Question

• As you learned in this unit, infants experience rapid physical, cognitive, and psychosocial development during the first year. How might this development be influenced when an infant is being cared for at home by a parent or grandparent, versus being cared for outside the home in a day care facility? Consider your own caregiver(s) when you were an infant, and what effect it may have had on your development.

• Watch the following video:

  The Role of Attachment in Infancy and Later Mental and Physical Health Outcomes

  What kind of attachment do you think you experienced as an infant? What influence did this attachment have on your development, and do you think you are still influenced by this early attachment? Why or why not?

Answer 1

During infancy, the child gets its initial exposure to the world. The one who is very close to the child helps it to explore the world with his views attached to it. The child experiences the world's way of working with whoever helps him in his brought up. Most of the times the child grows up under the supervision of his parents and grandparents but there are also cases when the child grows under different guardians as per the condition may be. There may be foster parents, nanny, teachers or people assigned the job of looking after the child. The environment and the surrounding in which a child grows up enhances and influences his personality. The child starts to grow an attachment to the person who is close to him during his upbringing. It is seen the notion of attachment is the same but the difference is only in the section of relation.

I have been grown up under the supervision of my parents and my grandparents. Everyone has a different role to play in my upbringing when I analyze what I've gained under their supervision. As an infant, I've grown attached to my grandmother as my mother was expecting her second baby. My grandmother used to be with me and take me wherever she used to go. This was the reason that I was not much attached to my mother. I learned things from her point of view and learned the things she used to do. She was very fond of reading literature and her way of explaining literature also grew interested in me too. As of when I had to choose a subject, I choose Literature as my grandmother had helped me grow interested in me. In this way what I've learned during my infancy helped me in my later development.