Studying Child Psychology

Do you light up at the idea of spending your days around children, and can you hold your temper when most people would snap? If so, child psychology might suit you. Training in this area puts you right next to the questions of how a child grows, how a personality takes shape, and what is happening inside a young brain as it develops.

The work can carry real weight. You may be the person helping a child name what is bothering him, and in harder cases helping him work through trauma or a frightening experience he cannot explain on his own. A degree in the field gives you a hand in shaping how a child thinks and who he becomes.

That same degree opens the door to a range of roles: counselor, clinician, teacher, member of the clergy, or researcher and analyst. The settings are just as varied, from hospitals, schools, and churches to public service agencies, private clinics, and government programs. Finish the degree and the list of places willing to hire you grows considerably.

You can begin studying child psychology at the undergraduate level or go straight into graduate work. From there a doctorate is an option, and it equips you with enough depth to push further in whichever direction you pick.

Counselors are not the only ones who benefit from knowing this material. Parents, teachers, law enforcement officers, and even volunteers spend plenty of time around children, so a working understanding of how kids behave and what is going on in their heads matters for them too.

Sitting in the counselor's chair, you quickly learn that children are only half the job. Parents and guardians arrive troubled by a child's behavior, and they need counseling as much as the child does.

Clamping down and being strict rarely fixes anything. The real skill is figuring out why a child acts the way he does, and what mood or worry is driving that particular reaction.

Much of that comes back to how personality forms and how you describe it once it has. The framework most researchers reach for now is the Big Five, or OCEAN, which measures five broad traits that stay fairly stable from later childhood into adulthood. Anyone studying how children develop meets it early, so it pays to know what it covers. This overview of the OCEAN personality test lays out the five traits and the research behind them.