Marcus has two adoptive toddlers, Leo and Toby, who attend the same local day care centre. Marcus has noticed that the boys respond very differently when he comes to collect them at the end of the day: Toby runs to him excitedly, hugging him tightly, and is easily comforted, whereas Leo ignores Marcus's arrival, keeping his distance and avoiding eye contact.
At the day care, Toby is highly cooperative, organizing group imaginative play and sharing toys generously. In contrast, Leo prefers to play alone in the sandbox, frequently snatching toys from others and showing high levels of aggression when staff intervene. Furthermore, Toby's cognitive and language skills have progressed rapidly, as he now speaks in complete sentences and asks complex questions, while Leo's language development remains limited to basic gestures and single words.
Assess the effects of day care on the social, cognitive, and attachment development of children, making reference to Leo and Toby in your answer.
84 exam-style questions on Edexcel A Level Psychology Content, covering Bowlby's work on attachment, Ainsworth and the Strange Situation, Research into deprivation, Research into privation, Research into day care, Cross-cultural research into attachment, Autism, Individual differences, and Developmental psychology. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.