Theories of child development.

There are many theories regarding how children develop, (just put ‘child development’ into Google and see how many results you get!)

Almost without exception the supporters of each theory would have you believe that 'their' theory is the only one worth considering.

You should remember, however, that every child is different and no child will conform exactly to any one model of physical or mental development, whether it be the theory offered by Piaget, Erikson, Freud or anyone else.

Some theories of child development are highly controversial or recently discredited (for example, Freud’s psychosexual theory) and most are difficult if not impossible to test objectively. Some, however, seem like common sense and, happily, these are also the theories that are accepted by psychologists as probably being correct.

As a soccer coach, you can usefully mix and match elements of any of the popular theories of child development when you’re designing practices or assessing the abilities of your children and I would encourage you to spend some time researching this most interesting subject.

Footy4kids is not the right place to describe the many theories of child development in any detail (to do so would require many hundreds of pages) but I'd like to outline one that you might find useful:...Piaget’s theory of intellectual development.