Overview of Developmental Theories

In this lesson, we’re going to go over some highlights of developmental theories.

This is just a heads up, but this particular lesson is going to be pretty short, because we’re going to go into these developmental theories more in-depth.

The reason we want to address developmental theories is because they really give you an idea of what kind of patterns you may see in your patients. This is really dependent on things like age, cognitive abilities, social exposure, and some other factors. Development Theories are complex and they also add a level of complexity to the patients. Developmental theories for the most part Focus on things like morality, Psychosocial development, and cognitive ideals.

But one of the things that you’re going to have to do is remove yourself in the situation, and think about how your patient is based upon these theories. This will give you some better insight into what to expect from your patient going forward, and how you can best help care for them.

There are three main players that focus on developmental theories. The first is Piaget, who was a psychologist who focused most of most of his research on cognitive psychological theories. The big thing to remember about Piaget, is that his theories based on a span of development over four periods, and his work focuses on the cognitive aspect of development.

Kohlberg is another one that we’re also going to focus on. Kohlberg really focused his research on moral development and he piggyback a lot on what Piaget focused on. Kohlberg breaks his theories down into three levels with each of them having two stages throughout development.

And Erickson is going to be the last one that we focus on. Erickson is very well known for his eight stages of development throughout life. What’s interesting about his theory is that in order to move from one stage to the next you have to master the previous page. There’s more detail about that in the lesson on Erikson, so be sure to check that out.

As we go through the nursing concepts and the lessons on development, just remember they were focusing on human development, cognition and also health promotion.

Now a brief recap.

You need to know this stuff so that you can expect patterns from your patients and if you have a good foundation and developmental theory, you can anticipate certain things happening.

Piaget focuses on cognitive development, whereas kohlberg focuses on moral development. And lastly Erikson really coined theories about personality development over the eight stages.

I know this lesson was really short, but I wanted to make sure that we had some highlights in preparation for going into those lessons so be sure to check out those for more detail.Make sure you check out all the resources attached to this lesson. Now, go out and be your best selves today. And, as always, happy nursing!!