Early Childhood Development PDF

**EARLY CHILDHOOD** **PHYSICAL AND COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT** - Children slim down and shoot up. - Need less sleep and more likely to develop sleep problems - Improves in running, hopping, skipping, jumping, and throwing balls - Become better at tying shoelace, drawing with crayons, and po...

**EARLY CHILDHOOD** **PHYSICAL AND COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT** - Children slim down and shoot up. - Need less sleep and more likely to develop sleep problems - Improves in running, hopping, skipping, jumping, and throwing balls - Become better at tying shoelace, drawing with crayons, and pouring cereals; and begin to show a preference for using either the right or left hand - Children grow rapidly between ages 3-6, but less quickly than before. **DEVELOPMENT MILESTONES IN EARLY CHILDHOOD** - 3 y/o -- children normally begin to lose their babyish roundness and take on the slender, athletic appearance of childhood. - As abdominal muscles develop, the toddler potbelly tightens. The trunk, arms, legs grow longer. - The head is still relatively large, but the other parts of the body continue to catch up as body proportions steadily become more adult like. - Muscular and skeletal growth progresses, making children stronger. - Cartilage turns to bone at a faster rate than before, and bones becomes harder, giving the child a firmer shape and protecting the internal organs. - These changes, coordinated by the still-maturing brain and nervous system, promote the development of a wide range of motor skills. **SLEEPING PATTERNS** - In most cases sleep disturbances are occasional and usually are outgrown. - A child who experiences a sleep (or night) terror appears to awaken abruptly early in the night from a deep sleep in a state of agitation. - Walking and, specially, talking during sleep are fairly typical in early childhood. - Nightmares are also common. - Most children dry, day and night, by ages 3-5, but enuresis-repeated, involuntary urination at night by children old enough to be expected to have bladder control-is not unusual. **BRAIN DEVELOPMENT** - Brain development during early childhood is less dramatic than infancy, but a brain growth spurt continues until at least age 3, when the brain is approximately 90% of adult weight. - By the age of 6, the brain has attained about 95% of its peak volume. - From ages 3-6, the most rapid growth occurs in the frontal areas that regulates the planning and organizing of actions. - From ages 6-11, the most rapid growth is in an area that primarily supports associative thinking, language, and spatial relations. **MOTOR SKILLS** - Development of the sensory and motor areas of the cerebral cortex permits better coordination between what children want to do and what they can do. - HANDEDNESS- preference for using a particular hand; usually evident by about the age of 3 - Handedness is not always clear-cut; not everybody prefers on hand for every task. Boys are more likely to be left-handed than girls. **COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT** - PREOPERATIONAL STAGE - Children this age are not yet ready to engage in logical mental operations; lasts from approximately ages 2 to 7, is characterized by a great expansion in the use of symbolic thought, or representational ability, which first emerged during the sensorimotor stage. - [Advances in Preoperational Thought] - Symbolic function -- ability to use mental representations (words, numbers, or images) to which a child has attached meaning. - Deferred imitation -- based on mental representation of a previously obvious event; robust after 18 months. - Present play -- play involving imaginary people and situations. - Transduction -- tendency to mentally link particular phenomena, whether or not there is logically a causal relationship. - Animism -- tendency to attribute life to objects that are not alive. - Theory of mind -- awareness and understanding of own mental processes and those of others. - Between ages 3 and 5, children come to understand that thinking goes on inside the mind, that it can deal either real or imaginary things. - IMMATURE ASPECTS - Centration -- tendency to focus on one aspect of situation and neglect others. - Egocentrism -- inability to consider another's point of view. - Conservation -- awareness that two objects that are equal according to a certain measure remain equal in the face of perceptual alteration so long as nothing to has been added or taken away from either object. - Irreversibility -- failure to understand that an operation can go in two or more directions. [PSYCHOMETRIC APPROACH] 1. **Standford -- Binet Intelligence Scale** -- measure fluid reasoning, knowledge, quantitative reasoning, visual spatial processing, and working memory. 2. **Wechsler Preschool and primary scale of intelligence** -- yield verbal and performance scores as well as a combined score. **MEMORY DEVELOPMENT** - During early childhood, children improve in attention and in the speed and efficiency with which they process information; and they begin to form long-lasting memory. - Still, young children do not remember as well as older ones. - Young children may fail to notice important aspects of a situation such as when and where it occurred, which could help jog their memory. [THREE STEPS OF MEMORY FILING SYSTEM] - **Encoding** -- information is prepared for long-term storage and later retrieval - **Storage** -- retention of information in memory for future use. - **Retrieval** -- information is accessed or recalled from memory storage. - **Recognition** -- ability to identify previously encountered stimulus - **Recall** -- ability to produce material from memory [THREE STOREHOUSES OF THE BRAIN] 1. **Sensory memory** -- initial, brief, temporary storage of sensory information 2. **Working memory/Short term memory** -- short term storage information being actively processed. 3. **Long-term memory** -- storage of virtually unlimited capacity that holds information for long periods. [FORMING AND RETAINING CHILDHOOD MEMORIES] - Young children simply remember events that made a strong impression - 3 types of childhood memories: 1. **Generic Memory --** memory that produces scripts of familiar routines to guide behavior, begins at about age 2 2. **Episode memory --** long --term memory of specific experiences or events, linked to time and place 3. **Autobiographical memory --** memory of specific events in one's life; a type of episodic memory, not everything in episodic memory becomes part of autobiographical memory. **LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT** - At the age 3, the average child knows and can use 900 to 1000 words. - By age 6, a child typically has an expressive vocabulary of 2,600 words and understands more than 20,00 (Owens, 1996) - With the help of formal schooling, a child's passive or receptive, vocabulary will quadruple to 80,000 words by the time she enters high school. - FAST MAPPING -- process by which a child absorbs the meaning of a new word after hearing it once or twice in a conversation. - As children learn vocabulary, grammar, and syntax, they become more competent in PRAGMATICS -- the practical knowledge of how to use language to communicate. - This includes knowing how to ask for things, how to tell a story or joke, how to begin and continue a conversation, and how to adjust to comments to the listener's perspective. - These are all aspects of SOCIAL SPEECH: speech intended to be understood by a listener. - PRIVATE SPEECH -- talking aloud to oneself with no intent to communicate with others. - EMERGENT LITERACY -- preschoolers' development skills, knowledge, and attitudes, that underlie reading and writing. - Social interaction - Children are more likely to become a good reader and writers if parents provide conversational challenges. **PSYCHOSOCIAL DEVELOPMENT** **THE DEVELOPING SELF** - SELF-CONCEPT -- sense of self, descriptive and evaluative mental picture of one's abilities and traits; it is a cognitive construction... a system descriptive and evaluative representations about the self. - SELF -- definition-cluster of characteristics used to describe oneself: typically changes between about the age 5 and 7 - SELF- REPRESENTATION- Neo-Piagetian term, first stage in development of self-definition in which children describes themselves in terms of individuals unconnected characteristics and in all-or-nothing terms. - Statement about himself are one-dimensional - His thinking jumps from particular to particular without logical connections - He cannot imagine having two emotions at once. - REPRESENTATIONAL MAPPINGS -- second Neo-Piagetian development, in which a child makes logical connections between aspect of the self but still sees these characteristics in all-or-nothing terms - SELF-ESTEEM -- the judgement a person makes about their self-worth based on children's growing cognitive ability to describe and define themselves. **UNDERSTANDING CONFLICTING EMOTIONS** - Younger children's confusion about their feelings is that they do not understand that they can experience contrary emotional reactions at the same time. - Emotions directed toward the self, such as guilt, shame and pride, typically developed by the end of the third year, after children gain self-awareness and accept the standards of behavior their parents have set. **GENDER IDENTITY** - Awareness of one's femaleness or maleness and all it implies in one society of origin. - GENDER DIFFERENCES -- psychological or behavioral differences between males and females. - GENDER ROLES -- behaviors, interest, attitudes, skills, and traits that a culture considers appropriate for each sex; differ from males and females. - GENDER-TYPING -- socialization process whereby children, at an early age, learn appropriate gender roles; acquisition of gender roles. - GENDER STEREOTYPES -- preconceived generalizations about male and female behavior. **PLAY: THE BUSINESS OF EARLY CHILDHOOD** - Healthy development of body and brain - Enable children to engage with the world around them, which prepare them to adult roles. - It can stimulate senses, exercise their muscles, coordinate sight with movement, gain mastery over their bodies, make decisions and acquire new skills. COGNITIVE LEVELS OF PLAY 1. **Functional Play/Locomotor Play** - play involving repetitive large muscular movement. 2. **Constructive play/ object play** -- use of objects or materials to make something 3. **Dramatic play/ Pretend play/ Imaginative play** -- imaginary people or situation; peaks during preschool and declines as school-age children become more involved in formal games with rules **PARENTING** 1. **Reward and Punishment** 2. **Corporal Punishment** -- use of physical force with an intention of causing pain but not injury so as to correct or control behavior - Psychological aggression -- verbal attacks on a child by a parent that may result in psychological harm 3. **Inductive techniques** -- designed to induce desirable behavior by appealing to a child's sense of reason and fairness 4. **Power assertion** -- designed to discourage undesirable behavior through physical or verbal enforcement 5. **Withdrawal of love** -- involves ignoring, isolating, or showing dislike for a child PARENTING STYLES 1. [Authoritarian parenting] - According to Diana Baumrind, emphasizes control and unquestioning obedience. - Authoritarian parents try to make children conform to a set of standard of conduct and punish them arbitrarily and forcefully for violating it. - They are more detached and less warm than other parents - Their children tend to be more discontented, withdrawn and distrustful. 2. [Permissive parenting] - Emphasize self-expression and self-regulation - Makes few demands and allow children to monitor their own activities as much as possible. - When they do have to make rules, they explain the reasons for them - They consult with children about policy decisions and rarely punish - Their preschool children tend to be immature-the least- controlled and least explanatory 3. [Authoritative parenting] - Emphasizes a child's individuality but also stresses social constrains. - Authoritative parents have confidence in their ability to guide children, but they also respect children's independent decisions, interests, opinions and personalities. - They are loving and accepting but also demand good behavior and are firm in maintaining standards. - They impose judicious punishment when necessary, within the context of warm, supportive relationship - They favor inductive discipline, explaining the reasoning behind their standards and encouraging verbal give-and-take - Preschoolers with authoritative parents tend to be the most self-reliant, self-controlled, self-assertive, exploratory and content. **RELATIONSHIP WITH OTHER CHILDREN** - Preschoolers choose playmates and friends who are more like them and with whom they have positive experiences - Aggressive children are less popular than prosocial children - Most sibling interactions are positive. Older sibling tend sto initiate activities, younger siblings to imitate. Same sex siblings, especially girls, get along best.