Infancy & Toddlerhood

Flashcards about Infancy & Toddlerhood

Define parturition.

The act or process of giving birth, typically beginning about 2 weeks before delivery.

What are Braxton-Hicks contractions?

False contractions that occur during the final months of pregnancy (or earlier), characterized by uterus tightening for up to 2 minutes.

Describe Stage 1 of childbirth.

Dilation of the cervix, the longest stage, lasting 12-14 hours for first-time mothers. Involves regular uterine contractions causing the cervix to shorten and widen.

Describe Stage 2 of childbirth.

Descent and emergence of the baby, lasting up to an hour or two. Begins when the baby's head moves through the cervix into the vaginal canal and ends when the baby emerges.

Describe Stage 3 of childbirth.

Expulsion of the placenta, lasting between 10 minutes and 1 hour. The placenta and remaining umbilical cord are expelled.

What is Electronic Fetal Monitoring (EFM)?

A method used to track the fetus's heartbeat during labor using sensors attached to the woman's midsection.

List some potential benefits of Cesarean Delivery

Reduced risk of urinary incontinence and pelvic organ prolapse

What is VBAC?

Vaginal birth after cesarean

What does natural childbirth seek to prevent?

Pain by eliminating the mother’s fear through education about the physiology of reproduction and training in breathing and relaxation during delivery

What is a doula?

An experienced mentor, coach, and helper who can furnish emotional support and information and can stay at a woman’s bedside throughout labor.

Define neonatal period.

The first 4 weeks of life.

Define neonate.

newborn

What are fontanels?

Areas on a baby's head where the bones of the skull do not meet, covered by a tough membrane that allows for flexibility in shape.

What is vernix caseosa?

An oily protection against infection that dries within the first few days after birth, covering almost all new babies.

What is anoxia?

Lack of oxygen as a result of repeated compression of the placenta and umbilical cord with each contraction.

What is meconium?

Stringy, greenish-black waste matter formed in the fetal intestinal tract.

What causes neonatal jaundice?

Immaturity of the liver and failure to filter out bilirubin, a by-product of the breakdown of red blood cells.

What does the Apgar Scale assess?

A newborn's condition at 1 minute and 5 minutes after birth, assessing appearance, pulse, grimace, activity, and respiration.

What are subscales of the Brazelton Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale?

motor organization, changes in state, attention and interactive capacities, and indications of central nervous system instability.

What is the Recommended Uniform Screening Panel?

Contains 35 core conditions and 26 secondary conditions for which it recommends screening all newborns

What are the States of Arousal for infants?

infant’s physiological and behavioral status at a given moment in the periodic daily cycle of wakefulness, sleep, and activity

Define low birth weight.

Weight of less than 2500 grams (5 pounds) at birth.

Define preterm infants.

Infants born before the 37th week of gestation.

Define small-for-date infants.

Infants born at or around their due dates but are smaller than would be expected, weighing less than 90% of babies of the same gestational age.

Describe Kangaroo care.

method of skin-to-skin contact in which a newborn is laid face down between the mother’s breasts for an hour or so at a time after birth

Define postmature fetus.

Not yet born as of 2 weeks after the due date or 42 weeks after the mother’s last menstrual period

Define Stillbirth.

Sudden death of a fetus at or after the 20th week of gestation

Define SIDS.

Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (crib death) sudden death of an infant under age 1

State the cephalocaudal principle

Growth from the top down; infants learn to use the upper parts of the body before the lower parts.

State the proximodistal principle

Inner to outer; babies first learn to control their arms when reaching, then use their hands in a scooping motion, then finally learn to use their thumb and pointer finger in a pincer grip

List some Benefits of Breastfeeding

less likely to contract infectious diseases, have lower risk of SIDS and of postneonatal death, less likely to develop obesity, diabetes, or childhood cancer, perform better on IQ and cognitive tests, have fewer cavities

When should babies consume nothing but breast milk or iron-fortified formula?

For the first 6 months

When should iron-enriched solid foods must be introduced?

Gradually during the second half of the 1st year

What is lateralization in terms of brain anatomy?

Specialization of left and right hemispheres

What is the function of the corpus callosum?

Joins the two hemispheres; giant switchboard of fibers connecting the hemispheres and allowing them to share information and coordinate commands

Four Lobes: occipital

smallest; visual processing

Four Lobes: parietal

integrating sensory information with the body; helps us move our bodies through space and manipulate objects in our world

Four Lobes: temporal

interpret smells and sounds and is involved with memory

Four Lobes: frontal

involved with a variety of higher-order processes

What is integration regarding growing brain?

neurons that control various groups of muscles coordinate their activities

What is differentiation regarding growing brain?

each neuron takes on a specific, specialized structure and function

When does myelination begin?

About halfway through gestation

What are Early Reflexes?

automatic, innate response to stimulation controlled by the lower brain centers

What is Brain Plasticity

range of modifiability of performance molding of the brain through experience plasticity enables learning during the formative period of early life when the brain is most plastic, the brain is especially vulnerable

When embyos respond to touch?

as early as 8-9 weeks of pregnancy

What does babies brains showing at 4 months?

lateralization for language, as occurs in adults

What does babies prefer to look at?

human faces more than almost any other stimuli

Define systems of action

increasingly complex combinations of motor skills, which permit a wider or more precise range of movement and more control of the movement

What is Denver Developmental Screening Test used for?

to chart progress between 1 month and 6 years and to identify children who are not developing normally

What is the pincer grasp?

hands become coordinated enough to pick up a tiny object

How crawling helps babies?

learn to better judge distances and perceive depth, helps to social referencing

What is perception?

ability to perceive objects and surfaces in three dimensions

What is Haptic perception?

ability to acquire information by handling objects rather than just looking at them

What is Theories of Motor Development Ecological Theory of Perception?

stemmed from the experiment involving a visual cliff apparatus designed to give an illusion of depth and used to asses depth perception in infants

What is Theories of Motor Development Dynamic Systems Theory?

behavior emerges in the moment from the self-organization of multiple components infant and environment form an interconnected, dynamic system

What is Classical Conditioning?

a person learns to make a reflex or involuntary response to a stimulus that originally did not bring about the response enables infants to anticipate an event before it happens

What is Operant Conditioning?

focuses on the consequences of behaviors and how they affect the likelihood of that behavior occurring again

What is intelligence?

enables people to acquire, remember, and use knowledge; to understand concepts and relationships; and to solve everyday problems

What Bailey Scales of Infant and Toddler Development used for?

developmental test designed to assess children from 1 month to 3 1/2 years scores indicate a child’s competencies in each of five developmental areas

What Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment (HOME) used for?

trained observers interview the primary caregiver and rate on a yes-or-no checklist the intellectual stimulation and support observed in a child’s home

What is the sensorimotor stage?

first of four cognitive stages of development infants learn about themselves and their world through their developing sensory and motor activity

What are circular reactions?

an infant learns to reproduce events originally discovered by chance repetition of behavior produces pleasure, which motivates the baby to do it yet again

What is Use of Reflexes in an infant?

birth to about 1 month practice their reflexes

What is Primary Circular Reaction in an infant?

1-4 months learn to purposely repeat a pleasurable bodily sensation first achieved by chance activities focus on the body rather than the external environment

What is Secondary Circular Reaction in an infant?

4-8 months intentionally repeats an action not for its own sake, but to get rewarding results beyond the infant’s own body

What is Coordination of Secondary Schemes in an infant?

8-12 months built upon the few schemes they were born with behavior is more intentional and purposeful, and they can anticipate events

What is Tertiary Circular Reactions in an infant?

12-18 months babies begin to experiment to see what will happen vary a behavior to see what might happen by trial and error, toddlers try behaviors until they find the best way to attain a goal

What is Mental Combinations in an infant?

18 months to 2 years transition to the preoperational stage of early childhood representational ability

What is representational ability?

capacity to store mental images or symbols of objects and events

What is object permanence?

realization that something continues to exist when out of sight

What is A-not-B error?

infants continue to look for an object in the place where they first found it after seeing it hidden, even if they were later shown the object being moved to a new location

What is imitation?

visible imitation uses body parts such as hands or feet that babies can see develops first

What is deferred imitation?

more complex ability requiring long-term ability which children under 18 months cannot engage in reproduction of an observed behavior after the passage of time

What is overimitation?

tendency to copy any action performed by an adult, even if that action is clearly purposeless or inefficient

What is pictorial competence?

ability to understand the nature of pictures

What is scale error?

momentary misperception of the relative sizes of objects

What is the dual representation hypothesis?

an object has two potential representations: an object in its own right (a miniature chair) symbol for a class of things (chairs—for sitting)

What is Habituation?

type of learning in which repeated or continuous exposure to a stimulus reduces attention to that stimulus

What is dishabituation?

response to a new stimulus

What is visual recognition memory?

ability to distinguish a familiar visual stimulus from an unfamiliar one when show both at the same time

What is joint attention?

shared attentional focus, typically initiated with eye gaze or pointing when babies follow an adults’ gaze by looking or pointing in the same direction

What is Cross-Modal Transfer?

ability to use information gained from one sense to guide another

What is Causality?

principle that one event causes another

What is violation-of-expectations?

begins with a familiarization phase in which infants see an event happen normally after habituation, the event is changed in a way that conflicts with normal expectations

What is examines the hardware of the central nervous system to identify what brain structures are involved in specific areas of cognition?

Cognitive Neuroscience Approach

What is implicit memory?

remembering that occurs without effort or even conscious awareness

What is explicit memory?

conscious or intentional recollection, usually of facts, names, events, or other things that can be stated or declared

What is working memory?

short-term storage of information the brain is actively processing or working on

What is Social-Contextual Approach?

influenced by Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory interested in how cultural context affects early social interactions

What is guided participation?

mutual interactions with adults that help structure children’s activities and bridge the gap between a child’s understanding and an adult’s

What is a Language?

communication system based on words and grammar

What is Skinner's approach to language learning?

Language learning is based on experience and learned associations through operant conditioning babies utter sounds at random which caregivers reinforce when they make sounds that resemble adult speech

What is the language acquisition device (LAD)?

inborn mechanism that programs children’s brains to analyze the language they hear and to figure out its rules almost all children master their native language in the same age-related sequence without formal teaching

What is prelinguistic speech?

forerunner of linguistic speech utterance of sounds that are not words

What is crying language?

a newborn’s first means of communication

What is cooing in babies?

starts between 6 weeks and 3 months squealing, gurgling, and making vowel sounds

What is babbling infant language?

repeating consonant-vowel strings between ages 6 and 10 months often mistaken for a baby’s first word

What is linguistic speech?

verbal expression that conveys meaning

What is holophrase?

entire sentence expressed with one word

Are Nouns, verbs easy to learn?

receptive vocabulary → what infants understand continues to grow as verbal comprehension gradually becomes faster and more accurate and efficient expressive vocabulary → spoken nouns are the easiest type of word to learn while verbs are more difficult