AP Psychology / Development and Learning
Lesson
Growing up: stages, attachment, and context
Development is more than a ladder of ages.
Learning goals
- Explain development as change across the life span, not only childhood.
- Describe attachment as a pattern of seeking safety from a caregiver.
Explanation
Developmental psychology asks how thinking, emotion, and social ties change from infancy through adulthood. Stage theories are useful maps, but they can hide variation. Culture, nutrition, stress, and relationships all shift the timing of skills. A twelve-year-old is not a finished adult mind in a smaller body.
Attachment describes how infants use a caregiver as a secure base. A child who explores and then returns for comfort is showing a relationship strategy, not a permanent personality stamp. Later friendships and stress responses can echo those early patterns without being trapped by them. When a prompt mentions attachment, talk about the caregiver–child system.
Key terms
- attachment. An emotional tie in which a person uses another, often a caregiver, as a source of safety and a base for exploration.
- developmental psychology. The study of how behavior and mental processes change across the life span.
Common mistakes
- Treating stage names as proof that every child hits the same milestone on the same birthday.
- Calling attachment a child's personality instead of a relationship pattern.
Practice
Original Marlow Works items. Check the answer explanation after you try.
Researchers find that students who sleep more tend to perform better on memory tests. Why can't they conclude from this correlation that more sleep causes better memory?
Original Marlow Works item — not a College Board question.
Take your time—this is practice, not a test.
Answer explanation
Why is it safer to describe attachment as a relationship than as a trait?
Answer. The pattern is about how the child and caregiver respond to each other, especially under stress, not a label that lives only inside the child.
Traits sound fixed. Attachment research is about a system that can vary with care.
Related resources
External links with reuse status. Marlow Works is independent and does not copy restricted exam or textbook material.
Official / link only
AP Psychology course page
Official five-unit framework and science practices.
College Board · All rights reserved · accessed 2026-10-01
Open sourceReference only — do not copy
OpenStax Psychology 2e
Useful psychology background, but current publisher terms restrict commercial reuse and AI ingestion.
OpenStax · CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 with additional restrictions · accessed 2026-10-01
Link only. Do not republish or ingest this book.
Open source