Psych 223 - Quiz 2 Review (ch 7-13)

Growth and motor development

• Changes in height and weight happen much slower in preschool years than in infancy

• Make steady progress in motor development

• Extraneous motor activity is an important form of purposeful, exploratory behaviour

• Children with higher motor activity levels demonstrate better ability to control/inhibit their behaviour

• Motor activity levels tend to peak between 7 and 9 years

• 3-5 year olds need 10-13 hours of sleep

• Most impressive gains are in large muscle skills

• Small muscle skills also improve, just to a lesser extent

• Gross motor skills: movements that use and develop the large muscles

• Fine motor skills: movements that develop the small muscles of the hand

• Early training of fine motor skills (starting at around 2 ½ years) can accelerate the rate at which young children develop these skills

• Learning to write letters appears to help children more fully understand them

• Physical and cognitive development are sometimes interactive processes

Motor development chart

Age	Gross motor skills	Fine motor skills
18-24 months	Runs (20 months) Walks well (24 months) Climbs stairs with both feet on each step Pushes and pulls boxes or wheeled toys Unscrews lid on a jar	Shows clear hand preference Stacks 4-6 blocks Turns pages one at a time Picks up things without overbalancing
2-3 years	Runs easily Climbs on furniture unaided Hauls and shoves big toys around obstacles	Picks up small objects Throws small white ball while standing
3-4 years	Walks upstairs one foot per step Skips on two feet Walks on tiptoes Pedals and steers a tricycle Walks in any direction pulling large toys	Catches large ball between outstretched arms Cuts paper with scissors  Holds pencil between thumb and fingers
4-5 years	Walks up and down stairs one foot per step Stands, runs, and walks on tiptoes	Strikes ball with bat Kicks and catches ball Threads beads on a string Grasps pencil properly
5-6 years	Skips on alternate feet Walks on a line Slides, swings	Plays ball games well Threads needle and sews large stitches

Brain and ns 2

Brain growth, synapse formation, and myelinization continue in early childhood, but at a slower pace than in infancy

• Many neurological milestones happen between 2 and 6

1. Lateralization

2. Reticular formation and hippocampus

3. Handedness

4. Infantile amnesia

2

Lateralization

Functional specialization of the left and right hemispheres of the brain

• Corpus callosum grows and matures more during early childhood years than in any other period of life

• Basic outline of lateralization is genetically determined, whereas specific timing of lateralization of each function is determined by an interaction of genes and experiences

• Maturation and experience are both at work in the lateralization process

Reticular formation and hippocampus

• Reticular formation: brain structure that regulates attention and concentration; gets myelinated during this time

• Hippocampus: involved in the transfer of information to long term memory

• Episodic memory improves between 4 and 6 years, and the hippocampus becomes more integrated with cortical regions that are part of the hippocampal memory network and segregated from regions unrelated to memory

• Maturation of the functional connections between the hippocampus and cerebral cortex is likely responsible for the fact that we don’t remember the first 3 years of life (infantile amnesia)

Handedness

Tendency to rely primarily on the right or left hand; another neurological milestone that appears very early in life

• Start seeing this preference between 2-6 years of age

• Prevalence of right handedness is likely to be the result of genetic inheritance

• Any memories that remain by 8 years old are more likely to survive

Infantile amnesia

• Cut off age for our earliest memories seems to occur around 2.5 years old

• Several factors facilitate the long-term narrative memory of early life events, including:

  • Child’s ability to verbally describe the event

  • Emotional impact it had at the time

  • Importance of the event to the child

  • Distinctiveness and uniqueness of the event

  • Age of the child when it occurred

-

Possible explanations: 

• Brain growth that happens during this time that overrides those memories

• Development of autobiographical memory (have to know the things are happening to YOU, meaning you need a good sense of self)

• We often remember events with language, so if it wasn’t strongly developed at the time, this could impede with memory formation

Cognitive changes in early childhood

By 5 or 6, children are proficient at manipulating symbols and can make accurate judgements about others’ thoughts, feelings, and behaviour

1. Preoperational stage info

2. Challenges to Piaget’s view

3. Theories of mind

4. Alternative theories of early childhood thinking

5. Sociocultural theory

Preoperational stage

Piaget says that once children acquire the semiotic (symbolic) function (the understanding that one object or behaviour can represent another) between 18 and 24 months, they’re in the preoperational stage

Characteristics of preoperational thought

• Early symbol use

• Proficient symbol use: used for thinking and communicating but have difficulty thinking logically

• Egocentrism: assuming everyone sees the world as the child does

• Centration: tendency to think of the world in terms of one variable at a time (ex. anything that moves is an animal)

• Limited conservation ability: centration limits conservation; conservation doesn’t show up till about 5 years old

• Conservation and transformation: the understanding that matter can change in appearance without changing in quantity

2 preoperational stages

Preconceptual Stage

• 2-4 years old

• Ex. imaginary friends

  • ~65% of children this age have imaginary friends

  • Tend to be more sociable

  • Now shown to have cognitive and emotional benefits

  • Children know the difference between real and not real friends

-

Intuitive Stage

• 4-7 years old

• Ex. imitations on perceptual tasks

Errors in preop children 1

• Animistic thinking: thinking inanimate objects are alive - “Sun sleeps” / “car is alive”

• Transductive thinking: from particular to particular, things that happen close in time must be associated with each other - “I fell because the phone was ringing”

• Egocentrism: view that everyone sees the world from your perspective

  • Pronouns unidentified during story telling (don’t give names to “he” and “she” in their stories); expect you to know what they’re talking about because THEY know what they’re talking about

  • Mountain scene task

  • Pencil example (touching two different ends of a pencil and asking what the other person feels - they get it wrong)

Errors in preop children 2

• Appearance/reality distinctions: easily fooled by changes in appearance

  • Ex. Maynard the cat becomes a dog (many 3 year olds are fooled when appearance changes; put a dog mask on the cat then the children say the cat is a dog; 6 year olds aren’t fooled)

  • Perception-bound thought: focus on how it looks instead of what it is

• Irreversible thinking: children in this stage can’t retrace the series of steps in a problem (ex. conservation of liquid)

• Lack of hierarchical classification: giving preoperational children a list of things and asking them to classify things that belong together, but their lists follow no coherent pattern

  • Class inclusion (more red jellybeans? Yes. More red jellybeans or more jellybeans? Red)

  • Can’t think of the whole and the part at the same time together

2

Errors in preop children 3

• Conservation problems (lines of circles, ask if one line has more, then move circles apart and ask again - they’ll get it wrong)

• 1 to 1 correspondence problems (can’t make a row of circles the same as an example row)

• Centration: only focusing on one characteristic/scheme at a time (ex. start and end rather than the in-between)

  • Transformations (want to see if a child focuses on end state or actual transformation of states - ex. book falling)

  • Distance and velocity (two trains, one straight path one through mountains, leave and arrive same time, did they go the same speed? Yes)

• Seriation: putting things in order (children can’t put sizes of things in order or largest to smallest or vice versa, and instead group small and big ones in respective groups)

• Horizontal decalage: can master one concept but not the others

3

Challenges to Piaget

• Younger children demonstrate an understanding of conservation if the task is made very simple

• Preschoolers are more cognitively sophisticated than Piaget thought

• Research generally confirms Piaget’s observations, but there are some disparities (order is right, timing not so much)

-

1. Egocentrism

• Children as young as 14.5 months appear to have some ability to understand that another person perceives/experiences things differently than they do

-

• John Flavell says there are 2 levels of perspective-taking:

1. Child knows other people experience things differently

2. Child develops a whole series of complex rules for figuring out precisely what the other person sees or experiences

-

• Level 1 knowledge emerges around 2 or 3 years, and level 2 around 4 or 5 years

• Between 2 and 6 years, children learn to regulate/modulate their emotional expressions to conform to others’ expectations

2. Appearance vs reality

• Movement away from egocentrism seems to be part of a much larger change in their understanding of appearance and reality

• 4-5 year olds can see the difference between a sponge painted to look like a rock and an actual rock (the same object can be represented differently)

Theories of mind

A set of ideas constructed by an individual to explain other people’s ideas, beliefs, desires, and behaviour

• Correlated with performance on Piaget’s tasks and working memory development

• Development of theory of mind is enhanced by pretend play and sharing pretense with other children

• Some level of language facility may be a necessary condition for the development of theory of mind

Understanding thoughts, desires, and beliefs

• ToM doesn’t develop until 4 years old

• By 10 months old, infants understand that people (not inanimate objects) operate with goals and intentions

• By 3 years old, children understand some aspects of of the link between people’s thinking or feeling and their behaviour

  • However, they don’t understand that people’s actions are based on their own representations of reality, which may differ from actual reality

•  False belief principle: the ability to look at a problem or situation from another person’s point of view and discern what kind of information would cause that person to believe something that isn’t true (ex. candy box that actually has crayons in it and asking children what they think another child would think is in it)

• 4 year olds understand “I know that you know” but not “You know that I know”

  • This understanding of the reciprocal nature of thought occurs between 5 and 7 years old (important for reciprocal friendships)

• Children usually figure out that knowledge can be derived from inference by 6 years old

Influences on ToM development

• A child’s ToM correlates with their performance on Piaget’s tasks 

• Language skills (ex. knowledge of words like “want”, “need”, “think”, etc) are also related to ToM development since they express feelings, thoughts, and desires

• Children with disabilities that affect language development develop ToM more slowly

Alternative theories of early childhood thinking

1. Info processing theory

2. Sociocultural theory

Info processing theory

• Age differences in cognitive development are a function of changes in children’s use of their short term memories

• Short term storage space (STSS): neo-Piagetian theorist Robbie Case’s term for the working memory

•  Number of schemes the STSS can attend to is limited

• Operational efficiency: the maximum amount of schemes that can be processed in STSS

  • Improves with age and practice

• Emphasize the importance of:

  • Metamemory: knowledge about and control of memory processes

  • Metacognition: knowledge about and control of thought processes

• Both improve during the early childhood period

Sociocultural theory

• Emphasizes role of social factors in cognitive development

• Suggests that group learning processes are central to cognitive development

• Social interaction is required for cognitive development

• Can’t exactly confirm or deny his findings, but there is evidence that parents who provide more cognitive scaffolding to their children during preschool years allow their children to exhibit higher levels of achievement in early elementary grades

• Children in pairs and groups tend to produce more sophisticated ideas than those on their own

• Logical thinking of older children develops because of internalization of speech routines acquired from older children and adults

Stages of sociocultural theory

Stage	Description
Primitive stage	Infant possesses mental processes similar to those of lower animals Learns primarily through conditioning, until language begins to develop in the second year
Naive psychology stage	Starts when infants learn language Still doesn’t understand language’s symbolic character
Egocentric speech stage	Starts when children understand the symbolic function of language (near the end of the third year of life) Uses language as a guide to solving problems
Ingrowth stage	Stars when egocentric speech becomes completely internalized at 6 or 7 years old Logical thinking results from children’s internalization of speech routines they have acquired from older children and adults

Fast mapping

Ability to categorically link new words to real-world referents

• Form a hypothesis of the word’s meaning and then use the word and get feedback to help judge the accuracy of your hypothesis

• At 2 ½ years old, the average child knows about 600 words, but by the time they reach preschool age (5-6 years old), they know about 15,000 words (an increase of about 10 words per day)

• Around 3 years old, children begin to pay attention to words in whole groups, such as words that name objects in a single class or words with similar meanings

• Understanding the categorical nature of words helps children develop as mental “slots” for new words

Grammar explosion

Period when the grammatical features of children’s speech become more similar to those of adult speech

1. Inflections

2. Questions and negatives

3. Overregularization

4. Complex sentences

Inflections

• Children add inflections and more complex word orders in fairly predictably sequences

• Earliest inflection is usually “ing” (2 ½-3 years old)

• Over the next year or so, prepositions like “on” and “in”, plurals, irregular past tenses, articles (“a” and “the”), “s” added to third person verbs, regular past tenses, and various forms of auxiliary verbs (ex. I am going) start to emerge

Questions and negatives

• Child seems to go through periods where they create types of sentences that they haven’t heard adults use but that are consistent with the particular set of rules they’re using

• In the development of negatives, children go through a stage where they put the not or no somewhere but omit the auxiliary verb (ex. I not crying)

Overregularization

AKA overgeneralization, refers to attachment of regular inflections to irregular words, such as the substitution of “goed” for “went”

• Language development is a rule-governed process that cannot be explained by imitation theories

• Children actively infer and use language rules

Complex sentences

After children have figured out inflections and the basic sentence forms (negatives and questions), they soon begin to create remarkably complex sentences, using conjunctions to combine two ideas or using embedded clauses

Phonological awareness

A child’s sensitivity to the sound patterns that are specific to the language being acquired; also includes the child’s knowledge of that particular language’s system for representing sounds with letters

• Ex. what does “gas” sound like if you take away the “g”?

• Learned in elementary school through formal instruction

• The greater a child’s phonological awareness before they enter school, the faster they learn to read

• Appears to develop mainly through word play (ex. nursery rhymes, repeating sounds/words)

• Shared/dialogic reading has also shown to contribute

  • Dialogic reading: dialogue, having a dialogue with a child about a book, asking them questions about what you’re reading

• Invented spelling: a strategy young children with good phonological awareness skills use when they write

  • Coupled with corrective feedback from parents and teachers helps children learn their language’s system for representing speech sounds with letters

First intelligence test

• Intelligence quotient: ratio of mental age to chronological age; also, a general term for any kind of score derived from an intelligence test

• First created by Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon

• In the present, IQ now measures a person’s performance compared to the average performance of a larger population of people the same age

Modern intelligence tests

Tests psychologists use most frequently today were developed by David Wechsler

• Wechsler intelligence scales for children (WISC-V) is the current edition for measuring child’s general thinking and reasoning skills; tests 5 main areas:

1. Verbal comprehension: ability to access and apply acquired word knowledge to verbalize meaningful concepts, think about verbal information, and express ideas in words

2. Visuals spatial reasoning: ability to evaluate visual details and understand visual spatial relationships to construct geometric designs from a model

3. Fluid reasoning: ability to detect the underlying conceptual relationship among visual objects and use reasoning to identify and apply logical rules

4. Working memory: ability to register, maintain, and manipulate visual and auditory information in conscious awareness, which requires attention and concentration, as well as visual and auditory discrimination

5. Processing speed: speed and accuracy of visual identification, decision making, and decision implementation

• Can be used to indicate intellectual strengths and weaknesses

Predictive value and stability of IQ scores

• Children with higher IQs are more likely to get good grades, complete high school, and go on to post secondary education

• IQ scores are quite stable

• Lower IQs are more likely to change than higher ones

• Attitudes toward school and education in general make a difference as well

• IQ and income only have a 0.23 correlation

• People with lower intelligence are more likely to get cancer and CVD, more likely to die younger

• IQ can predict income but not wealth

Limitations of IQ tests

• Does not measure underlying competence

• Don’t measure many skills that are likely to be highly significant for getting along in the world

• Don’t measure:

  • Creativity

  • Street smarts

  • Ability to read social cues

  • Understanding of spatial relationships

• Likely include cultural biases

Heredity

(intelligence)

• Strong hereditary influence on IQ

• 0.5 - 0.7 correlation

• No section for it but environment accounts for 30% - 50% of variation in IQ

Family environment

(intelligence)

• Environment can have a significant impact on IQ 

• Parents of higher IQ tend to:

  • Provide their children with an interesting and complex physical environment, including play materials appropriate for the child’s age and developmental level

  • Be responsive to children’s behaviour

  • Talk to their children often, using rich and accurate language

  • Keep their children within the zone of proximal development, helping them master new skills

• High risk parents tend to:

  • Be less likely to provide effective intellectual stimulation

  • Display less constructive feedback during problem solving activities

  • Be less effective in their teaching strategies

Preschool/school influences

(intelligence)

• Enrichment programs begun in infancy tend to have lasting positive effects

• Enriched daycare children had significantly higher reading and math scores at 12 years old and were half as likely as the control group to have repeated a grade

• A study found that girls enter school with:

  • Better communication skills

  • Stronger abilities in copying and symbol use

  • Higher scores in attention and in self control of impulsive behaviour

  • Higher independence in dressing

• Boys were rated above girls in curiosity

Reaction range

Range  between upper and lower boundaries for traits such as intelligence, which is established by one’s genes; one’s environment determines where, within those limits, one will fall

Psychoanalytic approach

(early childhood)

• Argue that internal drives and emotions are the driving force behind developmental change in the social and emotional domains

• As the child matures, they must adapt these inner forces to social demands of those around them

• Freud’s view of the early childhood period states that they must gain control of their bodily functions and then renegotiate their relationships with their parents to prepare for stepping out into the world of peers

Psychosocial approach

(early childhood)

Erikson on the other hand, placed the emphasis during this time on new mobility and desire for autonomy, as well as new cognitive skills which cause toddlers to begin wanting to take initiative

• For Erikson, the key to healthy development is finding a balance between the child’s emerging skills and desire for autonomy and the parent’s need to protect the child and control their behaviour

Autonomy vs shame and doubt

• Toddlers have new mobility and the accompanying desire for autonomy

• Want to dress themselves, choose the toys they like, develop food preferences, and master toilet training

• Frustrating time for parents, but it’s important to let kids do the things so they can develop their autonomy/sense of control

• To successfully complete this stage, toddlers must feel secure and confident

• If not, they’ll have self-doubt and feel inadequate

Initiative vs guilt

• Toddler develops new cognitive skills (ex. ability to plan) which accentuates their wish to take initiative

• Want to develop a sense of purpose, and if this is not developed, toddlers feel guilt

• Mistakes may be viewed as personal failures

• Want to put your child into circumstances where they can plan and do things on their own, and explore and make decisions

• Don’t always criticize what they’ve done because then they’ll develop guilt

• A lot of this purpose is developed through play

Social cognitive perspective

Assumes that social and emotional changes in the child are the result of, or at least are facilitated by, the enormous growth in cognitive abilities that happens during the preschool years (Bandura)

• Social and personality development in early childhood are related to improvements in the cognitive domain

• Includes:

  • Person perception

  • Understanding rule categories

  • Understanding others’ intentions

Person perception

The ability to classify others according to categories/traits such as age, gender, and race

• Begins around age 5

• Can also speak about others’ behaviour (ex. person is nice or not nice)

• Young children’s observations and categorizations of people are much less consistent than those of older children, like because they base these categorizations on their most recent interactions with that person

• Cross race effect: people are more likely to remember the faces of people of their own race than those of people of a different race (established by 5 years old) 

• Self-segregation by gender begins as early as 2 years old

Understanding rule categories

• We have little tolerance for breaking rules that we view as having a basis in morality

• Children begin to respond differently to violations of social conventions and moral rules between ages 2 and 3

  • AKA they understand that some things are more bad than others

• This kind of understanding seems to develop both as a consequence of preschoolers’ increasing capacity for classification and as a result of adults’ tendency to emphasize moral transgressions more than social-convention violations when punishing children

Understanding others’ intentions

• We tend to base our judgments of others’ behaviour and our responses to them on what we perceive to be their intentions

  • Piaget suggests that young children are incapable of such discriminations

  • However, later research found that young children do understand intentions to some degree

• Children have a good understanding of this when they’re trying to avoid punishment

• However, children’s judgements were also influenced by outcomes (ex. more likely to say a child who wanted to hurt his playmate was good if he failed to hit the other child with the ball)

  • Still limited in their ability to base judgements entirely on intentions

  • Starting to understand intentions and things done on purpose/by accident

Attachment

• Attachment quality predicts behaviour during preschool years

• Insecurely attached children have more anger and aggression toward peers and adults in social settings

  • Are more likely to develop negative, critical attitudes toward themselves

• By 12 months, a baby has normally established a clear attachment to at least one caregiver

• 2 year olds realize they’re independent contributors to the parent-child relationship

  • Brings them into more situations in which parents want one thing and children another

  • 2 year olds comply with parents’  requests more often than not

  • More likely to comply with safety requests or prohibitions about care of objects than requests to delay or instructions about self care

  • Mostly passive resistance at this age

• By 2 or 3, attachments are just as strong, but many attachment behaviours become less visible

• Securely attached children have fewer behaviour problems

• Attachment relationships seem to change around 4 years old

  • Referred to by Bowlby as goal-corrected partnership (preschooler understands that the relationship continues to exist even when the partners are apart)

• 4 and 5 year olds who are securely attached to their parents are more likely to have positive relationships with their preschool teachers than those who are insecurely attached

• Advances in the internal working model bring about new conflicts

Warmth and nurturance

Good quality of this leads to more securely attached children than those with rejecting parents; children are/have:

• Higher self esteem

• More empathetic

• More altruistic

• More responsive to others’ hurts or sufferings

• Higher IQs

• More compliant in preschool and elementary school

• Do better in school

• Less likely to show criminal behaviour in adolescence/adulthood

Clarity and consistency of rules

Parents with clear, consistently applied rules have children who are much less likely to be defiant or noncompliant; result in children with:

• Fewer behavioural problems

• Less aggressive / defiant / noncompliant

• Protective factor for high risk children

Level of expectations

AKA maturity demands, form of control parents use and expectations they place on their children; ideal is parents who aren’t overly restrictive, explain things to the child, and avoid physical punishments; result in children with: 

• Higher maturity

• High self-esteem

• More generosity and altruism

Communication between parent and child

Open, regular communication between parent and child has been linked to more positive outcomes

• More emotionally and socially mature children

Parenting styles

Diana Baumrind (1972) identified the 4 aspects of family functioning and came up with 3/4 widely recognized parenting styes

1. Permissive: high in nurturance but low in maturity demands, control, and communication

2. Authoritarian: high in control and maturity demands but low in nurturance and communication

3. Authoritative: high in all 4 dimensions: nurturance, communication, clarity and consistency, and maturity demands

• Maccoby and Martin expanded on this, and added a fourth type of parenting style

4. Uninvolved: low in all 4 dimensions: nurturance, communication, clarity and consistency, and maturity demands

• Parenting style is a better predictor of poor outcomes in a child than is a parent’s SES

Authoritarian

Deal with issues by asserting physical, social, and emotional control over the child, 25%

• Children do less well in school

• Have lower self-esteem

• Are less skilled with peers

• Some appear subdued

• May be highly aggressive or rebellious

Authoritative

Deal with issues by firmly sticking to their demands without resorting to asserting their power over the child; set clear limits while also responding to the child’s individual needs, 33%

• Children generally have higher self-esteem

• More independent

• More likely to comply with parental requests

• May be more altruistic

• Self confident

• Achievement oriented

• Get better grades

Permissive

Deal with issues by allowing the child to do whatever they want, 25%

• Children do slightly worse in school

• Are more likely to be aggressive

• Somewhat immature in their behaviour

• Less likely to take responsibility

• Less independent

Uninvolved

Deal with issues by not dealing with them in the slightest - no rules or expectations or involvement; indifferent to children’s behaviours and to the responsibilities of parenting, 15%

• MOST consistently negative outcomes (almost 50% have behavioural issues)

• Children show disturbances in social relationships

• More impulsive and antisocial

• Less competent with peers

• Less achievement oriented in school

Hostile / ineffective parenting

Manipulate children through use of sarcasm or put downs and/or mix anger with punishment

• Have strong negative effects on children’s behaviour

Ethnicity, SES, and parenting styles

• Asian American parents tend to employ an authoritarian parenting style 

  • Asian American children score higher than their European American counterparts on almost all measures of cognitive competence

• Indigenous parents in Canada are found to widely employ permissive parenting, but they haven’t found associations with negative outcomes in their children

  • Studies suggest that parenting style may be dependent on cultural context in which parents and children live, so as that context changes, the best corresponding type of parenting style changes with it

• Low family income and low levels of parental education increase risk of children’s vulnerability to aggression or social withdrawal

• Parenting style is a better predictor of outcome than SES

• Increased vulnerability is still associated with low SES

• Many low SES parents lack personal and material resources required to provide effective parenting

Family structure and effects

• Children 0-5 living with married parents made up 59% in 2021

  • 24% lived with common law couple families

  • 17.5% lived in lone parent families

  • 9% of children lived with at least one grandparent

• Lone parenthood isn’t linked to any specific effects in children aged 2-3, but between 4 and 11, it’s linked with double the rate of emotional disorder, conduct disorder, hyperactivity, repeating a grade, relationship problems, and having any one or more of these problems

• 80% of lone parent families are headed by women in Canada, and almost half of female lone-parent families experience high levels of chronic stress

• Children and parents in lone parent families tend to have increased bonding, and children often exhibit high levels of:

  • Resiliency

  • Maturity

  • Problem solving

  • Emotional regulation

Skip generation families

Children live with grandparents without parents present

• Some studies suggest rates of behavioural problems are higher among children living in skip generation families

  • It is important to note that children are often in the care of their grandparents due to a traumatic event that has disrupted their own family

Same sex parents

Studies have shown that children raised by same-sex parents are not at a disadvantage when compared to children raised by heterosexual parents

• Children in these families have been shown to be better psychologically adjusted

• Generally more welcoming of diversity

• Less likely to impose gender stereotypes

• More nurturing of young children

• Higher success rates in elementary and secondary school

• More likely to graduate high school and be successful in higher education

-

Most studies say that children’s development depends more on how parental figures interact with them rather than on any particular family configuration

-

Loving nurturing home environment is essential for healthy, competent, and well adjusted children

Divorce

• Rates have overall declined from the peak in 1987

• 25% of all marriages dissolve by the 4th anniversary

• For many families, divorce happens during the child-rearing period

• Children whose parents separate or stay in conflict-ridden marriages can experience the same effects as children whose parents actually divorce

• In the first few years after a divorce, children usually exhibit declines in school performance and show more aggressive, defiant, negative, or depressed behaviour

• Children of divorced parents are more likely to engage in criminal behaviour in adolescence 

• Children in step parent families have: 

  • Higher rates of delinquency

  • More behaviour problems in school

  • Lower grades

• Negative effects of divorce are persistent

• Adults whose parents divorced are more likely to get divorced

• Negative effects are more pronounced for boys than girls; however, the effects are delayed in girls, making it hard to say for sure

• Effects of divorce were found to be most severe in children who experienced parental divorce in early childhood rather than during school years

Effects of divorce

• In the first year after divorce, women’s income drops an average of 50% and men’s 25%

• Lone parenthood, divorce, and step parenthood all increase the likelihood that the family climate or style will shift away from authoritative parenting

• Extended families seem to serve a protective function for children who are growing up in lone parent homes

  • They also often help single and divorced mothers with financial and emotional support and childcare

Peer relationships

• Over the years from 2-6, relationships with nonsibling peers becomes increasingly important

• It’s the critical period when brain development and function is most sensitive to social skills development

Relating to peers through play

• Play is related to cognitive development

• Social skills: set of behaviours that usually lead to being accepted as a play partner or friend by others

  • Play is related to social skill development

• Children who are skilled in group entry spend time observing others to find out what they’re doing and try to become a part of it

• Children with poor group entry skills try to gain acceptance through aggressive behaviour or by interrupting the group

• Social skills training improves children’s ability to regulate emotions

• Improving children’s communication skills can help as well

Parten’s stages of play

1. Unoccupied: children seem to be making random movements with no clear purpose

2. Solitary and onlooker play: playing alone, onlooker as in watching other children play

• Children show interest in playing with others as early as 6 months old

3. Parallel play: by 14-18 months, two or more children play together with toys, sometimes cooperating, but more often simply playing side by side with different toys

• Express interest in each other at gaze at or make noises at one another

4. Associative play: around 18 months, toddlers pursue their own activities but also engage in spontaneous, though short lived, social interactions, ex. sharing or borrowing toys, but they’re not doing the same thing

5. Cooperative play: by 3 or 4 years old, children play and work together to accomplish a goal

• Can be constructive or symbolic

• Playing “house” or cooperating to build a tower

Types of play

• Functional play: simple, repetitive activities typical of 3 year olds that may involve objects or repetitive muscular movements

• Constructive play: activities in which children manipulate objects to produce or build something

• Play to learn, learn to play

Development of prosocial behaviour

Intentional and voluntary behaviour for the purpose of helping another person in some way (sometimes referred to as “altruism”)

• First become evident around 2 or 3 years old

  • About the same time as real interest in playing with other children arises

• Involves sharing toys, offering to help sick children, and trying to comfort an upset child

• Even before 2 years old, children experience greater happiness when giving treats to others than when receiving treats themselves

• Some kinds of prosocial behaviour (ex. taking turns, sharing, helping) increases over time, whereas comforting other children becomes less common over time

• Young children who show more empathy and altruism are also those who regulate their emotions well

  • Seem to be related to different kinds of child rearing

Parental influences on prosocial behaviour

• Parents who draw children’s attention to how others are feeling and model prosocial behaviour tend to have more altruistic children

• Explain the effects of the child’s behaviour on others

• If the warmth parents display is combined with clear rules and expectations about behaviour, children are more likely to behave altruistically

• Prosocial attributions: positive statements about the underlying cause for helpful behaviour; useful in raising prosocial children

• Parents of altruistic children look for opportunities for their children to do helpful things

• When parents model thoughtful and generous behaviour, children tend to practice it as well

Friendships

• As early as 18 months, toddlers can show hints of playmate preferences or individual friendships

• By 3 years old, 20% of children have a stable playmate

• By 4 years old, more than half of children spend 30% or more of their time with one other child

• The formation of stable friendships is an important change in social behaviour during early childhood

• Early peer interactions are primitive but still show:

  • Mutual liking

  • More reciprocity

  • More extended interactions

  • More positive and less negative behaviour

  • More supportiveness in a novel situation

•  When compared to nonfriend pairs at the same age

• Having a friend in early childhood is related to social competence

Personality and self concept

• As young children gain more understanding of the social environment, their temperaments evolve into their true personalities

• Self concepts become more complex, allowing them to exercise greater control over their own behaviour

Temperament to personality

• The dimension of effortful control is important for getting along with others

  • Children with difficult temperaments learn that behaviours associated with being difficult often result in peer rejection

  • May change their behaviour to gain social acceptance

• Duck duck goose and similar games contribute to the process through which temperament becomes personality

  • Teaches children that controlling their impulses is more beneficial than submitting to them

  • When children learn to achieve this, they are encouraged by their peers to keep their impulses in check going forward

• Parental responses to temperament matter - once children understand how they should and shouldn’t behave, they can start shaping a better personality

Self concept 2

• Between 2 and 6 years old, children continue to develop their categorical and emotional selves AND add the social self

• Gender differences begin to appear in preschoolers’ self concept

• Define people in terms of visible/outward characteristics

• Includes:

  • Categorical self

  • Social self

  • Emotional self

2

Categorical self

• Self concept of preschoolers often revolves around their visible characteristics rather than more inner qualities

• Preschoolers prefer playmates of their own age and gender

• Categorical self seems to be as much an internal working model for social relationships as for the self

Social self

• By 2 years old, toddlers have already started learning various social “scripts” (routines of play or interaction with others)

• Begin to develop some implicit understanding of their roles in such scripts

• In playing house, children gradually begin to understand their place in the network of family roles

• Role scripts help young children become more independent

• Children who interact with teachers the most in early years are those deemed particularly aggressive (them initiating the interaction) and more shy children (whom teachers initiate interaction with)

• Shyness seems to be related to social anxiety rather than a lack of ability to verbally express themselves

Emotional self

• An ability to label and explain emotions

• Acquisition of emotional regulation is central to this stage; involves shifting control slowly from the parents to the child

• Empathy and the awareness of moral emotions play key roles

• Preschool girls tend to score higher than boys in the ability to correctly label emotions and understand complex ones

• Children are better at understanding their own emotions than those of others

• Level of emotional regulation at 2 years old predicted level of aggressive behaviour at 4 years old

• Temperament is a notable factor in a child’s ability to develop emotional regulation

• Issues with self control also appear in children born prematurely and those who were delayed in language development

• Young children’s emotional selves include an awareness of emotional states that are linked to their culture’s definitions of right and wrong

• Children who won’t have warm, trusting relationships with parents are at risk of failing to develop moral emotions (guilt, shame, pride) or of developing feelings of guilt, shame, and pride that are too weak to influence their behaviour

Sex role knowledge

• Children also must learn what goes with being a boy or girl in a certain culture

• Gender stereotypes develop quite early

• Sometimes as young as 2 years old

• By 3-4 years old, children can assign stereotypical occupations, toys, and activities with each gender

• By 5 years old, children begin to associate certain personality traits with men and women

• Children express essentialist ideas about gender-typed behaviour

• It takes a while but eventually, children understand that these rules are flexible

• Gender stereotyping declines between 5 and 11 years old, although stereotype knowledge and spontaneous stereotyping remain at high levels

Sex typed behaviour

Different patterns of behaviour among girls and boys

• Actually develops earlier than ideas about sex roles

• By 18 to 24 months old, children begin to show some preference for sex-stereotyped toys, which is even earlier than they can consistently identify their own gender

• By 3 years old, children begin to show preference for same sex friends and are more sociable with playmates of the same sex

Growth and motor development

(middle childhood)

• By 12 years old, girls have reached 93% of adult height, but boys only 84%

• Gain 5-8cm of height and ~2.75kg of weight per year during this period

• Girls have slightly more body fat and less muscle tissue than boys

• Large muscle coordination improves, same with hand eye and fine motor coordination

• Fine motor coordination improvement is partially thanks to wrist bone maturation

• Girls: slightly more body fat and slightly less muscle tissue

• Gender differences in skeletal and muscular maturation cause girls to be better coordinated but slower and somewhat weaker than boys

Brain and ns

(middle childhood)

• Steady increase in myelinization of neural axons across the cerebral cortex

  • Sensory and motor areas are affected first

  • Linked to improvements in fine motor skills and hand eye coordination

• Brain growth in the frontal lobes is significant at this time

  • Linked to improvements in logic and planning

• Ability to control attention improves in middle childhood

• Selective attention: ability to focus cognitive activity on the important elements of a problem or situation; important to school performance

• Children begin to function similar to adults when presented with distractions due to increased myelinization of the nerves connecting the reticular formation and frontal lobes 

• Association areas: parts of the brain where sensory, motor, and intellectual functions are linked; neurons are myelinized to some degree during this time

  • Increases information processing speed

• Lateralization of spatial perception (ability to identify and act on relationships between objects in space) advances; due to right hemisphere lateralization

  • Test often involves relative right-left orientation: ability to identify right and left from multiple perspectives

  • Usually only after 8 years old can children successfully identify right and left from perspectives other than their own

• Spatial cognition: ability to infer rules form and make predictions about the movement of objects in space

  • Boys perform much better than girls starting at an early age on spatial orientation tests, may be due to their play preferences (ex. building Lego, blocks, etc)

• Brain development isn’t only about individual areas, but also how those areas learn to work together

• Human connectome: complete set of structural (neurons, synapses, fibre pathways, brain regions) and functional (time and task dependent brain activity patterns) neural networks of the human brain and nervous system

• Being neurally in tune with parents’ connectome is associated with emotional benefits for the child and may be thought of as a measure of social bonding

Healthy bodies and weights

• Children are becoming less active

• Unhealthy body weights is another significant health risk of middle childhood

• BMI below 3rd percentile is underweight, above 85th percentile is overweight, and above 97th percentile is obese

• Weight is being distributed during this time

• In the last decade, the amount of Canadian children who have unhealthy body weights has begun to decline

Obesity in middle childhood

• 3 risk factors for predicting excessive weight gain in childhood:

1. Overweight parent(s)

2. Large size for gestational age at birth

3. Early onset of being overweight (5 years and under)

• Obesity likely results from a combination of factors:

  • Genetic predisposition

  • Epigenetic modifications set early in life for obesity

  • Environments that promote overeating and/or low levels of activity

• ¼ of Canadian children between 5 and 11 now have unhealthy body weights

• 40% of 9 and 10 year olds are already trying to lose weight

• Weight loss diets for children can be risky because they’re still growing

• Children are also weaker now than in 1981

• Unhealthy body weight could result in serious eating disorders

• obese/overweight children are at risk for developing asthma, type II diabetes, and heart disease

• ⅔ of children aren’t getting enough physical activity

• ½ of children are being more sedentary than they should

Concrete operational stage

• Children construct schemes that enable them to think logically about objects and events in the real world

• Logical operations applied to concrete problems

• No longer swayed by outward appearances

• Figured out conservation

• Understand addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division

• Good at manipulating concrete things, but not yet abstract ones

Components of concrete operational stage

• Decentration: thinking that takes multiple variables into account

• Reversibility: ability to mentally undo some kind of physical or mental transformation

• Hierarchical classification: part of reversible thinking, able to classify things into categories and hierarchies

• Seriation: would do the stick task a lot better (sorting from smallest to largest), have more of a plan for arranging things and put things in order

• Spatial operations: ex. distance and speed problems (trains and hills), would answer the question correctly, improving in this are

• Transitive inference: allows you to figure relationships between things that you haven’t compared before, ex. inductive logic

  • Inductive logic: general principles are inferred from specific experiences; can make assumptions based on specific facts

    • If A=B and B=C, A=C

• Not yet good at deductive logic (starting with a general principle and then predicting an outcome or observation)

  • Children respond to deductive problems by generating ideas that are essentially copies of things they already know about in the concrete world

Horizontal decalage

Applying new cognitive skills to all kinds of problems; Piaget says it takes children many years to do this

• Shift from preoperational to operational thinking doesn’t happen overnight, and children may shift back and forth between the stages

• Children understand conservation of mass/substance by 7, weight by 8, and volume by 11

• Children first understand class inclusion: the understanding that subordinate classes are included in larger, superordinate classes

Concrete operations as rules for problem solving

Robert Siegler said that cognitive development involves acquiring a set of basic rules that are then applied to an increasingly broader range of problems on the basis of experience

• No stages, only sequences

• Problem solving rules emerge from repeated trial-and-error experimentation

• Showed that children’s positions in the sequence depends less on age and more on their specific experiences with a given set of material

Advances in info processing skills

• As children progress through middle childhood, they’re able to remember increasingly longer lists of numbers, letters, and words

• If given a list of 12 items and 2 minutes to study them, a 4 year old would remember 2-4 items, and an 8 year old would remember 7-9 items

• Increasing memory capacity allows children to acquire new information and skills at a faster rate and with greater understanding

• Digit span is easier than word span; the older you get, the better you do

Processing efficiency vs automaticity

1. Ability to make efficient use of STM capacity; increases steadily with age

• Most developmentalists see it as the basis for cognitive development

2. Ability to recall information from LTM without using STM capacity

• Critical to efficient information processing

• Children who have automatized basic math facts learn complex computational skills more rapidly

• Achieved primarily through practice

• It is during middle childhood when children seem to  begin automatizing large quantities of information and skills at a fairly rapid rate

Executive and strategic processes

• Executive processes: information processing skills that allow a person to devise and carry out alternative strategies for remembering and problem solving

  • Based on a basic understanding of how the mind works

• Memory strategies: learned methods for remembering information, ex.

  • Rehearsal: mental or vocal repetition; becomes a more common practice as children age; associated with better performance on memory tasks

  • Organization: grouping ideas, objects, or words into clusters; begins around 9 or 10 years old

  • Elaboration: finding shared meaning or a common referent for 2+ things that need to be remembered

  • Mnemonic: device to assist memory (ex. Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge)

  • Systematic searching: scanning one’s memory for the whole domain in which a piece of information can be found

Expertise

• The amount of knowledge a person has makes a huge difference in how efficiently their information processing system works

• Won’t help you in other areas you don’t have expertise in though

• Typical age differences in strategy use or memory ability disappear when the younger group has more expertise than the older

• Some believe that an individual’s information processing skills may entirely depend on the quantity and quality of relevant information stored in LTM

Language

(middle childhood)

• By 5 or 6 years old, almost all children have mastered basic grammar and pronunciation of their first language

• During middle childhood, they become more skilled at managing finer points of grammar (ex. correct uses of tense), learn how to maintain the topic of conversation, create unambiguous sentences, and speak politely and persuasively

• By 9 years old, most children are fully capable of engaging in fluent conversation with speakers of any age

• Between 6 and 12 years old, children add new vocabulary, between 5000 and 10000 words per year

• At 8 or 9 years old, children figure out relationships between whole categories of words (ex. adjectives and adverbs, adjectives and nouns, etc)

Literacy

(middle childhood)

• Phonological awareness continues to develop and is the foundation for oral reading fluency: ability to read aloud with emotional expressiveness and minimal effort

• To be effective, a beginning reading program must include systematic and explicit phonics: planned, specific instruction in sound-letter correspondences, teach them one letter, then two letter combos, and so on

• Children can’t easily understand written language until they can decode it automatically and fluently

• Some advocate for the balanced approach: reading instruction that combines explicit phonics instruction with other strategies for helping children acquire literacy (ex. guided reading, going slightly beyond a child’s current reading level and helping them through the words they don’t know; zone of proximal development)

• Instruction in sound-letter connections helps children learn to spell and read

Theory of multiple intelligences

1. Linguistic: ability to use language effectively

2. Logical / mathematical: facility with numbers and logical problem solving

3. Musical: ability to appreciate and produce music

4. Spatial: ability to appreciate spatial relationships

5. Bodily kinesthetic: ability to move in a coordinated way, combined with a sense of one’s body in space

6. Naturalist: ability to make fine discriminations among flora and fauna of the natural world or the patterns and designs of human artifacts

7. Interpersonal: sensitivity to the behaviour, moods, and needs of others

8. Intrapersonal: ability to understand oneself

• Critics say that his view has little empirical support

• Howard Gardner

Triarchic theory of intelligence

Intelligence: mental activity directed toward purposive adaptation to, selection and shaping of, real-world environments relevant to one’s life

1. Contextual intelligence: knowing the right behaviour for a specific situation (practical)

2. Experiential intelligence: involves learning to give specific responses without thinking about them (ex. 7x7); allows us to come up with novel solutions to everyday problems (creative)

3. Componential intelligence: ability to come up with effective strategies (analytical)

• Critics say these three areas of intelligence are too closely related to each other

Emotional intelligence

Daniel Goleman proposes 3 components:

1. Awareness of one’s own emotions

2. Ability to express one’s emotions appropriately

3. Capacity to channel emotions into the pursuit of worthwhile goals

-

• He says it’s impossible to achieve one’s intellectual potential without emotional intelligence

• Children’s ability to exercise control over their emotions in childhood is strongly related to measures of academic achievement in high school

• Also involves:

  • Ability to perceive emotions

  • Use emotions to facilitate thoughts

  • Understand and manage emotions

• Can result in:

  • Increased leadership ability

  • Increased team performance

  • Improved decision making

  • Decreased occupational stress

  • Reduced staff turnover

  • Increased personal wellbeing

Gender differences in achievement

• No consistent differences in IQ scores

• Girls achieve better marks than boys in all subjects, especially in language studies but also in science and math

• Some say this is because young boys often lack role models since most teachers are female, and/or the reading material or learning environment doesn’t match boys’ interests and temperament

Differences in learning styles

• Variations in learning style can explain variations in achievement

• Children with an analytical style define learning goals and follow a set of orderly steps to reach them

  • Well organized

  • Good at learning details 

  • Think of information in terms of “right” and “wrong”

  • Cognitive style fits better with school expectations

• Others use a relational style and focus attention on “the big picture” instead of individual bits of information

Learners with exceptionalities

Various disabilities and attention problems are correlated with achievement in some way, as are language proficiency, gender, and culture

• Behavioural disorders: conduct disorders, social maladjustment, ADHD, and emotional disorders

• Communication disorders: language impairment, speech impairment, and learning disability

• Sensory impairments: deafness and hearing impairment, blindness and low vision

• Intellectual differences: giftedness, mild intellectual disability, and developmental disability

• Pervasive developmental disorders: childhood psychosis, childhood schizophrenia, and infantile autism

• Physical disorders and impaired health: neurological defects, physical disability, and conditions that result from infection and disease

• Multiple: multiple exceptionalities from any of the above categories

Exceptional children

Has special learning needs; can refer to children with disabilities and gifted students

• Typically remain integrated in the same class as peers of the same age

• Program accommodations: adjustment of teaching methods to help a child with special needs achieve the outcomes of the standard curriculum by allowing them to demonstrate learning in a nonstandard way

  • More emphasis on the possible alternative learning methods to achieve the same outcomes rather than what the student can’t do

• Modified program: standard curriculum itself is changed so that the modified outcomes are different from the standard outcomes

• Individual education plans (IEP): a written document containing learning and behavioural objectives for the exceptional student, a description of how objectives will be achieved, and how the objectives will be evaluated

Learning disabilities 

Disorder in which a child has difficulty in attaining a specific academic skill, despite possessing average to above-average intelligence and is not primarily due to physical or sensory handicaps; impairments in one or more processes related to perceiving, thinking, remembering, or learning

• May include but are not limited to:

  • Inaccurate or slow and effortful word reading

  • Difficulty understanding the meaning of what is read

  • Difficulty spelling

  • Difficulties with written expression

  • Difficulties mastering number sense, number facts, or calculation

  • Difficulties in mathematical reasoning

• Some neuropsychologists are investigating a neuro-biological basis for learning disabilities; possibilities include:

  • Irregular neuron arrangement

  • Clumps of immature brain cells

  • Scars

  • Congenital tumors

• To compensate, the brain may rewire itself in a way that can scramble normal information-processing pathways to make certain tasks quite difficult

• May also have a genetic basis

• 10% of Canadian population may experience learning difficulties that are a continuation of learning disabilities from early childhood

Dyslexia

Deficits in reading and not a general cognitive dysfunction

• Could be an inability to automatize sound-letter correspondences or a weak morphological awareness (ability to understand and correctly use small words, letters, and letter combinations)

• Successful interventions:

  • Early identification

  • Timely specialized assessments

  • Involve home, school, community, and workplace

  • Include the provisions of specific skill instruction, accommodations, compensatory strategies, and self-advocacy skills