, is it possible to doubt that the basic features of the future personality are established for the first time by education? Incidentally, education, which plays such a prominent role in preschool age, lays the foundations for greater or lesser self-activity of the future personality, which is essential for its future fate. As for education, according to V. M. Bekhterev, in this regard, apparently, they are more concerned about cluttering up the head with knowledge, sometimes completely unnecessary, with a more or less passive attitude towards this knowledge, than about the development of criticism and independent thinking, which constitute the true guarantee of self-activity of the future personality. (Based on the materials of V. M. Bekhterev.)

The family influences the psychological and physical health of children. It plays an important, almost dominant role. It is a socio-cultural environment for the upbringing and development of the individual. Education in a family should be based on certain principles, first of all, on the principle of humane relations between its members. After all, the family is the most important institution of the socialization of society, since the child receives the first experience of communicating with the outside world in the family. And if he was not prosperous, then this will affect the further mental development. And only much later in the life of a child does a school, a street, at an older age - any groupings.

Families differ not only in composition (complete, incomplete, large, childless, etc.), but also in the nature of the relationship between family members.

Researchers distinguish different types of families. For example, M. I. Buyanov identifies the following types of families: harmonious, decaying, broken and incomplete.

Another explorer Yu. P. Azarov identifies 3 types of families: ideal, average and negative.

But most often, psychologists divide families not on the basis of well-being - disadvantage, but on the basis of educational potential. G. M. Minkovsky identifies 10 types of families:

1) educationally strong;

2) educationally sustainable;

3) educationally unstable;

4) educationally weak. There is a loss of contact with children;

5) families with a constant conflict atmosphere;

6) families with an aggressively negative atmosphere;

7) families with alcoholic, sexual demoralization;

8) criminal;

9) delinquent;

10) mentally ill.

Naturally, all adverse factors affect the development of the child's personality. In critical cases, development is inhibited, and the child does not develop at all. And all this in its totality affects the success of children in school, the position in society, among peers.

There are a number of reasons for the improper upbringing of children in the family. E. G. Eidemiller highlights the 2 most important ones:

1) mental disorders in parents often lead to improper upbringing and development of the child in the family. With such a deviation, there are reduced requirements for the child or the dominant role of parents, where the main factor is child abuse. Sometimes there is a conflicting parenting style. In society, in the presence of people, parents show excessive concern for the child, and in their absence - complete disregard. In such cases, the psychologist needs to find out the cause and nature of such deviations of the parents and trace their relationship with deviations in the upbringing and development of the child;

2) personal problems of parentsresolved at the expense of the child.

This is the most difficult for a psychologist. First of all, it is necessary to identify the personal problem of the parent. Questions and persuasion, as a rule, are futile. In such cases, the psychologist should call on all his professionalism to help. Among the problems mentioned above are the following:

1) fear of losing a child. This can be caused by difficult childbirth, a long wait for a child, pain. At the same time, parents show excessive guardianship, which is most often an annoying factor for the child;

2) lack of understanding between spouses also causes negative attitudes towards the child. Responsibility for conflicts, quarrels between mother and father is shifted to the children, which undoubtedly injures his psyche. This also includes the dissatisfaction of one spouse with the methods of educating the other;

3) projection onto a teenager of one's own qualities. At the same time, it is necessary to make a reservation that qualities can be both desirable and undesirable. So, one of the parents may struggle with real or imaginary qualities in a child that he does not recognize in himself. Such qualities can be recognized as laziness, alcoholism, aggressiveness, etc. On a subconscious level, such a person struggles with these qualities in himself. Desired qualities can also be projected, often not realized by the parent himself, childhood dreams. This is manifested in the fact that the parent imposes his point of view on the child, tries to make decisions for him;

4) expansion of parenting observed in families where relations between spouses are violated for some reason: divorce, death of one of the spouses, etc. Then the parent wants the child to become something more. This is manifested in increased attention, refusal of remarriage for the sake of the child, jealousy for friends or any other hobbies of a son or daughter, a preference for childish qualities in a teenager, and support for infantilism. In this case, parents significantly reduce the requirements for the child, considering him still small. This leads to the fact that he tries not to grow up, to look childish, pandering to the whims of his parents;

5) parenting uncertainty. In this case, we are talking about the dominant role of the child in the family. This may be due to the fact that when the parents were children, their family had a similar pattern of upbringing. As a rule, a child in such families very quickly understands that the power is in his hands, finds the weaknesses of his parents and uses this to achieve his goals. Against the background of the child, the parent looks weak and weak-willed, and he, in turn, looks self-confident and sometimes even despotic.

LECTURE No. 23. The main types of improper upbringing of a child. Mental differences in children as a consequence

With a complete lack of control during upbringing, parents go about their own business and do not pay due attention to the child, so he is forced to look for communication and support on the side, and often such children end up in unfavorable companies. The other extreme is overprotection. Parents control every step of the child, try to take part in all his affairs. Sometimes it borders on tyranny and cruel treatment. The child grows up in a constant atmosphere of anger, which naturally affects the formation of character. As a variant of this type, one can single out the type of upbringing when the child is put at the forefront, and he begins to get used to the fact that everything in the family revolves around him. Such children grow up selfish and self-confident, unable to soberly assess their real possibilities in the future.

Sometimes, from childhood, parents inspire the child that he must justify their hopes and expectations, thereby imposing on him an increased moral responsibility. As a result, children become nervous and experience psychological breakdowns.

The concept of rational education based on strict discipline penetrated family life in the XNUMXth century. All aspects of children's life began to attract the attention of parents. But the function of organized preparation of children for adult life was assumed not by the family, but by a special public institution - the school, designed to educate qualified workers and exemplary citizens.

In total, there are 7 types of improper upbringing:

1) neglect. On the part of parents: complete or partial lack of attention to the child, lack of responsibility for his actions, absence or presence of improper upbringing. On the part of the child: lack of parental authority, disregard for moral and ethical standards. In the younger preschool and primary school age, there are attempts to attract the attention of parents in the form of tantrums, hooligan behavior, and outright disobedience. At a later age - leaving home, the danger of falling into drug or alcohol addiction;

2) overprotection. On the part of parents: constant vigilant control and excessive concern for the child. Several development options:

a) indulgence to any of his desires. The child grows up spoiled, selfish, conflict, greedy, incapable of communicating with peers;

b) excessive concern for the health of the child. The child develops inferiority complexes, it is difficult to communicate with peers, closed, silent;

c) enhanced guardianship, permanent decrees, complete control, lack of independence and self-expression. The child becomes non-initiative, depressed, inactive, and in the case of a strong personality of the child - constant scandals with parents about freedom, leaving home;

3) conniving guardianship. On the part of parents: indulgence in the desires of the child, impunity for any misconduct. Shifting responsibility to others, denying any possibility of the child's guilt. On the part of the child: unsuitability, permissiveness, irresponsibility;

4) raising Cinderella. On the part of parents: indifference, lack of attention, constant reproaches and remarks. On the part of the child: jealousy for more beloved children, anger, resentment;

5) tough upbringing. On the part of parents: abuse, complete submission of the child to the will of the parents, often education with the use of physical punishment. On the part of the child: gloom, lethargy, fearfulness, hidden anger;

6) increased moral responsibility. On the part of parents: requirements and requests that do not correspond to the age of the child. The desire to see in the child responsibility, independence, independence, shifting responsibility for the affairs of other family members onto him. On the part of the child: aggressive attitude towards the guarded family member, hidden anger, aggression in case of an unstable mental state of the child. There may be situations when the child takes on the role of "head of the family." Often this style of upbringing is typical in an incomplete family, where the mother shifts responsibility to her son;

7) conflicting upbringing. On the part of parents: the use of incompatible parenting styles. Constant conflict on this ground. On the part of the child: split, spoiled, often there is an inability to develop weaknesses of character, and therefore increased insecurity and susceptibility.

Speaking about the behavior of the mother, several types of incorrect behavior can also be distinguished here:

1) the position of "head of the family" - the transfer of all the functions of the head of the family to the son, jealousy, suspicion, increased attention, the desire to constantly be aware of all the events in the life of the son. Over time, the rejection of the son's wife, complete interference in his personal, family life;

2) symbiosis - the desire to keep the child close to him as long as possible, deprive him of any manifestation of independence, understatement of his abilities. Such upbringing develops an inferiority complex in the child, does not allow full development, leads to a regression of mental development, apathy;

3) deliberate deprivation of love - ignoring the child by parents as a punishment for wrongdoing leads to attacks of aggression in the child, an attempt to express himself, forcibly force him to draw attention to himself. In the case of a weak-willed and insecure child, it leads to the appearance of inferiority complexes, a feeling of being unnecessary;

4) guilt education- the constant accusation of the child of ungrateful behavior, violation of order, poor study, etc. Causes a complex in the child, he is afraid of any manifestation of independence, fearing to be the cause of the family's troubles.

The fundamental principles that must be followed in the family, formulated P. F. Lesgaft. The primary concern of the family is to ensure the correct hygienic conditions for child development. The second condition is the absence of arbitrariness in the actions of the educator. The third requirement is the strict correspondence of words and deeds when dealing with a child. "It must be firmly remembered that the child is mainly influenced by the deed, not the word; he is so real that everything in him is formed under the influence of the actions that he sees ... ".

We must not forget that the family for the child is at the initial stage a model of society. For a child, the love of parents, trust between family members and sincerity in relationships are most important. It is also necessary to involve the child in the life of the family and consider him an equal member of it. A very important principle is the willingness to help the child in difficulties and failures, to answer questions that interest and worry him. And this applies not only to school lessons. Children need to feel loved and desired. You can not physically punish a child, no matter what he did. But it is not recommended to indulge him in all his whims. In the family, the child receives all types of education: physical, labor, mental, aesthetic and moral.

Due to deviations in the family, abnormal behavior is often formed, which requires the psychological help of a specialist.

From a biological point of view, mental disorders are a disease, which, in turn, must be investigated and treated by medicine. The prevailing factor in such diseases is genetic: chromosomal abnormalities, abnormalities of the prenatal period, genes for mental illness.

The attitude towards people suffering from mental disorders depended on a specific historical era. During the Middle Ages, they were considered from the devil. In Russia, they were called holy fools, although they did not deny certain abilities for providence and predictions, and therefore they were afraid of such people. This continued until the 1792th century. In XNUMX a French doctor F. Pinel began to investigate the insane and tried to find the roots of diseases. Already in the XIX century. physicians are seriously engaged in the classification of mental disorders. Thus the medical approach was born.

At the beginning of the XX century. a psychological approach emerged and began to develop. This problem was actively dealt with by prominent psychologists of that time, such as the German psychologist Z. Freud with his theory of the unconscious and K. Jungwho studies the collective subconscious. Many so-called currents also arose: for example, behaviorism, whose representatives believed that abnormal behavior is a reaction to external factors of the environment and upbringing.

Representatives of the cognitive direction believed that the cause of abnormal behavior is the inability of the patient to objectively assess the situation.

But in 1960, an international classification of mental disorders was adopted. They singled out neuroses that arise with internal psychological contradictions; organic psychoses - with disorders of the nervous system; functional psychoses, which have not yet been fully investigated.

Currently, many diseases have already been investigated and described. For example, Down's disease is caused by an extra chromosome of 21 pairs.

The transmission of diseases by genes depends on whether a gene is dominant or recessive. If the gene is dominant, then the disease manifests itself, but if the gene is recessive, that is, suppressed, then the child is a carrier of the disease, but it may not manifest itself during life.

Children with mental retardation have difficulty in cognitive processes. They begin to walk, talk later than children with a normal level of development. Among the forms of violation of intellectual activity in children, the following are distinguished: those associated with a violation of environmental conditions and upbringing, with prolonged asthenic conditions, with various types of infantilism, or with speech, hearing, reading and writing disorders caused by somatic diseases.

The national classification reveals significant group differences in parenting, emotional responses, sexual behavior, interests, etc., and in the performance of many aptitude tests. In all such studies, the nature and degree of difference between groups depends on the trait being studied. Since each culture or subculture creates conditions for the development of its own set of abilities and personality traits, comparing individuals on such global indicators as IQ or general emotional state may not make much sense. Races are populations that differ in the relative frequency of certain genes. They form whenever a group, for geographical or social reasons, becomes isolated. Thus, the contributions of cultural and biological factors to the origin of differences are difficult to separate. In race comparisons, mean differences between groups are much smaller than the range of individual differences within each group. Hence, the group distributions overlap significantly. It turns out that the belonging of an individual to any group serves as a poor basis for expecting a strong development of any psychological trait in him.

However, there is a division according to the mental level of development, and it is often necessary to identify certain extremes of this comparison. In case of developmental delay in children, it is necessary to identify it for timely treatment and training according to a special program. The main problem in such a choice is the identification of an indicator, a certain characteristic by which it is possible to differentiate the levels of mental development of children.

An attempt to identify children with a lagging level of development was made by A. Binet, who analyzed the abilities of students, after which he tried to accumulate data and bring them to a single indicator, i.e., to find a series of questions by answering which the child would demonstrate his level of intelligence and make a prediction about the further development of abilities. These questions were combined into tests that differ by age categories and determine the so-called intelligence quotient (IQ).

However, the applicability of the IQ as a parameter that separates children by level of development is not always relevant, since a person has many intellectual abilities that cannot be considered in combination with all the others, and IQ tests just correlate abilities with each other.

In psychology intelligence (from Latin intellectus - "understanding, understanding, comprehension") - a relatively stable structure of the individual's mental abilities. In a number of psychological concepts, intelligence is identified with a system of mental operations, with a style and strategy for solving problems, with the effectiveness of an individual approach to a situation that requires cognitive activity, with a cognitive style, etc. In modern Western psychology, the most common understanding of intelligence is as a biopsychic adaptation to existing circumstances. life (W. Stern, J. Piaget and etc.). An attempt to study the productive creative components of the intellect was made by representatives of Gestalt psychology (M. Wertheimer, W. Koehler), who developed the concept insight.

At the beginning of the twentieth century. French psychologists A. Binet и T. Simon proposed to determine the degree of mental giftedness through special tests. Their work marked the beginning of the pragmatic interpretation of intelligence, which has been widely used to date, as the ability to cope with appropriate tasks, to effectively engage in sociocultural life, and to successfully adapt. This puts forward the idea of ​​the existence of basic structures of intelligence, regardless of cultural influences. In order to improve the methodology for diagnosing intelligence, various studies of its structure were carried out (as a rule, with the help of factor analysis). At the same time, different authors distinguish a different number of basic "intelligence factors": from 1-2 to 120. Such fragmentation of the intellect into many components prevents the understanding of its integrity. C. P. Snow (1986) proposed a system of six components as a structure of intelligence:

Thinking - the ability to receive information about an object that is not amenable to direct physical perception.

Understanding - the ability to link the information received with personal experience and previously received information.

Strategy modification - the ability to adapt to changing events, make strong-willed decisions, change intermediate goals.

Analytic reasoning - the ability to consider the event under study from all sides, make a logical conclusion and bring the data to a finished structured form.

Non-standard - the desire caused as a result of the interest that has arisen in setting a goal that is different from the generally accepted ones, for obtaining intellectual pleasure.

Idiosyncratic learning - the ability to develop through training and develop teaching methods.

Domestic psychology proceeds from the principle of the unity of the intellect, its connection with the personality. Much attention is paid to the study of the relationship between practical and theoretical intelligence, their dependence on the emotional and volitional characteristics of the individual. The meaningful definition of intelligence itself and the features of the tools for measuring it depend on the nature of the corresponding socially significant activity of the individual's sphere (teaching, production, politics, etc.).

LECTURE No. 24. The role of nutrition, environment and society in child development

It has been scientifically proven that classes from early childhood, the early development of mental abilities and the ability to concentrate on something, combined with the art of constantly awakening and maintaining a child’s interest in any type of activity, contribute to the discovery and development of the talent of a new person.

Everyone knows that malnutrition harms not only the physical condition of a person. It also has a strong effect on mental and social development. Therefore, nutrition must necessarily be sufficient and complete.

Brain development studies show that malnutrition during pregnancy harms cell reproduction. This is especially significant during the period from the 10th to the 18th week of pregnancy. It is during this period that the fetal cells actively multiply and by the end of this period reach the same number as in an adult. Violations during this period are irreversible. The greater the nutritional deficiency, the lower the weight of the brain.

Lack of nutrition has an inhibitory effect on learning. Classes are often missed due to illness. Due to reduced motivation, lack of concentration, excessive tension, diligence suffers greatly. Reduced activity and apathy are also aggravated by insufficient involvement of such children in mental activity.

Complete nutrition of children and their mothers during pregnancy and breastfeeding creates the basis for the normal development of the intellect. In a society where such nutrition cannot be provided, this negatively affects the intellectual development of the younger generation.

In addition to good nutrition for a newly born baby, the normal conditions for its development are cleanliness and oxygen-rich air. This is an important influence of the environment. Stimulation of mental development in the first days of life is limited to the fact that a clean, emotionally warm external environment must be provided, free from dirt, noise, anxiety, nervousness, etc. From this, adults begin to encourage the mental development of the child.

The role of the family can hardly be overestimated in the formation and development of a person. The role of the teacher in education is immeasurably great. But how difficult and sometimes even meaningless are all his efforts if at home the child does not receive appropriate reinforcement for the efforts of the teacher. In other words, parents will make a very significant contribution to the upbringing of their child if they actively participate in his school life, his preparatory stage for it (both in terms of preparing homework, and during the preschool period in general).

The social status of the family plays a certain, although not primary, role in the formation of personality. The strategy of upbringing in the parental home and a specially created education system with its specific historical differences are the basis for higher or lower intelligence indicators. However, differences in mental development between individuals exist regardless of this. So far, it has not been proven where there are more differences in abilities: between layers or within individual layers. Many studies show that the intellectual inclinations that make it possible to achieve outstanding success belong to all social strata, and their distribution does not depend on social origin.

A positive impact on all children is the conscientious, demanding attitude of parents and teachers to their upbringing and education. In addition, the social potential accumulated over the years is more and more effectively influencing the development of the intellectual abilities of all children.

In a family where several children grow and develop, the same conditions for development should be provided. Such conditions will tend to bring the often lower intellectual level of later born children closer to the higher level of firstborns. The lower IQ is explained by the fact that the attention of adults to each subsequent child is usually significantly lower. The more children, the less attention goes to each individually. However, the difference in the degree of intelligence is compensated if the older children participate in the development of the younger ones, sharing their practical experience. In addition, parents and other constantly surrounding adults accumulate a lot of experience in communicating with children and their learning and development. For effective education in the family, a friendly atmosphere, support and mutual assistance should reign.

play an important role in the upbringing and development of the child preschool institutions и school.

Already in the nursery, parents and educators need to stimulate the development of a young child. First of all, it is necessary to promote the differentiation of the activity of the sense organs. For example, colorful and shiny objects that are manipulated at a distance of a meter from the child contribute to visual development. At the same time, the child gets acquainted with new objects and remembers already known ones. Noise-producing objects also stimulate acoustic perception. This teaches the child to navigate in space. Later, the child learns to identify as many objects as possible, to distinguish between familiar and unfamiliar, to express his attitude to certain sounds, noises and objects, to evaluate the different distances between objects in space.

Speech development is facilitated by slow and intelligible pronunciation of words, a melodious manner of speaking, singing, naming surrounding objects and designating the types of activities used. To stimulate the cognitive activity of the child, one should try not to limit his free movement in space and involve him in various kinds of economic activities. This contributes to the perception of increasingly complex phenomena and their comprehension with the help of various senses. The main thing is that the development of the child is accompanied by attention and love from adults, and the impact on his mental and physical abilities is maximum, but not excessive (that is, does not interfere with assimilation), diverse.

The child also attends kindergarten at the request of the parents. The kindergarten has junior, middle and senior groups. Education is based on the results of the work done in the nursery. In addition, it is taken into account that not all children attended the nursery.

The teacher introduces the kids to the phenomena and objects of the world through observation, search, selection, collection, bringing into the system. With the help of comparison, children learn to generalize, to understand simple relationships.

In the middle groups, the role of manipulations with objects is great. Children begin to count objects, compare them in length, width and height. Their experience is constantly growing. They learn to understand the qualitative and quantitative relationships between objects, their properties and masses. At the same time, a differentiated worldview, mental activity and ingenuity of children, the pleasure derived from games develop.

In the older group, children are engaged in comparing a variety of objects that are different in many ways: from 1 to 4. They conduct a variety of meaningful activities with them. Of course, everything usually happens in a playful way. At this age, children participate in all the events of daily life. They want to know everything. They willingly play, but with monotonous activity they quickly get tired and lose the desire to do this further. At this age, they already speak well, easily understand verbal explanations, especially if they are accompanied by visual illustrations. They are very active, tend to do everything on their own.

It is important to support the child's desire for activity. On each walk, the child learns something new, if adults draw his attention to it and answer his questions. The main thing is that the explanations are given in a form understandable to the child. Much depends on the purposefulness and systematic nature of the child's activities. The readiness of a child to do something depends on a positive assessment of his actions, on the success of this activity, on a joyful feeling in the process of specific actions, on encouragement by adults. In stimulating a child to a particular type of activity, these factors must be taken into account. In addition, it is important to teach the child to win and lose.

The decisive factor in the development of personality is education in a comprehensive school. Here lies the potential for the implementation of creative tasks, striving for excellence. Therefore, the help of experienced mentors during the transition to intensive self-education is simply necessary. The quality of education is decisive for achieving a high level of intelligence development.

Even the most gifted children do not always show their abilities if they are not engaged in their development. Modern psychologists give a lot of advice about the education of the child's abilities. Of course, their advice should be resorted to taking into account the specific situation, individual characteristics and age of the child. However, in psychology there are general provisions that should be followed in the development of both a child and an adult. In general, they boil down to the following points:

1) First of all, one should proceed from the abilities already shown by the child. They can be distinguished from those types of activities that not only turn out to be the best for him, but also arouse sincere interest. The child will be engaged in this direction with special pleasure;

2) maximize and maintain the child's interest. After all, it is much more difficult to help a child retain interest than to arouse interest. In addition, the interest of the child must be made purposeful, since it is much easier to achieve the goal if you clearly imagine it;

3) in order to achieve high results, it is necessary to constantly stimulate the pursuit of the chosen activity. All sorts of obstacles should not stop when reaching the goal - it is very important to accustom the child to this. Moreover, motivation should constantly expand: on the basis of what has been achieved, it is necessary to strive for more important goals;

4) it is necessary to orient the child to the social significance of the activity. Awareness of making one's own contribution to the development of one's society and even humanity stimulates the pursuit of the chosen direction, facilitates the overcoming of many difficulties;

5) the process of development of abilities must be directed very carefully, sincerely believing in its strength and ability to achieve what was planned. The child must feel the support of adults;

6) it is necessary to develop abilities in an organized and purposeful manner. Even at the very beginning of the lesson, the child needs to be directed in a certain direction.

Authors: Akrushenko A.V., Larina O.A., Karatyan T.V.

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