DEVPSY - LESSON 5: EARLY CHILDHOOD

Physical Aspect of Development

- In early childhood, children

- Need less sleep than before and are more likely to develop sleep problems.

- Improve in running, hopping, skipping, jumping, and throwing balls.

- Become better at tying shoelaces, drawing with crayons, and pouring cereal;

- Begin to show a preference for using either the right or left hand.

Bodily Growth and Change

- Children grow rapidly between ages 3 and 6, but less quickly than before.

- At about 3, children normally begin to lose their babyish roundness and take on the slender, athletic appearance of childhood.

- As abdominal muscles develop, the toddler potbelly tightens.

- The trunk, arms, and legs grow longer.

- The head is still relatively large, but the other parts of the body continue to catch up as body proportions steadily become more adultlike.

- Cartilage turns to bone at a faster rate than before, and bones become harder, giving the child a firmer shape, and protecting the internal organs.

Typical Sleep Requirements in Childhood

- Preschoolers get all or almost all their sleep in one long nighttime period. The number of hours of sleep steadily decreases throughout childhood, but individual children may need more or fewer hours than shown here.

SLEEPWAKING, SLEEPTAKING, AND NIGHT TERRORS SHARE MANY CHARACTERISTICS

- Occurs during slow wave sleep and are more common when children are sleep deprived, have a fever or are on medications, or when conditions are noisy.

- Children are generally unresponsive to external stimulation and are confused during the occurrences.

Sleep disturbances

may be cause by accidental activation of the brain’s motor control system (Hobson & Silvestri, 1999), by incomplete arousal from a deep sleep (Hoban, 2004), or by disordered breather or restless leg movements (Guilleminault, Palombini, Pelayo & Chervin, 2003).

Sleepwalkers and people with sleep terrors

tend to have family members who sleepwalk, have sleep terrors, or both. Moreover, parents who have history of sleepwalking or sleep talking tend to have children who have night terrors. Young children who have night terrors tend to later sleepwalk (Petit et al., 2015).

Nightmares

are common during early childhood (Petit et al., 2007). The occurrence of nightmares has been related to difficult child temperament, high overall childhood anxiety, and bedtime parenting practices that promote dependency (More, 2012).

BRAIN DEVELOPMENT

- At least age 4, when the brain is approximately 90% of adult weight.

- By age 6, the brain has attained about 95% of its peak volume.

- From ages 3 to 6 years, the most rapid growth occurs in the frontal areas that regulate the planning and organizing of action.

- It affects other aspects of development such as growth in motor skills.

Fine Motor Skills

- Physical skills that involve the small muscles and eye-hand coordination.

EX: Buttoning a shirt, drawing pictures.

Gross Motor Skills

- Physical skills that involve the large muscles.

EX: Running, jumping.

3 Years

age

- Cannot turn or stop suddenly or quickly.

- Can jump a distance of 15 to 24 inches.

- Can ascend a stairway alone, alternating feet.

- Can hop, using largely an irregular series of jumps with some variation needed.

4 Years

age

- Have more effective control of stopping, starting, and turning.

- Can jump a distance of 24 to 33 inches.

- Can descend a long stairway alternating, feet, if supported.

- Can hop 4 to 6 steps on the one foot.

5 Years

age

- Can start, turn, and stop effectively in games.

- Can make a running jump of 28 to 26 inches.

- Can descend a long stairway alone, alternating feet.

- Can easily hop a distance of 16 feet.

Handedness

- Usually evident by about age 3

- Heritability

- Single-gene theory

- Handedness, the preference for using one hand over the other, is usually evident by about age 3.

Centration

– tendency to focus on one aspect of a situation and neglect others.

Irreversibility

– children fail to understand that some operations or actions can be reversed.

Focus on States rather than Transformations

– children fail to understand the significance of the transformation between states.

Transductive Reasoning

– children do not use deductive or inductive reasoning; instead, they jump from one particular to another and see cause where none exists.

Egocentrism

– a form of concentration. Children assume everyone else thinks, perceives, and feels as they do.

Animism

– children attribute life to objects not alive.

nability to distinguish appearance from Reality

– children confuse what is real with outward appearance.

False Belief and Deception

- This is generally tested with what is called a false belief task. Children do not consistently pass false belief tasks until about 4 yrs./old (Baillargeon, Scott, & He, 2010). EX: if you see your mother searching for an umbrella, but you know it’s not raining outside, you can understand that she thinks it’s raining, even if it is not.

Appearance and Reality

- Only at age 5 or 6 do children begin to understand the distinction between what seems to be and what is.

- BETWEEN eraser that looked like chocolate bar and a real chocolate and asked to hand an experimenter “the real one” they were able to select the correct item (Moll & Tomasello, 2012).

- It may be that children do understand the difference between appearance and reality but have difficulty displaying their knowledge in traditional tasks that required verbal responses. When you ask them to display their knowledge via their actions, they are better able to do so.

Fantasy and Reality

- Sometime between 18 months and 3 years, children learn to distinguish between real and imagined events.

- While more inclined to believe in storybook characters than older children, 3-year-olds are still skeptical about whether or not characters in books are real or pretend, especially if those books contain fantastical elements (Woolley & Cox, 2007). By the age of 4, most children, if given the choice, complete stories with real-world causal laws rather than magical fantastical elements (Weisberg, Sobel, Goodstein, & Bloom, 2013).

Magical Thinking

- In children ages 3 and older does not seem to stem from confusion between fantasy and reality. Often magical thinking is a way to explain events that do not seem to have obvious realistic explanations (usually because children lack knowledge about them), or simply to indulge in the pleasures of pretending—as with a belief in imaginary companions.

- Moreover, there are indications that imaginative activities may offer developmental benefits. In one study, children who had imaginary companions used richer and more elaborate narrative structure than children without imaginary companions when asked to recount a personal story (Trionfi & Reese, 2009). Other research has shown that children who watched movies with magical themes later scored higher on creativity tests and drew more imaginative impossible objects, even though their beliefs about magic were unaffected (Subbotsky, Hysted, & Jones, 2010).

Generic Memory
Episodic Memory
Autobiographical Memory

(3) TYPES OF CHILDHOOD MEMORIES

Generic Memory

- Begins at about age 2, produces a script, or general outline of a familiar, repeated event, such as riding the bus to preschool or having lunch at Grandma’s house. It helps a child know what to expect and how to act.

Episodic Memory

- Refers to awareness of having experienced a particular event or episode at a specific time and place. Young children remember more clearly events that are new to them. Given a young child’s limited memory capacity, episodic memories are temporary. Unless they recur several times (in which case they are transferred to generic memory), they last for a few weeks or months and then fade.

Autobiographical Memory

- A type of episodic memory refers to memories of distinctive experiences that form a person’s life history. Not everything in episodic memory becomes part of autobiographical memory only those memories that have a special, personal meaning to the child (Fivush & Nelson, 2004). Autobiographical memory generally emerges between ages 3 and 4.

Scaffolding

is the temporary support that parents, teachers, or others give a child to do a task until the child can do it alone— can help guide children’s cognitive progress.

Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)

- is Vygotsky’s term for the difference between what a child can do alone and what the child can do with help.

Vocabulary

- Child learns the meaning of a word after hearing only once or twice, that is first mapping.

- By age 3, average child knows 900–1,000 words

- By age 6, knows about 2,600 words and understands more than 20,000.

Grammars and Syntax

- At age 3, children start using plurals, possessives, and past tense and know the difference between I, you, and we.

- They can ask and answer what and where questions.

- Most sentences are declarative, generally short and simple.

- They often omit articles a and the, but include some pronouns, adjectives and prepositions.

- Between ages 4 and 5, sentences average four to five words and may be declarative, negative, interrogative, or imperative.

- Age of 4 use complex, multiclause sentences (“I’m eating because I’m hungry”) more frequently if their parents often use such sentences (Huttenlocher, Vasilyeva, Cymerman, & Levine, 2002).

Pragmatics and Social Speech

- Early children become more competent in pragmatics—the practical knowledge of how to use language to communicate.

Private Speech

- This is talking aloud with no intended listener.

- This is normal and common in childhood

- For Piaget: This is a sign of cognitive immaturity

- For Vygotsky: This is a special form of communication: conversation with the self.

Self-Concept

- Is our total picture of our abilities and traits.

- Is “a cognitive construction... a system of descriptive and evaluative representations about the self,” that determines how we feel about ourselves and guides our actions.

- Children’s self-definition—the way they describe themselves—typically changes between about ages 5 and 7, reflecting self-concept development.

Self-Esteem

- Is the self-evaluative part of the self-concept, the judgment children make about their overall worth. Self-esteem is based on children’s growing cognitive ability to describe and define themselves.

Single Presentation

– children (at age 4) describe themselves in terms of individual, unconnected characteristics and in all-ornothing terms.

Representational Mapping

– children (at about age 5 or 6) make logical connections between aspects of the self but still sees these characteristics in all-or nothing terms.

Representational System

– this takes place in middle childhood when children begin to integrate specific features of the self into a general, multidimensional concept.

The Helpless Pattern

- When self-esteem is high, a child is motivated to achieve. However, if self-esteem is contingent on success, children may view failure or criticism as an indictment of their worth and may feel helpless to do better.

Self-Evaluative Emotions

- Guilt, shame and pride typically develop by the end of the third year after children gain selfawareness and accept the standards of behavior their parents have set.

-They become more complex with age.

Simultaneous Emotions

- Young children have difficulty in recognizing that they can experience more than one emotion at the same time.

Erik Erikson: Initiative VS. Guilt

- Conflict arises from growing sense of purpose and desire to plan activities. - Children reconcile desire to “do” with their desire for approval.

Virtue of “purpose”

———————- the courage to envision and pursue goals without fear of punishment.

Gender Identity

- Is awareness of one's femaleness or maleness and all it implies in one's society of origin. This is

Gender Differences

- Psychological or behavioral differences between males and females.

Gender Roles

- The behaviors, interests, attitudes, skills, and personality traits that a culture considers appropriate for males or females.

- All societies have gender roles.

Gender-Typing

- Socialization process whereby children, at an early age, learn appropriate gender roles

Gender Stereotype

- A preconceived generalization about male or female behavior.

Play

- It contributes to all domains of development

Functional Play

- Begins during infancy. It involves repetitive large muscular movements.

Constructive Play

- Involves use of objects and materials to make something.

Dramatic Play

- Involves imaginary people or situations, it is also called as pretend play, fantasy play or imaginative play.

Mildred B. Parten

- He identified six types of play ranging from the least to the most social. - As children get older, their play becomes more social, more interactive, and more cooperative.

Unoccupatied Play

- It is defined as sensory activities that lack focus or narrative.

- Language use is non-existent or very limited

Overlooker Play

- First sign of children showing interest in the play behaviors of other children.

Solitary Play

- Increased focus and sustained attention on toys.

- Emerging play narratives, such as use of symbolic play (using objects to represent other objects, such as push around a block to represent a car).

- Disinterest in other children or adults during play.

- Unstructured play, lacking clear goals.

Parallel Play

- Involved children playing in proximity to one another but not together.

- They will tend to share resources and observe one another from a distance.

- However, they will not share the same game play or goals while playing.

Associative Play

- Children begin acknowledging one another and working side-by-side, but not necessarily together.

- Associative play differs from parallel play because children begin to share, acknowledge, copy, and work with one another.

Cooperative/Organized Play

- Children work together on a shared game.

- Children share a common objective during game play.

- Children have team roles or personas during game play.

- There can be an element of compromise and sacrifice for the common good of the game

Reinforcement (External / Internal)
Punishment

Forms of Discipline

Power Assertion

- This is disciplinary strategy designed to discourage undesirable behavior through physical or verbal enforcement of parental control.

Withdrawal of Love

- This is disciplinary strategy that involves ignoring, isolating, or showing dislike for a child.

Inductive Technique

- This is disciplinary strategy that involves ignoring, isolating, or showing dislike for a child.

Authoritarian
Permissive
Authoritative
Neglectful or Uninvolved

BAUMRIND’S PARENTING STYLES

Authoritarian

- These parents are strict and demand blind obedience from their children. The reason for rules is typically coupled with: “because I said so.”

Permissive

- Tend to be very loving yet provide few guidelines and rules.

- These parents do not expect mature behavior from their children and often seem more like a friend than parental figure.

Authoritative

- These parents are strict and have clear standards of behavior. But they are also loving, warm, and nurturing.

Neglectful or Uninvolved

- No actual parenting happening.