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Some aspects of development unfold slowly and gradually over time, demonstrating continuous change. For example, children slowly gain experience and learn strategies to become quicker at problem solving (Siegler, 2016). Others are best described as discontinuous change, characterized by abrupt change. For example, puberty transforms children’s bodies into more adult-like adolescent bodies (Wolf & Long, 2016), infants’ understanding and capacity for language is qualitatively different from that of school-aged children (Hoff, 2015), and children make leaps in their reasoning abilities over the course of childhood, such as from believing that robotic dogs and other inanimate objects are alive to understanding that life is a biological process (Beran, Ramirez-Serrano, Kuzyk, Fior, & Nugent, 2011; Zaitchik, Iqbal, & Carey, 2014). As shown in Figure 1.2, a discontinuous view of development emphasizes sudden transformation, whereas a continuous view emphasizes gradual and steady changes.

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Figure 1.2 Continuous and Discontinuous Development

Source: Adapted from End of the Game (2014) Child Development 101, History and Theory, https://endofthegame.net/2014/04/15/child-development-101-history-and-theory/3/

It was once believed that development was either continuous or discontinuous—but not both. Today, developmental scientists agree that development includes both continuity and discontinuity (Lerner et al., 2014). Whether a particular developmental change appears continuous or discontinuous depends in part on our point of view. For example, consider physical growth. We often think of increases in height as involving a slow and steady process; each month, an infant is taller than the prior month, illustrating continuous change. However, as shown in Figure 1.3, when researchers measured infants’ height every day, they discovered that infants have growth days and nongrowth days, days in which they show rapid change in height interspersed with days in which there is no change in height, illustrating discontinuous change (Lampl, Johnson, & Frongillo, 2001). In this example, monthly measurements of infant height suggest gradual increases, but daily measurements show spurts of growth, each lasting 24 hours or less. Thus, whether a given phenomenon, such as height, is described as continuous or discontinuous can vary depending on perspective. Most developmental scientists agree that some aspects of development are best described as continuous and others as discontinuous (Miller, 2016).

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Figure 1.3 Infant Growth: A Continuous or Discontinuous Process?

Infants’ growth occurs in a random series of roughly 1-centimeter spurts in height that occur over 24 hours or less. The overall pattern of growth entails increases in height, but whether the growth appears to be continuous or discontinuous depends on our point of view.

Source: Figure 1 from Lampl, M., Veldhuis, J. D., & Johnson, M. L. (1992). Saltation and stasis: A model of human growth. Science, 258, 801–803. With permission from AAAS.