How do genetics and environment affect people at different stages of development

Question

How do genetics and environment affect people at different stages of development?
Do you feel one factor, genetics or environment, might impact a person more strongly at certain ages? For example, if an infant is at home with only his mother all day for the first year of life, will his acquisition of language, motor skills, etc. be different from a child who spends his first year in daycare with several children of varied ages? What if the two children in this example were 6 years old?

Give details and specific examples to support your answers. Provide the complete URL of any website where you find information to support your posts. Developmental Psychology Across cultures, there are certain developmental milestones that people reach at around the same ages. Most children learn to crawl at around 7-8 months of age and walk at around 12 months. These similarities are due in part to genetics-human DNA is programmed in certain ways and this programming is common to all humans Environment also plays a role, however. In cultures where children aren't given as much freedom to move, they tend to walk a bit later. In this lesson, the role of genetics and environment will be considered with respect to developmental milestones. This will include a look at changes that occur during the neonatal period, infancy, childhood, adolescence, and adulthood.

Explanation / Answer

Question: How do genetics and environment affect people at different stages of development?

Do you feel one factor, genetics or environment, might impact a person more strongly at certain ages? For example, if an infant is at home with only his mother all day for the first year of life, will his acquisition of language, motor skills, etc. be different from a child who spends his first year in daycare with several children of varied ages? What if the two children in this example were 6 years old?

Give details and specific examples to support your answers. Provide the complete URL of any website where you find information to support your posts.

Answer: - Genetics and envirronment both have differential impact at different ages as well as in different areas/domains. For different kinds of development say physical development, emotional development, and cognitive development there are different milestones. For example physical development has the some of milestone - crawing, sitting straight, standing, walking. There are other milestones that are socio-emotional in nature like - behavioral syncrony, emotional discrimination in others emotions, sympathetic and prosocial behaviors (http://www.child-encyclopedia.com/emotions/according-experts/emotional-development-childhood) . Finally in the cognitive domain some of importnant milestonees might include as suggested by great pioneer of cognitive development Jean Piaget -

(https://www.simplypsychology.org/piaget.html)

The striking regularity with which most of these milestones appear among the average child in population provide a strong evidence that genetics strongly impact the unfolding of developmental stages.

However the major caveats lies in the reserach based fact that both genetics and environement interact with each other towards final developmental outcome. Whereas genetics provides a general template (program) of developmental stages at different ages it is action of environment and context which brings the genetic guidelines into action. The famous story of wolf child 'Mowgli' also dipicted in movie - The Jungle Book clearly shows the impact of environment upon the genetic endowment. There are also various research studies that investigated the children raised in a socially deprived environement which indicated that such children could not develop language abilities at expected age according to genetic milestone.

Therefore genetics and environment both interact in complex ways to bring about the development. Key regularities in this interaciton is that in the ealiest age genetics have a greater say in the developmental outcomes and in later age it is our social environement that is primary source of variations in our cognitive and personality development.

Therefore in repsonse to question on age related impact - a child of one year age would benefit more with his mother because of the close and intimate relationship required at this age for child to develope his/her age related motor or langauage milestones whereas a child of age six year would benefit more from spending time a a more social (day care) environment becuase at this age child would have already developed some of basic motor and coginitive skills and his/her inclinations would be driving towards more soico-emotional developmental milestones.

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