Health and Wellness in Children and Adolescents

Study Notes

Temporal lobe, responsible for language, reaches peak development at age 14.
Cerebellum, which regulates motor movements, undergoes changes over a longer duration.
Gray matter volume decreases in late childhood, while white matter volume increases, particularly in the corpus callosum, enhancing fine motor control.

Recess periods in schools often involve informal games and rough-and-tumble play.
Participation in organized sports is common among children.
During the Covid-19 Pandemic, children's physical activity was limited to home and remote learning environments.

Overweight is classified with a BMI between the 85th and 95th percentile; obesity is defined as a BMI above the 95th percentile.
Contributing factors to overweight and obesity include heredity, lack of exercise, and poor diet.
Health consequences include problems in physical, social-emotional, and academic areas.

Acute conditions like colds and flu are usually short-lived.
Chronic conditions include asthma, diabetes, and hypertension, which require ongoing management.
Accidental injuries (e.g., from bicycles, skateboarding, or baseball) can result in serious consequences, including death.

Concrete operational stage (ages 7-11) allows children to use logical reasoning on concrete problems.
Children can engage in spatial thinking, interpret maps, and navigate using landmarks.

Causality: Understanding of cause and effect evolves through practical experiences.
Seriation: Ability to organize objects in sequences based on attributes like time or color.
Transitive Reasoning: If object A is less than B, and B is less than C, then A is less than C.
Class Inclusion: Grasping relationships between a whole and its parts.
Inductive & Deductive Reasoning: Inductive reasoning considers specific observations; deductive reasoning applies general rules to specific instances.
Conservation tasks show that concrete operational children can grasp certain concepts consistently.

Significant development in the prefrontal cortex enhances planning, judgment, and decision-making.
Self-regulation skills evolve, enabling attention control, response inhibition, and error monitoring.
Selective attention improves, allowing longer concentration on relevant information.

Working memory becomes more efficient, with increased processing speed and storage capacity.
Mnemonics and other memory aids become valuable tools for learning.
Intelligence measurement methods include Wechsler Intelligence Scale and Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale.

Average height growth is 2-3 inches per year; girls have more fat tissue than boys.
Dental health is improving, despite tooth decay remaining common.
Nutritional habits are shifting toward less vegetable and fruit intake, influenced by fast food and media.

Sleep needs decrease to 9-11 hours per night; snoring may indicate poor sleep quality.
Obstructive sleep apnea is prevalent among children, affecting overall health and academic performance.