Cognitive Development from Childhood through Adolescence

Cognitive development from childhood through adolescence is important as it helps one understand the general preparation of adolescents for future careers and, most importantly, relationships. During this stage, most children start to think about specific things they desire or want to do as they start going out independently. As such, they start comparing themselves to ideals while exploring different careers. Besides, most of them start making different and important life choices than what they see their parents making. In this state, it is critical and healthy for most children to focus on setting important life goals, particularly of their end adolescence and the start of their adult lives (Mollon et al. 2018).

As the adolescents spend most of their time thinking about themselves, it helps by providing more opportunities to consider what they think about themselves and, most importantly, their world without harsh judgments from adults, particularly teachers or parents. If done at the appropriate time, it plays a crucial role in the ability of a person to develop a stronger sense of who one is and, most importantly, what they want for their future professionals. As a result, the relevance of this topic can be related to the ability of one to understand how to create a supportive and reliable environment to value ideas and independent thoughts and engage teens in discussion and understanding of current events, thus asking them to develop specific solutions to specific issues (Karcher et al. 2019). Besides, the topic is also important as it helps one to understand specific psychological characteristics of their peers and others. This case helps adolescents to make different guesses about other people’s thoughts and use resulting assumptions to decide the best way to interact with people or whether not to interact with them at all. As a result, such decisions play a crucial role in influencing and improving the development of adolescents, particularly for their future and professions.     

References

Karcher, N. R., O’Brien, K. J., Kandala, S., & Barch, D. M. (2019). Resting-state functional connectivity and psychotic-like experiences in childhood: results from the adolescent brain cognitive development study. Biological psychiatry, 86(1), 7-15.

Mollon, J., David, A. S., Zammit, S., Lewis, G., & Reichenberg, A. (2018). Course of cognitive development from infancy to early adulthood in the psychosis spectrum. JAMA psychiatry, 75(3), 270-279.