Child and

Adolescent
Development
Looking at Learners at Different
Life Stages

EDUC 50
 UNIT 1: BASIC CONCEPTS AND ISSUES ON
HUMAN DEVELOPMENT
Part I: Introduction

Module 3: Issues on Human Development

“The interaction of heredity and environment is so extensive that to ask which is more
important, nature or nurture, is like asking which is more important to a rectangle, height or
width.”
- William Greenough

Nature - individual’s biological inheritance, heredity

Nurture - environmental experiences, environment
Continuity - gradual, cumulative change
Discontinuity - distinct change, more abrupt, succession of changes that produces different
behaviors in different age-specific life periods called stages
Stability - personality traits present during infancy endure throughout the life span
Change - personalities modified by interactions with family, experiences at school and
acculturation

Abstraction
Both all nature and nurture, continuity and discontinuity, stability and change characterize
our life-span development. The key to development is the interaction of nature and nurture
rather than either factor alone.
Both genes and environment are necessary for a person even to exist, without both, there is
no person. Heredity and Environment operate together -or cooperate and interact to produce a
person’s intelligence, temperament, height, weight, ability to read and so on.
The relative contribution of heredity and environment are not additive. So we can’t say
there is 50% heredity and 50% environment. Neither is it correct to say that full genetic
expression happens once, around conception or birth, after which we take our genetic legacy into
the world to see how far it gets us. Genes produce proteins in different environments. Or they
don’t depending on how harsh or nourishing those environments are.
Heredity is already fixed. Their children have been born and they have passed on these
inherited traits at conception and that they cannot do anything anymore to change them.
Environment is complex, it includes nutrition as early as conception, parenting, family
dynamics, schooling, neighborhood quality and biological encounters such as viruses, birth
complications and even biological events in cells.
 “The frightening part about heredity and environment is that we, parents, provide both.”

How the First 9 Months Shape the rest of Your Life

We are the way we are because it’s in our genes, we turn out the way we do because of our
childhood experiences. But there’s another powerful source of influence you may not have
considered: your life as a fetus. The factors and conditions you were exposed to during gestation
shaped you as a baby and continue to affect you to this day. This is the provocative contention of
a field known as fetal origins, whose pioneers assert that the 9 months of gestation constitute the
most consequential period of our lives, PERMANENTLY. At the farthest edge of fetal origins
research, scientists are exploring the possibility that intrauterine conditions influence not only
our physical health but also our intelligence, temperament and sanity.