During infancy, the interviewee's cognitive abilities were stimulated by playing with her older siblings, and also by the mother, who was able to spend a lot of time with her children and did not work outside the home. Games like pat-a-cake were played, and toys were offered that had many bright colors and were enjoyable. She was also read to quite often from a very early age. According to the text, stimulating all of a baby's senses early and often is important for development. Reading to them is very good, so that's something that the interviewee's mother was definitely doing right. Another advantage that the interviewee had was the benefit of older siblings. Not only did the mother learn from mistakes that she might have made with them, but they were also around to play with the interviewee, meaning that she was benefitting from their interaction with her. Learning language can be difficult for an infant who does not hear people speaking that much, but with other children around there was certainly a lot of talking.
Walking and talking were reached as they should have been, with the interviewee walking around one year of age. She cannot remember when she said her first word and began to talk, but she does remember that there was no talk in her childhood of her being developmentally delayed in any way. She was able to meet all milestones and perform the required tests that the doctor gave her to ensure that she was of normal intelligence and reasoning abilities, as well as physical abilities. The interviewee compared to her siblings favorably....
She walked earlier than her brother did, and was on the same level with her older sister. The younger sister, who came along later, surpassed the milestones of the other children, but not by a wide margin. The home environment remained very stable. The mother and father remained married and living together up until the father died when the interviewee was a married adult. Income status increased slowly and gradually, but the family was never poor, so money was not a serious concern at any point during the interviewee's formative years.
Self-concept and gender understanding begin in younger children by the examples of others. Children are either praised or ridiculed, and they develop who they are largely by what others think of them and what they are taught to think of themselves. Their gender understanding comes from seeing the roles that their parents and other adults play, and also from the toys that they are given and the ways that they are encouraged to play. The understanding of being female in this case was likely reached not only from the way the mother acted, but from having both a brother and a sister and seeing both physical and emotional differences between the two. According to Erikson, the psychosocial stage is where the development of identity really begins to take shape. This is where a child begins to learn who he or she is and what role he or she has in relationship to others. If this is not learned correctly at that time, bipolar and other types of problems can result and the child can have gender confusion and other difficulties.
