I chose to do my reflection on the reading from Chapter 6 in the textbook. It was regarding cognitive and physical development in middle childhood. I found this chapter interesting although much of it is theoretical. Physical development is subjective and easy to measure. You can see a child is developing or not developing physically and we can even do genetic testing before the child is born to determine the level of physical development they will attain. The cognitive development is objective which means that you can take all of the genetic, enviroment, sociocultural and biological factors and determine how a child might develop cognitively, but it is not something that can be matter of factly measured. There are studies here and there about if a child grows up in a home with an abusive father, there is a great likelihood they will grow up and become the abuser. If you just look at the numbers, yeah, they tend to be high, but there is no way to quantify ALL of the abused children and follow them to adulthood, so you always have to question the statistics. I also didn't see much on autism in this chapter (unless I totally missed it). Autism seems to be much more prevelant now than it did a couple of decades ago even, but it could be because there are better ways to detect it or diagnosis it now and the spectrum has become broader. I have a friend who has a child who is on the mild end of autism, but he is very much affected. He gets physically ill if there is any changes in his daily routine including going to school, if she cooks something different for him or if she uses different laundry detergent. He is highly sensitive and there isn't enough known about his mental illness to really treat. He definitely will not be able to thrive on his own in society without her support or the support of a group home of some sort and she has been a single parent to him for his entire life. She also isn't able to provide him with the most effective therapies because of the limitations of his insurance (Molina). I do think there are mental illnesses that one can overcome and then there are the ones that one cannot overcome without medication, counseling and lifelong struggle. All in all, I feel proud of my friend for being such a supportive, sometimes enabling, parent given that she hasn't had much help.