Growth and Development

Growth and Development

• Growth is increasing physical size or cell count and size.
• Development is the progressive acquisition of skills and advanced functionality.

Measuring Growth

• Growth is measurable and quantitative.
• Standardized growth charts plot measurements as percentile of height, weight, head circumference, and BMI for age.
• A child with measurements above the 95th or below the 5th percentile needs further evaluation.

Development Characteristics

• Development is qualitative, proceeding from general to specific skills.
• Language, thought, social relationships, and personality are products of human development.
• Developmental changes in these areas can be measured using specific assessment tools.

Maturation Defined

• Maturation refers to genetically influenced aspects of development.
• Skills like toilet training, riding a bike, and reading require neurologic and muscular maturation.
• Maturation is achieving full development of a skill.

Goals of Studying Lifespan Development

• Description: Understanding normal development and individual differences.
• Explanation: Understanding typical and individually varying development.
• Optimization: Promoting positive development, enhancing capacity, and preventing/overcoming difficulties.

Developmental Stages

• Stages are age ranges that include developmental changes and tasks
• Success or failure in a stage affects the ability to complete it and move on.

Prenatal Period

• From conception until birth
• Rapid growth, development of body systems, with dependency on mother’s health.

Infancy Period

• From birth to 12 months
• Initial adjustment to extra-uterine life and rapid development.
• Development of a strong mother and child relationship.

Early Childhood

• From 1 to 6 years
• From first steps and few words to physical and cognitive maturity for school.
• Gaining independence, self-control, and social skills.

Middle Childhood

• From 6 to 11 years
• Growing importance of peer relationships.
• Motor, language and social skill refinement occurs.

Later Childhood

• From 11 to 19 years as preadolescence and adolescence
• Rapid biological and psychosocial maturation with emotional changes.
• Starts with puberty and ends with adulthood.

Adulthood

• Young adulthood lasts from the 20s to the mid-to-late 30s; middle adulthood from late 30s to mid-60s; older adulthood from 65 years onward.
• Young adulthood involves decisions about career, marriage, and family.
• Middle adulthood involves reexamining life choices and considering contributions to the next generation.
• Older adulthood requires adapting to physical changes, losses, and finding new ways to live and enjoy life.

Developmental Assessment

• Health assessments are essential.
• The Denver II tool measures gross motor, fine motor, language, and personal-social skills, but NOT intelligence.
• Screening can identify infants and children below expected levels for more evaluation.
• Means of recording objective measurements for future reference.

Domains of Development

• Three fundamental and overlapping domains exist.
• These domains are conceptual distinctions.

Physical Domain

• Includes genetic factors.
• Addresses physical stature/appearance.
• Includes consideration of nutritional status.
• Involves physical health and well-being.
• Encompasses the state of fine and gross motor abilities.

Cognitive Domain

• Involves perception.
• Involves thinking, information processing, and memory.
• Encompasses receptive and expressive language skills.

Psychological and Social Domain

• Includes temperament and personality.
• Involves interpersonal relationships and moral development.
• Encompasses home and social contexts.

Life Span Perspective

• Life span is based on the oldest documented age and is currently 122 years.
• Life expectancy is the average number of years a person is expected to live, and is currently 78 years.

Principles of Growth and Development

• Growth is orderly and systematic.
• The sequence of development happens at different rates.
• Children creep, then stand, then walk.
• Language develops, then reading and writing.
• Each stage of development grows out of the previous stage.
• Growth rates and patterns are specific to body parts.
• Body parts mature at different rates.
• The brain is fully grown by age 7, but does not mature until years later.

Continued Principles

• Growth and development have multiple influences.
• Development progresses from simple to complex and general to specific.
• Development occurs according to cephalocaudal and proximodistal patterns.
• Growth and development has critical periods.
• Rates and patterns have wide individual differences.
• They are unique as they develop on their own schedules.
• Development continues throughout life.

Characteristics of Growth and Developement

• Development is a lifelong, multidirectional process that includes gains and losses.
• Development is characterized by plasticity and is shaped by historical-cultural context.
• Development has multiple influences and requires studies by multiple disciplines.
• Gains/losses occur from conception to death
• The dimensions are biological, cognitive, and socio-emotional .
• dimensions expand and shrink, increase, or decrease.

Multidisciplinary Studies

• Encompass psychology.
• Encompass medicine.
• Encompass sociology, anthropolgy, and neuroscience.
• Plasticity means capable of change and adapting to circumstances.
• Plasticity means human traits can be molded, yet retain a durability of identity.
• Some aspects of development are changeable, others are not.

Contextual Development

• Development occurs within a setting.
• There are three types of contextual influences.
• Normative age-graded influences affect a particular age group and connect to specific chronological phases.
• Historical circumstances cause the normative history-graded influences that affect a generation.
• Shared history can include wars, a change in roles for women, and the Internet.
• Non-normative life events are unusual occurrences that have a major impact on a life and come from unique experiences.
• Examples include the early death of a parent or teen pregnancy.
• Development relates to competing goals of growth, maintenance, and regulation of loss, all of which involve maintenance and regulation.
• No one domain dominates; rather culture, biology, and individual characteristics all influence one another.
• Development is a construction of biology, culture, and the individual.

Factors Influencing Development

• Genetics include temperament and chromosomes/genes.
• Chromosomes and genes carry messages for characteristics and diseases in the forms of sex and autosomal chromosomes.
• Inherited genes or mutations can cause disease.
• Influences during the prenatal period, such as mother's nutrition, substance use, and illnesses all affect development.
• Environmental factors such as radiation and chemicals also affect development.
• Family and parenting and cultural norms greatly influence children. Nutrition both prental and from diet are crucial.

Nature vs Nurture

• Biology is nature and environment is nurture.
• Nature emphasizes maturation; the biological development according to a genetic plan.
• Nurture emphasizes learning, and learning causes changes in thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
• Continuity has characteristics that are stable over time, such as sex.
• Discontinuity has characteristics unlike those that existed before such as learning a language.
• Stability remains constant throughout life based on genetics and early experiences.
• A change perspective fluctuates or adapts throughout the lifespan.
• The ability to change decreases.

Development Theory Foundation

• Theory describes the way that a set of concepts may explain phenomena
• The example of Jean Piaget’s theory explains children’s cognitive development.
• The process of development provides foundation in understanding human development which guides research.
• Developmental theories include Piaget’s periods of cognitive development, Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development, Kohlberg’s stages of moral development, and Freud’s stages of psychosexual development.

Sigmund Freud's Theory

• Freud’s theory is psychoanalytic as the psycho terms include Id, ego, and superego.
• All needs of each development stage must be satisfied to more successfully.

Components of Personality

• The id wants pleasure/libido and demands immediate satisfaction.
• The ego is the executive of the mind that relates to reality and can delay satisfaction.
• The superego judges, controls, and punishes as a conscience.
• There are five stages with inborn tendencies of all individuals to seek pleasure/reduce tension.
• The stages are associated with conflict to move on the next stage and resolve it.
• Experiences determine adjustments, traits in personalities.

Psychosocial Stages

• Oral happens from birth-1.5 years of age with relief from anxiety through oral needs meeting
• Anal happens from 1.5 to 3 years of age with learning independence/control. There is a focus on excretory functions.
• Identification with parent of the same sex happens in the phallic stage from the ages 3-6. Sex identity development in these years with focus on the genitals
• Latency happens from the ages 6-12. Sexuality repressed, focus on relationships.
• Genetal happens from the ages 13-20. Revitalization of their libido because of the genitals.

Erik Erikson

• Created theory of psychosocial development.
• Has 8 psychosocial stages with different tasks.
• Achieving the life sequence.
• Health of personality depends on success with resolution of life challenges.
• Stages reflect positive and negative critical parts of life periods.
• Regressing is caused from stress on life stages.
• Impact of relationship in shaping personality.

Erikson Trust vs Mistrust

• Birth to 1 year.
• Needs are met when trust develops from warmth, security, love, and food.
• They mistrust when needs are unmet of significantly delayed.
• Parent-infant determines development.

Erikson Continued Theory

• Autonomy vs. Shame and Doubt is from ages 1yr to 3yrs
• Trust develops by providing consistent loving care
• Autonomy develops by allowing self-care with focus on the excretory functions
• Initiative vs. Guilt from ages 3-6 with exploration from imagination
• Industry Vs. Inferiority wanting to be workers
• 12-20 yrs: peers influences.
• Intimacy vs. stagnation wanting to be in community.
• Ego integrity vs. Despair with view of past actions and influence in later life.

Jean Piaget’s Cognitive Theory

• Defines ways to adapt environment which shows in mental mapping.
• Thinking with ways of structuring.
• A schema is a mental thought.
• Schemata helps to form thoughts in one's mind.

Assimilation vs Accommodation

• Allows to absorb concepts.
• Helps to form new view on thoughts.
• Accommodation helps to introduce new ideas, objects, or experiences.
• Adaptation is mental form for certain experiences.

Stages of Cognitive Development

• Sensory motor with problems through senses.
• Toddler learns by interacting through work.
• Infant shows recognition even if object is unseen.
• The preoperational child thinks of the past, present, or future.
• The child moves from understanding sensation more prelogical thinking/solutions.

Continued Stages

• The egocentric needs to conceptualize in actions.
• Concrete child with the the sorting of facts.
• Ability to move logic and solve concrete problems through logic from prelogical thinking.
• Abstraction begins to development.

Formal Stage

• 11 years to adulthood has abstract and logical components.
• Thinking for expansion is used for abstract situations.

Additional Concepts

• A 10-month-old learns red balls bounce and thus blue balls bounce and forms the pattern.
• Red tomatos cause bounces, forming patterns.

Piaget's Cognitive Development Tasks

• Birth is developed though environment
• 2 year shows self-awareness
• increased mobility and awareness.
• 2-6 years shows growth of speech.
• 6-12yrs has logic thoughts/apply to actions.
• 12-15yrs abstract actions and reasonings.

Kohlberg’s Theory

• Has a complicated process that is accepted by society.
• The levels helps to shape human behavior in ways that determine a series to levels.
• Can't skip steps in level with gradual moving forward .

Kohlberg Levels

• Preconventional level is when one wants to avoid getting in trouble/bad situations.
• Level 1 stage wants to avoid punishment.
• Level 2 stage can be rewarded with money and praise.
• Conventional Level: wants to be good with good girl action is needed.
• Postconventional: wants to be ethical/accepted by society in norms and values.
• Universal- standards which shows the level of behaviour from the youth when it comes to the standards of society.

Nursing Implications

• Understand the normal and expected patterns of growth related to infants/children to the adult population
• help the nurse when working in the certain setting, during illness/surgery and any assistance to to caregivers.