Gender and Cognitive Development

Chapter 7: Gender and Cognitive Development

• Boys typically excel in force and power-based motor skills and can broad-jump slightly further by age 5.
• Girls tend to be better in fine-motor skills and gross-motor skills involving balance and foot movement.
• Social pressures contribute to these gender differences in motor skills, with boys often expected to play sports.
• Preschoolers undergo three major changes in play, play detaches from real life, using realistic props for actions in early pretending.
• Play gradually becomes less self-centered around the third year, after age 2, children use different objects to play pretend
• Play includes complex combinations of schemes (sociodramatic play)
• Sociodramatic play occurs with others, begins by the end of the second year, and complexity increases during childhood.
• Preoperational thought is limited by egocentrism which does not allow the child to see others’ symbolic points
• It is also limited by an inability to understand that certain physical traits of objects remain the same despite outward changes.
• Children focus on a single aspect of a situation, ignoring others, this is called centration
• Irreversibility is also a limit, which is the inability to mentally go through steps in a problem and reverse direction.
• Lack of hierarchical classification is another limitation, it's the limited ability to sort items into general and specific groups, which typically develops by age 7.
• Scaffolding involves adjusting support during teaching to match a child's current performance level.

Chapter 8: Self-Concept, Emotion, and Social Development

• By age 3.5, children understand psychological characteristics and can associate happiness with friends.
• By age 5, children define themselves based on their mothers' descriptions.
• By age 4, children begin to make self-judgments.
• At this age, children can’t distinguish their actual competence from their desired, resulting in an inflated view of their skills.
• Between ages 3 and 4, children start verbalizing strategies to cope with negative emotions.
• Children learn self-regulation through observing how their parents regulate emotions.
• Adults play a crucial role in children's self-regulation development.
• By ages 4 to 5, children can identify the causes of basic emotions.
• Conflict arises when it comes to understanding conflicting cues of what others are feeling
• Self-conscious emotions are tied to self-evaluation, which depends on messages from adults
• Addressing worth deeply impacts child’s performance and self-consciousness.
• Shame equates to feeling stupid.
• Guilt leads to good adjustment and helps resist harmful impulses.
• Excessive guilt can lead to depressive symptoms as early as age 3.
• Empathy, or sharing feelings, and sympathy, or concern, motivate pro-social behavior that can also trigger personal distress.
• Temperament affects whether one displays sympathetic, pro-social behavior, or is personally distressed.
• Early friendships evolve through four stages, beginning with nonsocial activity, such as solitary play.
• Parallel play is when children play near others with similar times, but don’t influence behaviors
• Associative play, engaging in separate activities, but exchanging toys and comments.
• Cooperative play involves children working together towards a shared goal.
• Proactive aggression involves unemotionally attacking to meet a goal driven by need.
• Reactive aggression is an angry, defensive response to provocation and can be physical, verbal, or relational.
• Authoritative parenting involves high acceptance and involvement while ensuring proper independence.
• Authoritarian parenting employs coercive control, without encouraging independence.
• Permissive parenting is warm and accepting but uninvolved and provides little control.
• Uninvolved parenting is characterized by little control and numerous issues of independence.

Chapter 9: Health and Well-being

• Overweight and obesity concerns
• Myopia, or nearsightedness, is a common vision issue.
• Increased time doing up-close activities can lead to myopia.
• Children in higher socioeconomic status are more likely to have myopia.
• Asthma is a common disease for kids.
• Girls are often better at fine motor skills and gross motor skills than boys.
• Boys are better at motor skills that mostly use strength.
• Early childhood marks the best tie to master fluency in a second language.

Chapter 10: Self-Esteem and Peer Relations

• Physical appearance is highly correlated to self-worth during school years
• Problem-centered self-regulation involves assessing a situation before acting.
• Emotion-centered self-regulation is internal and controls an outcome that is essentially fixed.
• In-group bias means kids tend to prefer their own groups.
• Out-groups assign positive characteristics to their own, and negative traits to others.
• There are 5 categories of Peer acceptance, popular, rejected, controversial, neglected, and average
• Popular: socially accepted all-around
• Rejected: high rates of conflict
• Controversial: hostile and disruptive but also positive
• Neglected: well-adjusted
• Average: average number of positive and negative votes

Chapter 11: Puberty, Sexuality, and Social Relationships

• Early maturing boys tend to experience more psychological problems and behavioral issues.
• Later maturing boys experience brief emotional difficulties until they physically catch up.
• Early maturing girls often lack self-confidence and feel out of place, particularly physically.
• Later maturing girls are generally seen as more physically attractive.
• When feeling physically out of place, children seek older friends.
• Early maturers in low socioeconomic statuses are more likely to befriend deviant peers.
• Anorexia, bulimia, and binge eating are all eating disorders.
• There have been more conservative sexual attitudes.
• Nonmarital sex activities have recently declined.
• Mutually consensual sex is more positive than casual sex.
• Adolescents experience an imaginary audience, feeling that everyone is watching them.
• Adolescents develop a personal fable, thinking that others are always observing and thinking about them.