So what of the TA?

None of the child development theories by the below theorists even mention a T/A
Arnold Gesell 1880-1961
Sigmund Freud 1856 – 23 September 1939
B.F.Skinner 1904 – August 18, 1990
Alfred Bandura 1925-present
Lev Vygotsky 1896-1934
Jean Piaget 1896-1980 1980
Erik Erikson 1902 – 12 May 1994
Most of the theorists were born over a century ago when the role of a teaching assistant wasn’t in existence.

The digital age of mass media internet connected, game console playing, mp3 listening youth is here and now. Banduras BoBo Doll study has already highlighted that what the child sees they will try to imitate.

Hours per year the average American youth spends in school: 900 hours
Hours per year the average American youth watches television: 1500
The average child will watch 8,000 murders on TV before finishing elementary school. By age eighteen, the average American has seen 200,000 acts of violence on TV, including 40,000 murders.
(Cmpiled by TV-Free America)

Clearly media will have a great influence over children.
Risk behavior & peer pressure as studied by Allen, Porter, McFarland, Marsh, & McElhaney (2005). has shown that popular adolescents are strongly bonded with their peer group and that adolescents are likely to experiment at this time with things such as drugs and alcohol.

Peer pressure is when the child is persuaded to adopt values, beliefs and goals or to take part in similar activities as the rest of the peer group. The children most susceptible to peer pressure are those with low self esteem who adopt the group’s norms to enhance their own self esteem. The children that don’t give in to peer pressure are often unpopular. This conforming to social norms and experimenting will affect their self esteem.

Birth order is also said to effect a child’s development: first-born children obtain better grades and are more often high school valedictorians than later born children. Altus. 1966.
Parental influence on child development has been widely studied the way in which parents reward and punish children has an effect also not punishing children for bad behaviour has an effect later in life as the child not punished for aggressive behaviour has been found more likely to be aggressive towards their peers (Wiley,1998).

Display of interest in a young child's activities is correlated with greater levels of response from the child (Landry, et al 1998.) The amount of time spent talking to our children by our parents pointing out new objects and encouraging children to talk can develop language skills. This can have a knock on effect as the child progresses quicker at school and perceives themselves as more competent than their peers.

Parents and families can also have an unconscious effect on our children’s development “emotional identification” whereby the child unconsciously believes they share some of their parents attributes such as phobias. Even who a child’s parent is can have an effect as we somehow believe “Like father like son” Earlier in this report It is stated that household income has a profound effect on child development, that along with parental influence, mass media and peer pressure, would appear to have much greater influence on a child’s development than a T/A but research by Dr John Brown and Professor Alma Harris from the Institute of Education for the TDA 2005-2008 found that there was a statistically significant relationship between increases in expenditure on teaching assistants and improvements in attainment. It also found that having more T/A’s meant higher attainment whilst fewer T/A’s in a school had lower attainment. The research does state that effective deployment of T/A’s is key to this success.

M King