PS220 Unit 10 Developmental Case Study Example

Seventeen Years of One Child: A PS220 Unit 10 Developmental Case Study of a Bilingual Girl in Albuquerque

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Purdue University Global

PS220: Child and Adolescent Psychology

Unit 10 Developmental Case Study

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[Date]

Maya, her family and every event in her development are composite; the research cited is real.

Introduction

Maya was born in Albuquerque to a mother who works as a hospital nurse and grew up in a three-generation home where her abuela used only Spanish with her. This case study follows her development from conception to seventeen and explains it with the theories and research covered in the course. It is organized by period, but its argument concerns three threads that connect the periods: her temperament, her bilingual household and the way her caregivers fit their responses to her.

Prenatal Development: Genes and Timing

Maya's development began with an inherited mix of genes, including a family tendency toward type 2 diabetes, and with a prenatal environment shaped by her mother's health and choices. A single glass of wine in the fourth week, before the pregnancy was known, fell in the embryonic period when structures form, but research associates fetal alcohol spectrum disorders with heavier exposure (May et al., 2018), and the remainder of the pregnancy was alcohol-free. Gestational diabetes in the third trimester was controlled with diet. The prenatal period shows two principles that recur: genes and environment interact, and timing matters.

Infancy: A Cautious Temperament and a Secure Base

As an infant Maya was slow to warm up, in Thomas and Chess's (1977) terms: wary of new people and places, adapting with time. When Maya was four months old her mother went back to hospital shifts, and the grandmother took on daytime care. At twelve months, in a procedure modeled on Ainsworth's Strange Situation (Ainsworth et al., 1978), she cried at separation and sought her grandmother on reunion, settling within a minute, a pattern of secure attachment. The fit between her cautious temperament and two patient caregivers, who gave her time rather than pushing her, allowed caution to become carefulness rather than anxiety.

A cautious temperament met patient caregivers, and that fit, more than the temperament itself, shaped what came next.

Early Childhood: Uneven Climbs in Thinking and Language

At three, Maya sorted Spanish and English by person without being taught, a social rule Vygotsky's account of learning through relationships explains well (Vygotsky, 1978). At four she judged a taller glass to hold more juice, a preoperational pattern Piaget described (Piaget & Inhelder, 1969), yet she correctly predicted that a friend would think a crayon box held crayons, passing a false-belief task of the kind Wimmer and Perner (1983) developed. Her vocabulary, counted in both languages, matched her monolingual cousin's (Hoff et al., 2012). Early childhood showed that cognitive development advances at different rates in different domains.

Middle Childhood: Competence and Comparison

By eight, Maya conserved liquid and explained why, reasoning in Piaget's concrete operational way. She learned to plan a two-week project, reflecting growing executive function (Diamond, 2013). Her friendships were few and close, consistent with her temperament. Her self-concept became more differentiated and comparative, good at math, okay at reading, and her worry about being "medium smart" in her reading group shows how comparison enters self-evaluation (Harter, 2012). When her teacher invited her to translate a story for the class, her bilingualism became a source of competence, the central theme of Erikson's middle childhood stage (Erikson, 1963).

Adolescence: Risk, Identity and Heritage

At sixteen, Maya drove carefully alone and sped through a yellow light with three friends cheering. That contrast fits research showing that peers heighten adolescents' risk-taking (Gardner & Steinberg, 2005), reflecting a reward system that matures earlier than the brain's control systems (Steinberg, 2008). Her plans moved from a foreclosed commitment to nursing, adopted from her mother, toward a moratorium in which she explored several careers (Marcia, 1966). After interviewing her grandmother for a class, she began examining what being Hispanic meant to her, entering the exploration stage of ethnic identity (Phinney, 1989).

The Three Threads

Her temperament appears in every period: wary at twelve months, choosing a few close friends at eight, careful driving alone at sixteen. It did not change so much as find settings that suited it.

Her bilingual household shaped her language, gave her daily practice in switching between social rules, became a source of competence at school and, in adolescence, became a question about identity. The same fact about her family meant something different at three, eight and sixteen.

Her caregivers' fit with her mattered most. They gave her time to warm up in infancy, watched shows with her rather than banning screens, and, in adolescence, let her explore careers rather than holding her to her early plan of nursing. The ecological view explains why (Bronfenbrenner, 1979): the most important influences on a child are the immediate relationships and settings around her, which are in turn shaped by wider systems, such as her mother's work schedule and New Mexico's bilingual history.

What the Case Suggests for Practice

The case carries lessons for the adults around children like Maya. Patience with a cautious child, rather than pushing, gave her temperament room to become a strength. Treating her Spanish as a skill, at home and at school, turned a possible disadvantage into competence. And letting her explore career and cultural questions in adolescence, rather than settling them for her, kept her identity her own. None of these lessons is new to developmental research, but seeing them in one life shows how they accumulate.

Limits of the Case

A single composite case cannot show what caused Maya's development. Her secure attachment might reflect her caregivers' sensitivity, her temperament or both; her school success might reflect her family, her teachers or her own traits. The research cited mostly reports associations across many children. The case illustrates how those patterns can come together in one life, which is its purpose, not proof of how they must. Other children with the same temperament and family might have developed differently.

Conclusion

Maya's first seventeen years show development as a sequence of periods, each with its own tasks, but also as a few lasting threads whose meaning changes with age. Her temperament, her two languages and her caregivers' patience appear in every period, and the theories studied in this course explain different parts of how they combined. The strongest explanation is not any one theory but the interaction they describe together: a particular child, in a particular family and culture, changing over time.

References

Ainsworth, M. D. S., Blehar, M. C., Waters, E., & Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of attachment: A psychological study of the strange situation. Lawrence Erlbaum.

Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The ecology of human development: Experiments by nature and design. Harvard University Press.

Diamond, A. (2013). Executive functions. Annual Review of Psychology, 64, 135-168. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-113011-143750

Erikson, E. H. (1963). Childhood and society (2nd ed.). W. W. Norton.

Gardner, M., & Steinberg, L. (2005). Peer influence on risk taking, risk preference, and risky decision making in adolescence and adulthood: An experimental study. Developmental Psychology, 41(4), 625-635. https://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.41.4.625

Harter, S. (2012). The construction of the self: Developmental and sociocultural foundations (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.

Hoff, E., Core, C., Place, S., Rumiche, R., Señor, M., & Parra, M. (2012). Dual language exposure and early bilingual development. Journal of Child Language, 39(1), 1-27. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000910000759

Marcia, J. E. (1966). Development and validation of ego-identity status. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 3(5), 551-558. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0023281

May, P. A., Chambers, C. D., Kalberg, W. O., Zellner, J., Feldman, H., Buckley, D., Kopald, D., Hasken, J. M., Xu, R., Honerkamp-Smith, G., Taras, H., Manning, M. A., Robinson, L. K., Adam, M. P., Abdul-Rahman, O., Vaux, K., Jewett, T., Elliott, A. J., Kable, J. A., . . . Hoyme, H. E. (2018). Prevalence of fetal alcohol spectrum disorders in 4 US communities. JAMA, 319(5), 474-482. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2017.21896

Phinney, J. S. (1989). Stages of ethnic identity development in minority group adolescents. The Journal of Early Adolescence, 9(1-2), 34-49. https://doi.org/10.1177/0272431689091004

Piaget, J., & Inhelder, B. (1969). The psychology of the child. Basic Books.

Steinberg, L. (2008). A social neuroscience perspective on adolescent risk-taking. Developmental Review, 28(1), 78-106. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dr.2007.08.002

Thomas, A., & Chess, S. (1977). Temperament and development. Brunner/Mazel.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Harvard University Press.

Wimmer, H., & Perner, J. (1983). Beliefs about beliefs: Representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children's understanding of deception. Cognition, 13(1), 103-128. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(83)90004-5