Reproductive Choices & Prenatal Development

Reproductive Choices

• Genetic counseling helps assess the chances of hereditary disorders and select the best course of action based on risks and family goals.
• Prenatal diagnostic methods detect developmental problems before birth, with advanced maternal age being a key factor.
• Amniocentesis, chorionic villus sampling, fetoscopy, ultrasound, maternal blood analysis, MRI, and preimplantation genetic diagnosis are examples of prenatal diagnostic methods.
• Arrange for a physical exam, consider your genetic makeup, reduce or eliminate toxins, ensure proper nutrition, and consult a doctor after 12 months of unsuccessful conception attempts to increase the chances of a healthy pregnancy.

Prenatal Development

• The zygote multiplies and forms a blastocyst that burrows into the uterine lining during the germinal period (weeks 1-2). Structures that feed and protect the developing organism start to form.
• A primitive brain and spinal cord appear during the period of the embryo (weeks 3-8). The heart, muscles, ribs, backbone, and digestive tract begin to develop, along with external body structures and internal organs. Neuron production and migration in the brain begin. The sense of touch starts to develop, and the embryo can move.
• The organs, muscles, and nervous system become organized and connected during the third month of pregnancy. Touch sensitivity extends to most of the body, and the fetus kicks, bends its arms, forms a fist, curls its toes, turns its head, opens its mouth, sucks its thumb, stretches, and yawns when the brain signals.
• The mother can feel the baby's movements during the second trimester. The baby is in motion nearly 30% of the time, strengthening joints and muscles. Vernix protects the skin, and lanugo helps the vernix stick to the skin. Brain growth leads to new sensory and behavioral capacities, and the 20-week-old fetus can be stimulated or irritated by sounds.
• The age of viability, when the baby can first survive, occurs between 22 and 26 weeks during the third trimester. The brain continues to make great strides, and the cerebral cortex enlarges.

Prenatal Environmental Influences

• A teratogen is any environmental agent that causes damage during the prenatal period.
• Larger doses of teratogens over longer periods usually have more negative effects.
• The genetic makeup of the mother and developing organism plays an important role in withstanding harmful environments.
• Multiple negative factors, such as additional teratogens, poor nutrition, and lack of medical care, can worsen the impact of a harmful agent.
• Teratogens rarely impact during the germinal period before implantation, serious defects during the embryonic period, minor structural damage during the fetal period.
• Sedative thalidomide causes deformities of arms and legs, and damage to the ears, heart, kidneys, and genitals.
• Synthetic hormone diethylstilbestrol (DES) prescribed from 1945-1970 to prevent miscarriages caused high rates of cancer of the vagina, malformations of the uterus, and infertility in daughters, and genital abnormalities and cancer of the testes in young men.
• Acne derivative isotretinoin causes eye, ear, skull, brain, heart, and immune system abnormalities during the first trimester.
• Cocaine, heroine, and methadone can cause prematurity, low birth weight, brain abnormalities, physical defects, breathing difficulties, and death around the time of birth, and drug addiction in infants who are often feverish, irritable, and have trouble sleeping.
• Marijuana can cause attention, memory, and academic achievement difficulties, impulsivity, overreactivity, and depression, as well as anger and aggression in childhood and adolescence.
• Tobacco can cause low birth weight, miscarriage, prematurity, cleft lip, blood vessel abnormalities, impaired heart rate and breathing during sleep, infant death, asthma, and cancer later in childhood.
• Fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD) encompasses physical, mental, and behavioral outcomes caused by prenatal alcohol exposure.
• Fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) is distinguished by slow physical growth, facial abnormalities, and brain injury and impairment.
• Partial fetal alcohol syndrome (p-FAS) is characterized by two of the three facial abnormalities and brain injury. Mothers generally drink smaller quantities of alcohol.
• Alcohol-related neurodevelopmental disorder (ARND) involves at least three areas of impaired mental functioning, and prenatal alcohol exposure, though confirmed, is less pervasive than FAS.
• Radiation increases the risks of childhood cancer, abnormal brain wave activity, lower intelligence test scores, and rates of language and emotional disorders.
• Mercury, PCBs, lead, and dioxins are environmental pollutants that can cause prenatal harm.
• HIV and AIDS are infectious diseases that can cause prenatal harm.
• Exercise improves fetal cardiovascular functioning, increases birth weight, and reduces the risk of pregnancy complications, maternal diabetes, and premature birth.
• Poor nutrition decreases brain weight and suppresses the development of the immune system.
• Emotional stress during pregnancy can lead to low birth weight, infant respiratory and digestive illness, colic, sleep disturbances, and irritability in the child's first three years.
• If Rh-incompatible blood enters the fetus’s system, red blood cells can be destroyed, reducing oxygen supply. This can lead to intellectual disability, miscarriage, heart damage, and infant death.
• Women who delay childbearing until their 30s or 40s face increased risk of infertility, miscarriage, and babies with chromosomal defects.

Childbirth

• Natural (prepared) childbirth reduces pain and medical intervention and makes childbirth a rewarding experience, with typical activities including classes, relaxation and breathing techniques, and labor coaching.
• Home births have a high likelihood of infant disability and death births if attendants are not carefully trained and prepared to handle emergencies.
• Fetal monitors are electronic instruments that track the baby's heart rate during labor.
• Analgesics relieve pain and may be given in mild doses during labor to help the mother relax.
• Anesthetics are a stronger type of painkiller that blocks sensation.
• A Cesarean birth involves a surgical incision in the mother's abdomen to lift the baby out of the uterus.
• Preterm babies are born several or more weeks before their due date.
• Small-for-date infants are below their expected weight considering the length of the pregnancy; some are full-term, while others are preterm.

Newborn Reflexes

• Eye blink: Closing eyelids quickly in response to bright light or a clap near the head protects the infant from strong stimulation.
• Rooting: Turning the head toward a stroke on the cheek near the mouth helps the infant find the nipple.
• Sucking: Sucking rhythmically when a finger is placed in the infant's mouth permits feeding.
• Moro: Making an embracing motion by arching the back, extending legs, and throwing arms outward when the head drops slightly may have helped the infant cling to the mother in human evolutionary past.
• Palmar grasp: Grasping a finger spontaneously when it is placed in the infant's hand prepares the infant for voluntary grasping.
• Tonic neck: Lying in a fencing position with one arm extended in front of the eyes when the baby's head is turned to one side may prepare the infant for voluntary reaching.
• Stepping: Lifting one foot after another in a stepping response when held under the arms prepares the infant for voluntary walking.
• Babinski: Fanning out and curling toes as the foot twists in when the sole of the foot is stroked is a reflex with function.

Sensory Capacities of the Newborn

• Vision: Focusing ability and visual acuity are limited at birth. Newborns are attracted to bright objects but have difficulty discriminating colors.
• Hearing: Newborns can distinguish a variety of sound patterns and prefer complex sounds. They are especially responsive to human speech, can detect the sounds of any human language, and prefer their mother's voice.
• Touch: Newborns use touch to investigate their world and are sensitive to pain.
• Taste and smell: Newborns prefer sweet tastes and smells and orient toward the odor of their own mother's lactating breast.

Social Issues and Newborn Health

• Widespread poverty and inadequate health care programs for mothers and young children are largely responsible higher infant mortality rates.
• Government-sponsored health care benefits to all citizens could significantly improve the quality of life for newborns and families.
• Serious physical defects and low birth weight are risk factors for Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS).
• Physical defects cannot be prevented, and low birth weight can be prevented.

Brain Development

• Neuron: Store and transit information, Thousands of direct connections with other neurons
• Synapse: The tiny gaps between, where fibers from different neurons come close together but don’t touch.
• Neurotransmitter: Neurons send messages to one another by releasing this chemical, which cross the synapse.
• Programmed cell death: Makes space for these cognitive structures: as synapses form, surrounding neurons die – 40 to 60 %
• Synaptic pruning: Neurons that are seldom stimulated soon lose their synapses, synaptic pruning that returns neurons not needed at the moment to an uncommitted state so they can support future development.
• Glial cells and myelination: Half the brains volume is made up of glial cells which are responsible for myelination, the coating of neural fibers with an insulating fatty sheath (myelin) that improves the efficiency of message transfer.
• Cerebral cortex: – frontal, temporal, occipital, and parietal lobes; prefrontal cortex:
• Lateralization
• A burst of activity occurs in the auditory and visual cortexes and in areas responsible for body movement over the first year, a period of dramatic gains in auditory and visual perception and master of motor skills.
• Language areas are especially active live from late infancy through the preschool years.
• From age to months on the prefrontal cortex functions more efficiently.
• A high plastic cerebral cortex is where many areas are not yet committed to specific functions, has a high capacity for learning.

Learning Capacities

• In classical conditioning, an unconditioned stimulus (UCS) consistently produces a reflexive or unconditioned response (UCR), such as sweet breast milk (UCS) leading to sucking (UCR).
• If learning has occurred with classical condition, the neutral stimulus by itself produces a conditioned stimulus and response.
• If learning has occurred, the neutral stimulus by itself produces a response similar to the reflective response with classical condition.
• In operant conditioning, infants act, or operate, on the environment, and stimuli that follow their behavior change the possibility that the behavior will occur again.
• A stimulus that increases the occurrence of a response is a reinforcer.
• Removing a desirable stimulus or preventing an unpleasant one to decrease the occurrence of a response is punishment.
• Gross motor development refers to control over actions that help infants get around in the environment, such as crawling, standing, and walking.
• Fine motor development has to do with smaller movements such as reaching and grasping.

Perceptual Development

• Around 2 months, infants can focus on objects about as well as adults can, and their color vision is adult-like at four months.
• Motion is the first depth cue to which infants are sensitive.
• Babies three to four weeks old blink their eyes defensively when an object moves towards their face as if it is going to hit them.
• Between 4 and 7 months, infants have a sense of musical phrasing.
• Researchers speculate that while perceiving speech sounds, babies also generate internal motor plans that prepare them for producing the same sounds.
• Around 5 months infants become sensitive to syllable stress patterns in their own language.
• Intermodal perception in infancy is making sense of running streams of light, sound, tactile, oder, and taste information.
• Intermodal sensitivity is crucial for perceptual development period in the first few months, when much stimulation is unfamiliar and confusing, it enables babies to notice the meaningful correlations between sensory inputs and rapidly making sense of their surroundings.

Piaget’s Cognitive-Developmental Theory

• Schemes are specific psychological structures organized ways of making sense of an experience.
• Adaptation involves building schemes through direct interaction with the environment it consists of two complementary activities, a simulation, and accommodation.
• During assimilation we use our current schemes to interpret the external world.
• We create new schemes or adjust to old ones after noticing that our current ways of thinking do not capture the environment completely with accommodation.
• Equilibrium is when children are not changing much, they assimilate more than they accommodate, a steady, comfortable state.
• Disequilibrium is during times of rapid cognitive change, children are in a state of disequilibrium, or cognitive discomfort.
• Organization is a process that occurs internally, apart from direct contact with the environment. Once children form new schemes, they rearrange them, linking them with other schemes to create a strongly interconnected cognitive system.
• The circular reaction provides a special means of adapting their first schemes.
• It involves stumbling onto new experiences caused by the baby's own motor activity.
• Mental representations develop in substage 6.
• It enables older toddlers to solve advanced object permanence problems involving invisible displacement.
• It permits deferred imitation and make-believe play as the sensorimotor stage draws to a close, mental symbols have become major instruments of thinking.

Follow-Up Research on Infant Cognitive Development and Limitations of Piaget’s Theory

• Researchers often use the violation-of-expectation method to investigate what infants know about hidden objects and other aspects of the physical world.

Information Processing

• Over the first year, infants mostly attend to novel and eye-catching events but by the second year they become more capable of intentional behavior.
• Attraction to novelty declines as sustained attention increases.
• Around 2-3 months of age, infants shift from focusing on single, high contrast features to exploring objects and patterns more thoroughly.
• Habituation studies show that infants learn and retain wide variety of information just by observing behaviors and not actually being physically active.
• By 10 months, babies remember both novel actions and the features of objects involved in those actions equally well.
• Analyzing cognition into its components such as perception, attention, memory, and categorization is a central strength; difficulty putting these concepts back together in a broad comprehensive theory because of information processing.

Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory

• Infants and young children exposed to poor quality childcare score lower on measurements of cognitive, language, academic and social skills during preschool, elementary, and secondary school years period in contrast good childcare can reduce the negative impact of a stressed poverty-stricken home life, and it sustains the benefits of growing up in economically advantaged family.
• One type of interactionalist theory applies to information processing perspectives to language development; the second type emphasizes social interaction.
• Infants coo, making pleasant vowel sounds at 2 months.
• Infants observe with interest as the caregiver plays turn taking games such as pat a cake and peekaboo at 4 months.
• Infants babble, adding consonants to their cooing sounds and repeating syllables at 6 months.
• By seven months, babbling starts to include many sounds of spoken languages and infants begin to comprehend a few commonly heard words.
• Infants become more accurate at establishing joint attention with a caregiver, who often verbally labels what a baby is looking at 8- 12 months.
• Infants actively participate in turn taking games, trading roles with the caregiver and use preverbal gestures, such as showing and pointing, to influence others goals and behavior and convey information.
• Babbling includes sound and annotation patterns of child's language community at 12 months.
• Speed and accuracy of word comprehension increase rapidly; toddlers say their first recognizable word.
• Spoken vocabulary expands from about 50 to 200 to 250 words at 18-24 months and toddlers combine 2 words.
• The more time caregivers and infants spend in joint play with objects, the earlier and more often babies use preverbal gestures.
• Physical setting: indoor environment is clean play materials are appropriate for infants and toddlers and are stored on low shelves.
• Cribs, high chairs infant seats, and child sized tables and chairs are available.
• In a childcare center the caregiver to child ratio is no greater than one to three for infants and 1:00 to 6:00 for toddlers.
• Daily schedule includes times for active play, quiet play, naps, snacks and meals; is flexible rather than a grid.
• Caregivers respond promptly to infants and toddlers distress.
• Caregiver has some training in child development, first aid, and safety.
• Parents are welcome anytime.
• Childcare setting whether a center or home is licensed by the state.

Erikson’s Theory of Development

• Erik Erikson emphasizes the importance of the parent- infant relationship during feeding, but it is not the amount of consumption that matters, it is the quality of caregiving.
• Infants only develop mistrust if they are neglected or handled harshly.
• Parents can foster autonomy by permitting reasonable free choice and not forcing or shaming the child.
• When the balance of care is sympathetic and loving, the psychological conflict of the first year – basic trust vs. mistrust – is resolved on the positive side.

Emotional Development

• Happiness and infants emerges first through smiles and later through laughter, playing a crucial role in social bonding and development.
• Newborns smile reflexively, but by 6 to 10 weeks, they develop the social smile in response to caregiver interaction, laughter appears around three to four months and by five to seven months babies begin to recognize humor.
• In the second half of the first year, they smile and laugh more with familiar people, strengthening relationships and using different types of smiles for various social contexts.
• By the end of the first year smiling becomes a deliberate social signal, assisting in emotional communication and social development.
• Anger in infants develops as they gain awareness and control over their environment.
• Newborns expressed generalized distress, but by four to six months anger becomes more distinct.
• As they grow infants react with anger when frustrated, such as when a desired object is removed or a caregiver leaves.
• Older infants can identify the source of frustration, especially when caregivers set limits.
• Increasing anger is adaptive, helping infants persist in challenges and signaling caregivers to meet their needs.
• Sadness in infants arises in response to pain, loss, or brief separations but occurs less frequently than anger.
• Newborns express generalized distress to discomforts like hunger or medical procedures, but sadness becomes more distinct around 4 to 6 months.
• Unlike anger which motivates action, sadness signals a need for comfort and support.
• If caregiver- infant communication is disrupted, prolonged sadness can negatively impact development.
• Temporary sadness is a natural response; consistent emotional support from caregivers helps infants regulate their emotions and build secure attachments.
• Fear develops around the second half of the first year, with stranger anxiety being a common response.
• As infants start exploring, fear helps them stay cautious while navigating new situations.
• Their reactions depend on temperament, past experiences, and caregiver responses.
• Cultural differences also shape fear expressions, with some infants showing stronger or weaker responses.
• Over time, toddlers learn to differentiate between real threats and safe situations, using fear to assess risks and seek comfort or guidance from caregivers when needed.
• Infants gradually develop to understanding and responding to the emotions of others.
• Early on, they match caregivers emotional tones, and by 3 months they expect appropriate responses in social interactions.
• By 4 to 5 months, they distinguish positive and negative emotions and by 8 to 10 months they use social referencing – seeking emotional cues from caregivers to navigate new situations.
• Caregivers emotions influence infants reactions to people and events.
• As toddlers grow, they compare their emotions with others, using social referencing to assess safety, guide actions and understand intentions, supporting cognitive and emotional development.
• Starting by first relying on caregivers for soothing , by 3 months infants shift attention to manage distress, as they grow, motor skills help them regulate emotions.
• Between 2 to 4 months, caregiver interactions strengthen emotional control.
• The prefrontal cortex and parental support play key roles in this process.
• By age 2, toddlers begin using language for emotions but still struggle with tantrums.
• Supportive parenting fosters better self-regulation and social skills in early childhood.
• Self conscious emotions are guilt, shame, embarrassment, envy, and pride.
• They develop around 18-24 months and they develop through social interactions and caregiver guidance.

Temperament

• Rothbart’s dimensions of temperament represent the three underlying components that define temperament in infancy/toddlerhood, which are emotion, attention, and action
• Effortful control is the capacity to voluntarily suppress a dominant response in order to plan and execute a more adaptive response.
• Jerome Keegan study found that about 20% of infants reacted strongly to new experiences, while 40% stayed calm, with the rest in between.
• Early interactions often predicted later personality, with highly reactive babies growing into shy children and calm babies becoming more social.

Shy/Inhibited Children vs. Sociable/Uninhibited Children

• Shy/inhibited children show higher amygdala activation when exposed to novel stimuli, leading to stronger fear response; heart rate is constantly higher.
• Tend to have higher levels of cholesterol, especially in unfamiliar situations and exhibit greater pupil dilation, increased blood pressure, and cooler fingertip temperatures when exposed to new experiences, indicating a stronger psychological response to stress.
• Show more activity in the right frontal lobe, which is associated with negative emotional reactivity.
• Warm, supportive parenting helps emotionally reactive babies gradually adjust to new experiences, reducing their fearfulness overtime.
• Overprotective or intrusive parenting reinforces fear, making children more likely to remain shy and anxious. If inhibition persists, it can lead to low self esteem, social withdrawal, and increased anxiety in later years.
• The goodness of fit model explains how temperament and environment work together to shape a child's development.
• It emphasizes the importance of creating child-rearing environments that match a child's temperament while also encouraging adaptive behaviors.

Development of Self

• Can describe the development of self-awareness in infancy/toddlerhood, along with the emotional and social capacities it supports? (Hint: I borrowed this question directly from Berk on p. 211. Use her summary as a starting point for your response.