Child Psychology Exam II

How does labor start

 fetal-signaling, when the baby signals to mom by releasing hormones that they are ready to be born. These hormones stimulate secretion of prostaglandins. Eventually, oxytocin is released too. Contractions are stimulated that help push the baby down. Pitocin is given during an induction to help kickstart those contractions.

States of childbirth

1. Initial (latent) phase/active phase: this is the longest phase. It is about dilation (widening of cervix) and effacement (thinning), when mom’s cervix is getting ready for the baby’s head to fit through. 

2. “Pushing stage”: Briefer stage, but lots of variability. Crowning. Some people only need to push a few times for the baby to come out, and some people have to push for hours. 

3. Placental stage: the baby has been delivered, now the placenta has to be delivered. This includes the umbilical cord. 

C-section statistics

1 in 3 births in the US are a C-section. There has been an increase in C-sections over the last several decades. This could be because of advancements in healthcare, safety for their baby- such as if they are breached, predictability of when the baby will be born, rise in multiple births, meaning twins and triplets, use of IBF (helps to not have multiple births), increase at the age in which women are giving birth, legal reasons, previous c-sections (having a previous c-sections is the strongest predictor for a reason a woman would have a c-section in the US), birth canal issues, prevent transmission of disease–such as HIV and you don’t want the blood of mom and baby to mix, fatigue, avoid pain.

Birth problems

For reference–normal pregnancy is 40 weeks. 

• Preterm (premature): <37 weeks. About 10% of babies in the US are born preterm. The vast majority of them are born 34-36 weeks.

• Low birth weight: if the baby is under 5.5 pounds.

One of the things that is happening in the third trimester is brain development–especially cerebral cortex. 8% of babies are born low birth weight in the US. The lower the birth rate of the baby, the more increased risk for neuro development disability.

At what point can a baby actually survive? Age of viability- what age does a baby have a 50/50 chance at survival. In the US, the age of viability is 24 weeks.

Problems that can occur with preterm and low birth weight

survival and neurodevelopmental disabilities (early onset and an alteration to central nervous system–the brain). Some examples of neurodevelopmental disabilities are auditory impairment, visual impairment, cerebral palsy, epilepsy, ADHD, autism, learning disabilities, language disorders. It also could be the case where the disability is not major, but still as difficulties that pop up later in life–like school-aged. Low birthweight babies can face immediate and long-term health conditions—such as breathing, feeding, and metabolic issues—that are separate from permanent disabilities.

Treating preterm babies

may have fewer physical interactions and respond less sensitively. Preterm babies profit from early stimulation and kangaroo care, skin-to-skin contact. There are also less opportunities for physical interactions because the baby might be in NICU for some time and around medical professionals. Parental sensitivity–how consistent and how accurately parents respond to their babies cues–is related. It is important for parents to become confident and comfortable taking care of these babies. Exclusive breastfeeding is encouraged.

Baby blues

approximately, 70% of women experience “baby blues”. This is sort of the norm and is more common. It is time limited, symptoms are expected for the first week or two after birth and gradually get better for Mom. Not functionally impaired, meaning that the symptoms don’t interfere with everyday functioning. Symptoms include mood changes, increased irritability, crying more, fatigue. Causes could be because of all the physiological changes that go through the mom’s body, including a crash of hormones. In addition, her sleep schedule is different.

Postpartum depression

Approximately 10-15% of women experience PPD. It lingers for weeks/months. It is functionally impairing. Symptoms are like a major depressive episode. Symptoms include feeling down, depressed, not finding things enjoyable that you used to, difficulty concentrating, feelings of hopelessness. The strongest predictor is if you are feeling depression during the pregnancy itself. Risk factors include lack of social support when a baby is born, stress and marital tension, previous diagnosis of depression. 

Cephalocaudal Development

Development proceeds from “head to tail (or feet)” development. Meaning that the head starts and everything follows because brain development is most important as it plays a role in respiration, sleep cycles, etc. The brain also links to the endocrine system which releases hormones, regulating development in the body. This is why babies and toddlers often have really big heads compared to the rest of their body. 

Proximodistal development

Development proceeds from the center of the body outward. Development has to happen along the midline first and spread out from there. For example, babies often have more stable control over their arms before their hands and individual fingers can successfully grab something. You need development of the CNS first.

Baby growth

They double their birth weight in about 5 months, and in the first year, babies triple their birth weight. They also have a 50% of height increase. They double their birth weight about 5 months. An average length for a newborn baby is about 20 inches, after a year, they should be about 30 inches. 

Kangaroo care

Skin-to-skin contact between parent and baby.

Benefits for babies:

• Physical Stability: Regulates body temperature, stabilizes heart rate, and improves breathing.

• Health & Growth: Lowers infection risks, reduces pain responses, and supports faster weight gain.

• Better Sleep: Helps babies sleep deeper, cry less, and spend more time resting quietly

Benefits for adults:

• Stronger Bonding: Enhances emotional attachment and closeness between the parent and baby.

• Reduced Stress: Lowers parental anxiety and significantly reduces the risk of postpartum depression.

• Increased Milk Supply: Boosts the production of breast milk for nursing parents.

What does Michelle Lampl’s research show about growth spurts?

Children grow in brief spurts, with little/no growth between them-supporting a discontinuous model. Frequent measurements reveal this vs. smooth charts; appetite may signal a spurt.

Do growth spurts exist?

growing overnight actually does occur. Extra sleep may signal growth spurt. It is true that babies can grow up to an inch in a 24 hour time period. Growth spurts is an example of discontinuous development.

Failure to thrive

when a baby is gaining weight in a way you wouldn’t expect for their age or gender. Most causes of failure to thrive is because of a combination of things both biologically, physiologically, socially.

Breastfeeding

25% or 1 in 4 American women that exclusively breastfeed through the first 6 months. At six months is when babies can start eating solid foods but they get most of their calories from breast milk. Lots of health organizations recommend breast feeding for the first year of life. Breast milk has a different composition from 1 month to 1 year. Babies who are breastfed often have less respiratory illness and other illnesses like ear infections, and decreased child obesity. If mom goes back to work after 6 weeks and still wants to breastfeed, she should be pumping every two-three hours.

Health benefits of breastfeeding

• Colostrum: contains high levels of nutrients and mom’s antibodies. Preps babies' immune systems now that they are in a germ-heavy environment. Kickstarts gut heath. It is pumped one week after birth. It is thick, yellow, and creamy.

• First milk: Pumped three weeks after birth. White, thinner, may be creamy.

• Easy on the digestive system

• Adapts to a baby's changing needs.

• Benefits for mom too, such as helping the uterus shrink and contract back to usual size, and decreased chance of hormonally driven cancer like breast cancer or ovarian cancer, releases oxytocin for mom (the feel good hormone and also helps uterus contract as well) because of skin to skin contact which can also promote bounding with the baby and decrease risk of postpartum depression .However, moms are losing a lot of calories, so they especially need to drink a lot of water. 

Health concerns of breastfeeding

Potentially transmit disease, such as HIV, or environmental hazards, such as alcohol or drugs).If you are going to drink when breastfeeding, it is recommended no more than one drink per day and wait at least two hours before breastfeeding. Importance of mom being well nourished.

Social aspects of breastfeeding

Many factors influence this decision, including return to work, day care, social support, physical demands, beliefs about bonding, etc. 

Neurons

specialized nerve cells in the CNS that receive, process, and transmit electrical and chemical signals throughout the body. Myelin Sheath codes the axons of neurons, it is an insulator (white fatty substance) that helps with speed and efficiency of communication. Axons are the output fire and transmit signals away from the neuron, maybe to a nearby one. The human brain contains approximately 86 billion neurons

Developmental neurogenesis

The birth of neurons that happens prenatally. A baby is born with 100 billion neurons. It happens before babies are born. You are born with the vast majority of brain cells you will ever have. There is also adult neurogenesis where you are getting new neurons (in the hippocampus) and brain cells when you are learning, exercising, stressed, etc. but at a much slower rate.

Myelination

Process by which axons are coated with myelin. Enhances speed and efficiency. Only essential areas are completed at birth, such as parts of the brain that deal with respiration, heartbeat, sleep/wake cycles, reflexes. Myelination occurs after the baby is born. Examples are reflexes and voluntary motor behavior. the dorsal brainstem, the posterior limb of the internal capsule, the lateral thalami, and the perirolandic gyri (the cortex surrounding the central sulcus) are myelinated at birth.

• Problems with myelination: multiple sclerosis (autoimmune  is a demyelinating disease (autoimmune disease where a person’s body attacks the myelin). Untreated PKU and congenital HIV can both inhibit myelination.

Gross motor skills

tend to come first. Large body movements that use the major muscles in the arms, legs, and torso. Motor skills, in general, often increase their agency and desire to explore. Motor development will intersect with social development.

Fine motor skills

 tend to come after gross motor skills. Precise movements we make using the small muscles in our hands, wrists, fingers, feet, and toes.

Head control

 a motor skill that often develops first as development is often head to tail. A neonate, baby during the first few weeks can really only move their head a little. By a month, they can lift their head for a few seconds. A 2-3 month old baby can hold their head up for a prolonged period of time.  and support themselves on their forearms. It is recommended that because babies are supposed to sleep on their backs, babies should have practice during the day of being on their stomach which gives them the ability to practice holding their head up. 

Motor development

the gradual process of gaining control over body movements and muscles as a person grows. helping them actively explore their surroundings, connect with others, and build essential cognitive and social skills

Control of the hands

Progression from grasping reflex (birth), prereaching (3 months and often unsuccessful attempts), and reaching (4-6 months). It seems that we can make prereaching stages happen earlier, and if they do, seem to have a better understanding of other areas of development such as social interaction. An example of how to make a prereaching baby reach is to give the gloves that have velcro on it and have them practice picking something up that also has velcro. Motor delays are common in kids with down syndrome–OT is a common intervention.

Ulnar grasp

Type of grasp that tends to come first when a baby palms an object.

Pincer grasp

9-12 months when baby learns how to pick up smaller objects with thumb and forefinger allowing baby to self feed–but also put others things in their mouths. 

Locomotion

Progression from 

• Rolling over (6 months)

• Sitting (7 months)

• Creeping (8-9 months)

• Crawling (8-9 months)

• Walking (12-15 months)

Motor milestones

• Sitting without support: 4-9 months

• Standing with assistance: 5-12 months

• Hands and knees crawling: 5.5-14 months

• Walking with assistance: 6-13.5 months

• Standing alone: 7-17 months

• Walking alone: 8-17.5 months

Motor milestones norms

at what age do we expect motor milestones to occur. This is helpful because you can compare their progress to other kids their age. These norms are present in all areas of development.

Karen Adolph’s work

Can babies transfer what they’ve learned about one motor skill to the next? She made observations about a baby grasping both sitting (experienced) and crawling (inexperienced) objects but the gap between them and the object keeps getting bigger. Her work says no, if a baby is experiencing a one motor behavior, there is a process of relearning a different motor behavior–and success or quick learning at one doesn’t mean the same for another. A lot of Adolph’s work revolves around behavioral flexibility, meaning that babies have to constantly adapt to a number of different changes, especially in the context of motor development. That has three big changes they have to contend with at all times. One, their skills are constantly evolving and changing; two, their environment constantly changes (stairs, hill, wet, etc); three, babies' bodies are constantly changing as they are having growth spurts). 

Habituation

infants respond less to previously experienced stimuli and more to novel stimuli. This is an adaptive trait. Habituation is a research technique where researchers repeatedly show a baby the same stimulus until the baby’s attention/response decreases.

• What it looks like: A researcher repeatedly shows a baby something (e.g., a picture, sound, or object). At first, the baby looks for a long time, but after repeated exposure, the baby looks for less and less time. Researchers interpret this decreased attention as habituation.

• Why it’s adaptive: Babies have limited attention and energy, so habituation helps them stop spending resources on things they already know are safe/familiar and focus on new or potentially important information.

What did the babies and monkey faces studies show about perceptual narrowing?

Using visual paired-comparison, 6-month-olds discriminated both human & monkey faces; 9-month-olds/adults only human. This reflects neural specialization: experience tunes face-processing networks toward familiar faces, reducing sensitivity to unfamiliar faces. But narrowing is experience-dependent—not a permanent loss: 6–9 months of monkey-face exposure preserved monkey-face discrimination at 9 months.

Perceptual narrowing

 a developmental process in which the brain uses your experiences to shape perceptual abilities. Neural pathways that are used will be strengthened, while those that are unused may be pruned. This is a process we call synaptic pruning.

Babies and phoneme discrimination

babies can distinguish between sound contrast made in all languages. A baby starts off as a universal listener meaning that baby can discriminate between any speech sounds in any language. Over time, because of what they are exposed to, they become a native listener–meaning they become very good at discriminating between the sounds and phonemes of their native language, and their ability to do this for other languages decreases. By 10 months, their ability to hear other phonemes outside of their native language have decreased significantly.

Patricia Kuhl’s work on language development (Mandarin study)

The control group was a group of American babies that came into the lab and listened to English- their Mandarin did not get better. The other group came in and listened to someone talk in Mandarin for twelve sessions. What was found was that the American babies who came in and listened to Mandarin were as good as babies who had been listening to Mandarin since they had been born. The intervention was between 6-8 months and the test was between 10-12 months. Another study was done, the same 12 sessions of mandarin, but one group was done with just audio and one was done with a video recording. These findings found no improvement in Mandarin, showing that in person learning/live social interaction is the most successful. The key difference is that the attention scores were much higher when there was a person right in front of them vs on a screen or in their ears. When you are with someone, there is a certain level of responsiveness that occurs. For example, if the teacher's eyes look at something, the baby's eyes are likely to follow, which can’t really happen online.

Why study attachment

The old belief was that adequate physical care is sufficient. Kids orphaned or separated from parents during WWII started to change this old belief that kids need more than physical care, such as cleaning and feeding. The new conclusion was that, since that wasn’t efficient, was that maybe that needed to be provided with the type of caregiving that will allow them to form attachments.

Rene Spitz

Set out to document children living in orphanages. Environment → research →  change in social policy. Spitz documented kids in institutions and hospitals. He wrote up papers and used video recording to show what they were like when kids were institutionalized or in the hospital, ultimately when they were away from caregivers for a longer period of time and how the kids were affected by it. Spitz’s research helped change social policies, such as less strict visiting hours in the hospital. René Spitz’s study would likely be considered unethical by today’s standards because it involved vulnerable infants who experienced severe emotional and social deprivation and could not consent. However, Spitz did not cause the deprivation—he observed children who were already living in institutional settings. The main ethical concern is that the infants were exposed to harmful conditions without the protections and oversight required in research today.

Harry Harlow

Conducted some of the first attachment research. Studied effects of the lack of all early social interactions. The baby monkey was in a cage by himself, had water, clean bedding, etc. One set of monkeys were isolated for one month, one set of monkeys were isolated for 6 months, and one set was isolated for a year. The monkeys that were in there for a month, did not know how to interact with other monkeys–they would go in a corner and avoid other monkeys. The monkeys had no interest in mating. Harlow artificially impregnated 6 month old monkeys, and they ended up rejecting and attacking their babies. The monkeys that were isolated for a year, many of them wouldn’t even eat and ended up starving themselves to death before the year was over. This shows how early social interaction is crucial for development to proceed. 

Bowlby

Attachment is biologically basked but also depended on the nature of experience with caregivers. Attachment is both nature and nurture. If a caregiver fails to give proper attention to the baby or child, they might acquire insecure attachment. In Bowlby’s theory, an internal working model is a mental picture or expectation that babies develop about themselves, other people, and relationships based on their early attachment experiences. It’s important as adults because these early expectations can influence how we view ourselves, how much we trust others, and how we behave in close relationships. For example, a baby who learns that caregivers are reliable may grow up expecting others to be trustworthy and supportive.

• Preattachment: birth-6 weeks. The baby is not really showing any signs of attachment. Yes they cry to be fed or picked up, but it doesn’t really matter who is doing it. 

• Attachment in the making: 6 weeks to 6-8 months. The  baby is starting to show some signs that they prefer one person over another person. Maybe they are more easily comforted by parents then other grown ups, etc.

• Clear-cut attachment: 6-8 months-1.5 years. This is when separation anxiety peaks for a baby. They think the world is ending when their caregiver, or preferred person leaves the room.

• Reciprocal attachment: 1.5 years on- toddlers. Toddlers first start to understand that adults have needs too. For example, they see their caregiver eating and can understand that, even though they are not hungry, their caregiver must be.

Secure base

Helps children explore and be more competent. When the child can go off into the world and explore, but they know they have a place to go back to. For example, when a mother sits on the bench on the outskirts of the playground, if a kid falls, gets hurt, or wants to show their parents something, they know their mother will always be sitting there at the bench.

Internal working model

a mental representation of the self, of attachment figures, and of relationships. Whether people can meet your needs or not. If a child is used to a caregiver that is not always there for their needs, they might start to expect that.

Ainsworth and Attachment

extent to which an infant can use his/her primary caregiver as a secure base. How infants react to separations and reunions. Ainsworth did the empirical study for Bowlby's theory to back it up. Ainsworth also did cross-cultural research. She did research in Maryland, and Gandia and looked at how attachment differed across cultures. Ainsworth attachment styles are a categorical model, meaning that she took all the babies she studied and put them in a category.

Strange situation

assesses parent as secure base, reaction to strangers, separation distress, reaction to reunions.

Secure attachment

infant or child has a high-quality, relatively unambivalent relationship with his/her attachment figure. Babies use caregivers as a secure base. Distress is expected when a caregiver leaves the room, especially if a stranger is there. When they are reunited, the baby calms down pretty instantly. Lots of things predict secure attachment, especially parental sensitivity, meaning that the caregiver is consistently responsive.

Insecure/resistant (ambivalent) attachment

 Infants or child is clingy and stays close to his/her caregiver, rather than explore the environment. Does not use parents as a secure base. When the parent(s) leaves, such as for daycare or preschool, the child might feel relieved to see their parents or caregiver again but also might be upset at them for leaving in the first place.

Insecure/avoidant attachment

 infant or child seem somewhat indifferent toward their caregiver and may even avoid caregiving. Generally okay with a stranger, doesn’t alway check in with parent or caregiver, and might not cry when that person leaves the room. Reunion looks avoidant–maybe no eye contact, hesitation to be picked up, etc.  This can be seen in adults through the silent treatment.

Disorganized/disoriented attachment

infant or child wants to approach caregiver, but also regard it as a source of fear to avoid. This could be when parents/caregivers are abusive. The reunion is contradictory, confusing, and fearful behavior

Temperament

Biologically-based individual differences. In emotional, motor and attentional reactivity as well as in self-regulation. Studies on temperament come after Ainsworth and Bowlby about attachment. Attachment is often about how the parent reacts, where temperament focuses more on the child. Each baby might react to the same situation in different ways because of their temperament as well as their ability to regulate, hold attention, etc. This will be different depending on the situation and stable across time.

Thomas and Chess

Created a categorical model. The percentages below don’t add up to 100%, showing the flaws in categorical models because not everyone fits in preconceived categories. Three types of babies:

1. Easy babies (40%): fairly cheerful, adjust well to new situations and people, and fairly consistent eating and sleeping routines.

2. Difficult babies (10%): difficulty eating. Schedules are pretty irregular. 

3. Slow-to-warm-up babies (15%): maybe at first they are hesitant or shy, especially with new situations. But with time, they will warm up to a new situation or person and come out of their shell.

Rothbart and Bates

Doesn’t like the categorical model so uses a dimensional model instead. Each baby in their study gets ranked on all six dimensions they outlined. The dimensions are

1. Fearful distress/inhibition

2. Irritable distress

3. Attention span/persistence

4. Activity level

5. Positive affect

6. Rhythmicity (looking at rhythms of sleeping and eating schedules)