Children at 'Play' in a local playground

Observing young children in a playground offers a rich array of different stages of children, at varying levels of personal and developmental maturity. For instance, children at very young stages of development still cling to their mothers, while older children may resist overly attentive parental involvement, and seek to play upon age-inappropriate equipment, like high monkey bars or more grown up swings, in mimicry of other children, rather than merely modeling or observing parental behavior.

This behavior may seem, upon reviewing different stages of childhood development to confirm the maturationist theory of childhood development, as advocated by the work of Arnold Gessell, whereby "development is a biological process that occurs automatically in predictable, sequential stages over time." In other words, children will instinctively model parents at young ages, and model other children at older ages, and then individually split off into age appropriate...
[ View Full Essay]