Child Development E2

When does the most rapid weight gain and height growth occur?

first two years

What motor skills are developed in the early postnatal period?

learn to coordinate their movements and how to use basic motor skills; grasping, reaching and locomotion

Crawling

muscle development, gain stability, increased stimuli, exploration, hand eye coordination

Dynamic Systems Theory

mastery of motor skills involves acquiring increasingly complex systems of action

Reflexes

involuntary movement in response to stimulation

Fine Motor Skills

small, precise movements using hands and fingers; reaching, grasping, drawing

Gross motor skills

large, coordinated movements using major muscle groups; crawling, walking, jumping, get better with age

What fine motor skills do children have at 0-3 months?

holding an object

What fine motor skills do children have at 3-6 months?

trying to reach for objects, putting things in mouth

What fine motor skills do children have at 6 months - 1 year?

trying to hold food, using hands/fingers to play games

What fine motor skills do children have at 1-1.5 years?

scribble on paper, trying to throw and catch with the ball

What fine motor skills do children have at 1.5-2 years?

drawing lines with pencil, using a spoon to eat food with little help

What fine motor skills do children have at 2-3 years?

brushing teeth and buttoning with help

What fine motor skills do children have at 3-5 years?

builds using building blocks, uses a pencil to draw, turn pages of book

What fine motor skills do children have at 5-7 years?

draws shapes easily, brushes and combs without help, cuts shapes clearly

What gross motor skill is developed around age 2?

jumping

What gross motor skill is developed around age 3?

riding tricycle

What gross motor skill is developed around age 4?

hopping on one foot

What gross motor skill is developed around age 5?

bike riding

What did the gap study study?

how infants learn to judge what is a safe/unsafe distance, integrating perceptual information with motor behavior

What were the results of the gap study?

children learn to judge what is safe/unsafe for each posture (sitting, crawling, cruising, walking) through experience

Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS)

unexplained death of a child, leading cause of death for infants

When is the greatest risk of SIDS?

2-4 months, transition from relfex behavior to intentional behavior, some babies struggle to make this transition and have a hard time getting over the difficulty of breathing after losing that reflex

What are the risk factors for SIDS?

sleeping on side or stomach, low birth weight, low Apgar score, mother smoked, soft bed and overheating

Co-sleeping

babies sleep in bed with parents

Where is co-sleeping common and why?

collectivist cultures where members of culture are closely bound to each other; Guatemala, South Korea, Japan

Is SIDS common in places with co-sleeping?

No

Amount of recommended sleep for newborns per day

16-18 hours

Amount of recommended sleep for preschoolers per day

11-12 hours

Amount of recommended sleep for school aged kids per day

10+ hours

Amount of recommended sleep for teens per day

9-10 hours

Amount of recommended sleep for adults per day

7-8 hours

How does sleep deprivation affect your performance?

decreased attention, memory and thinking, higher rates of anxiety and depression

How to promote sleep hygiene?

wake up at same time everyday, exercise regularly, avoid late naps, limit caffeine and alcohol, turn off screens before bed

Assimilation

making the environment fit you, preserving an existing scheme

Accommodation

making yourself fit the environment; modifying existing scheme

Piaget’s Theory

children progress through distinct stages of intellectual development, each characterized by unique cognitive abilities and approaches to problem-solving

What were Piaget’s four stages?

sensorimotor, pre-operational, concrete operations, formal operations

Sensorimotor Stage

0-2 years

What are the stages that make up the sensorimotor stage?

simple reflexes, primary circular reactions, secondary circular reactions, coordination of secondary circular reactions, tertiary circular reactions, enduring mental representations

Simple Reflexes

birth to 1 month, innate reflexes

Primary Circular Reactions

1-4 months, repetition of an action for pleasure (circular reaction), actions centered on the babies own body like thumb sucking

Secondary Circular Reactions

4-8 months, actions are focused on events or objects outside of the body such as shaking a rattle, only act on what they see (no object permanence yet)

Coordination of Secondary Circular Reactions

8-12 months, infants have object permanence, A not B error

A not B error

repeatedly search for an object in its original hiding place even after seeing it moved to a new location

Tertiary Circular Reactions

12-18 months, actions that are varied through trial and error to produce desirable consequences such as dropping toys from different heights

Enduring mental representations

18-24 months, pretend play, deferred imitation (imitating people and scenes they witnessed)

What are the critiques of Piaget’s theory?

vague about underlying mechanisms that give rise to cognitive development, infants and young children are more sophisticated, understated sociocultural influences, discontinuous stage theory

Information Processing Approaches

focus on cognitive processes that exist at all ages (attention, memory and executive function) rather than viewing cognitive development in discontinuous stages

Executive function

cognitive regulation

Overlapping Waves Theory

an information processing theory that emphasizes the variability of children’s thinking, children might employ different strategies for the same task at different ages

critiques of information-processing

focus on individual parts and not the whole, computer as a metaphor for the human mind

sociocultural approaches

emphasize that other people and the surrounding culture contribute greatly to children’s cognitive development

Sociocultural Theory

Lev Vygotsky, social scaffolding and zone of proximal development

Social Scaffolding

more competent people provide temporary framework that support children’s thinking at a higher level than children could manage alone

Zone of proximal development

the gape between what children can do unsupported and what they can do with support

critique of sociocultural approaches

biological influences ignored, focus not the group and not the individual

Language

a system of sounds or gestures that people use to communicate with others

Phonology

gaining knowledge about the sound system of language, how children learn to organize and use sounds to form words and communicate,

What skills are classified under phonology?

recognizing rhymes, manipulating sounds, understanding language structure

When do children become native listeners?

At the age of 12 months, the begin to become native listeners meaning they really only recognize sounds important to the language spoken around them

Phenome

smallest units of sound that change the meanings of words, mop and pop, conditional head turning procedure

Babbling

4-6 months, constant vowel utterances, dadada

Cooing

2 months, begin to discover vocal cords, vowel like utterances, oo-ing

semantics

meaning of words or combination of words

One word stages (semantics)

nominals (words that label objects, people or events) and vocabulary spurt (period of rapid word acquisition)

At 5 months what can infants understand?

meaning of frequently used words such as their names and mommy/daddy

At 8 months what can infants understand?

understand phrases like don’t touch and high five

Do girls or boys acquire vocab first?

girls

What might cause girls to develop vocab faster than boys?

mother respond more than fathers leading to a preference for mothers voice, mothers respond preferentially to infant girls than boys

Older-brother effect

children with an older sister had better language skills than children with and older brother

What are two possible reasons for the older brother effect?

sisters may talk to infant siblings more in parents absence, sisters might reply to infants more readily than brothers

How do children learn the meanings of words? (Semantics)

labeling, mutual exclusivity bias (unfamiliar words label new objects), whole object bias

whole object bias

he tendency of children to assume that a new word labels the entire object, not just its parts or features

grammar

rules for creating words and sentences

morphology

rules for forming a word

overregularization

inappropriate application of syntactic rules, he goed instead of he went

syntax

grammatical rules that dictate how words can be combined

pragmatics

rules for using language effectively within a social context, turn taking, different forms of speech, sarcasm and idioms

examples of idioms

hold your horses, piece of cake

emotions

complex behaviors involving physiological, expressive and cognitive elements that influence behavior

what are some functions of emotions?

preparing us for action (survival mechanism), emotions as information (shape behavior), interacting with others (social signals)

temperament

a basic, innate disposition that is relatively stable over time

Goodness of fit

is the child’s temperament compatible with the environment such as parenting style? a difficult child with either patient or frustrated parents

How do infants perceive emotions?

listening and looking

Emotional contagion

crying in response to hearing another infant cry

At what age can children begin to discriminate different facial expressions?

2-3 months

Still face paradigm

no emotion leads to distress

Social Referencing

looking to others for emotional cues

Secondary emotions

require social/cultural learning such as embarrassment, shame, guilt, pride and empathy

At what age can children clearly display empathy and how do they?

2-3 years old; giving a hug or sharing a toy

primary emotions

most basic emotions such as anger, sadness, fear, disgust, surprise and happiness

Emotion display rules

learned in childhood, the social norms for when, where, how and to whom to express emotions