Child Development Flashcards

This is a list of flashcards pertaining to Child Development lecture notes.

Infanticide

In ancient Rome/Greece, the practice of leaving children to die, especially if they were "deformed."

Children as Economic Property

A concept where children were viewed as economic property of parents and often sent out as servants or laborers by age 6-7, common in Medieval/Reformation periods.

Inuit Childhood

A Canadian Arctic culture where childhood is seen as a process of acquiring reason & understanding.

Beng Childhood

A West African culture with an emphasis on young children, who are believed to be recently from the spirit world.

Lack of Child Labor Laws in 19th Century

A concept describing how children worked in coal mines & factories in dangerous and dirty jobs.

19th Century Boarding School for Indigenous Children

A destructive practice where Indigenous children were separated from their families and forced to assimilate into American culture through 19th century boarding schools.

Turn of Century US/UK

A period where social reform of child labor began alongside scientific interest in studying child development.

Childhood as a Distinct Phase (Korea)

The idea of childhood as a distinct phase, with the emergence of a word for "child," associated with modernization in Korea, 1890’s-1910.

Emerging Adulthood

Refers to the legally adult individuals that are not fully independent and require financial and emotional support.

Nature

Biological endowment, genes, genetic inheritance, and innate abilities.

Nurture

Physical & social environments (i.e. womb, homes, community, people).

Nativism

Belief that certain skills or abilities are innate or hard-wired into the brain at birth.

Behaviorism

Belief that nurture is everything.

Behaviorist View of Child Development

The view that children are passively shaped by their environments.

Reciprocal Determinism

The concept that environment affects the child, but the child’s behaviors also influence the environment.

Continuous Development

Development where change is more of the same (growth of a pine tree).

Discontinuous Development

Development where there is a change; a qualitative change (caterpillar to butterfly).

Heterotypic Continuity

Behavioral manifestations change but concept remains the same & is reliably connected to earlier development

Neural Mechanisms

Brain development & formation of new pathways.

Genetic mechanisms

Differences in gene expression, underlying genetic profile.

Sociocultural Context

An individual's social and cultural circumstances

Cross-Cultural Research Interests

Western cultures are more interested in researching identity and development of the self than are non-Western cultures

Universal Development

Normative outcomes that everyone is thought to display

Assess Socioeconomic Status

Household income, occupational prestige, school districts & their funding – tax bases, parent’s education level, cost of living, standardizing for number of people in the household

Subjective Social Status

Where do you think you are relative to your community

Household Chaos

Level of instability in the household → chaotic routines, overcrowding, changeable work shifts, loud environment

Other Dimensions of SES

Neighborhood level, subjective social status, public assistance, household chaos, food instability

Cognitive stimulation

Quality of books & toys in home, amount of one-on-one attention from parents, teachers, other adults with child → playing with them & helping develop thinking

Hierarchy effects

Feeling like at bottom of social ladder

Sleep disruptions

Noise pollution, light pollution in lower income neighborhoods (near highways), crowding, variable sleep schedules → multiple kids who sleep in the same room but go to bed at different times, long commutes to/from work

Food Desert

Area where there’s no fresh, high quality food for sale (fruits, vegetables, meats, cheeses/dairy)

Strategies to disentangle race & SES

Measure experience of discrimination & systemic racism (through questionnaires or interviews) or Recruit samples in which race & SES aren’t confounded

Developmental timing effects

Early poverty is stronger predictor of later cognitive achievement than poverty in middle or late childhood

Language

Rate of processing → where’s the doggy? Children in lower SES took longer to look at the picture → processing language slower

Social selection

People end up in the social class that matches their IQ

Social causation

Environmental risks associated with poverty hinder cognitive development

Co-occurring adversity

Absolute poverty, stunted growth, macro & micronutrient deficiencies, environmental toxins, inadequate cognitive stimulation

Achievement Gap

Related to SES, differences in academic achievement in kids based on income. 90% of economic achievement gap present on first-day of kindergarten

Rug Rat Race

Affluent families today are investing much more of their money & time in early childhood enrichment than they did 40 years ago

Individual Differences

Are there aspects of development that are universal (normative outcomes that everyone is thought to display)?

Neighborhood opportunity

The extent of the educational, health & economic resources in a neighborhood, including green space, hospitals, grocery stores, libraries, daycares, public transportation, etc.

Toxic Stress

Excessive stress that leads to overactivation of fight-or-flight pathways

Place-based interventions

Harlem Children’s Zone

Kids & TV

Priming by TV commercials

Naturalistic observations

Observing w/o trying to interfere

Structured observation

Set it up to try to elicit a specific reaction/response

Clinical interviews

More free form → asking lots of questions w/flexibility based on responses

Case study

Going really deep into profiling one individual kid

Ethnography

Going really deep into profiling a specific group of people

Noise in your data

Observer bias & social desirability bias. Observer has their own bias → own experiences affect how they interpret other experiences. Tendency to want to say to what other people want to hear & wanting to look good

Interrater reliability

Level of consistency between different observers. Takes into account disagreements & if they are systemic

Temporal stability

Level of consistency of an individual’s score across repeated administrations close together in time. Assessing something close together in time

Reliability

Extent to which a measure yields consistent results

Validity

The extent to which a measure reflects what the researchers intended to measure

Correlation

Strength of association among variables

Confounding variables

Some factor other than the variables of interest that, if not controlled by the experimenter, could explain the relationship between the variables of interest

Experimental designs

Researcher introduces some change in participants’ environment & measures the effect of that change on the participant’s behavior

Experimental control

Steps taken to ensure that other variables that could affect the dependent variable are equivalent in all groups

Natural experiment

Investigator measures the impact of a naturally occurring event that is assumed to affect people’s lives

Longitudinal study

Some participants studied repeatedly at different ages

Cross-sectional study

People of differing ages all studied at the same time

Sequential study

Same groups of different-aged people studied repeatedly as they change ages

Microgenetic study

Same participant studied repeatedly over a short period as they master a task

Validity

The extent to which a measure reflects what the researchers intended to measure

Ethical Constraints on Methodology

Informed consent and/or assent. Assent = if child is 7+, explain study in age-appropriate way

Genotype

Genetic material inherited from parents

Phenotype

Observable expression of genotype, including bodily characteristics & behavior

Passive Gene-Environment Correlation

Environments parents choose and provide for their children are partially shaped by parents’ phenotype (ie. interests, talents, affinities)

Heritability

Measure of the extent to which individual differences on a given traits in a specific population are attributable to genetic differences among those individuals

Epigenesis

Development results from ongoing, bidirectional exchange between heredity & all levels of the environment

Plasticity

Capacity of the brain to be affected by experience

Neurogenesis

Birth of neurons

Neural migration

Neurons travel

Neural differentiation

Neurons becoming different type of neurons (ie. sensory, motor)

Synaptogenesis

Formation of synapses between neurons

Synaptic pruning

Based on experience, which ones are really needed

Arborization

Dendrites getting more branches for more connections with other neurons (more places for the synapses to connect)

Myelination

Formation of a fatty sheath insulating axons so signal can travel faster (so signals don’t get cross)

Sensitive Periods

Window of time when the brain is particularly sensitive to certain kinds of environmental inputs

Experience-Expectant Processes

Brain has evolved to expect certain experiences & rely upon species-typical experiences

Experience-Dependent Processes

Formation & pruning of synapses as the result of learning experiences unique to the individual’s environment; occurs throughout the lifespan

Teratogens

environmental agents that can cause damage (developmental abnormalities or spontaneous abortion/miscarriage) during prenatal development

Reflexes

Involuntary stereotyped movement responses controlled by brainstem

Differentiation

Ability to extract invariant elements from the constantly changing environment

Affordances

Infant’s discovery of the possibilities for action offered, by objects & situations

Intermodal Perceptions

Links between different senses

Perceptual Narrowing Effect

0-6 months, can distinguish speech sounds in all languages. By 9 months, less sensitive to speech distinctions in non-native languages

Habituation

Show same stimulus over & over causes you to respond to it less & brain stops paying attention to the repeating stimulus b/c there’s no new information

Novelty preference

Babies prefer to look at new stimuli, therefore look longer at new visual stimuli

Operant conditioning

Infants repeat behaviors that are rewarded; learning that certain behaviors are rewarded

Classical conditioning

Doesn’t involve front cortex, but Involves cerebellum → capable of classical conditioning at birth

Imitation

Reflex when make faces at newborn babies to see if babies will imitate. These babies will copy facial expression

Infant locomotion

Crawling does not teach you to be a wise walker.

Constructivist approach

Child actively constructs knowledge through interacting with the world

Object permanence

Understanding that objects continue to exist when out of sight

Mental Representation

Internal, mental depictions of information

Deferred imitation

Capacity to copy something that you saw earlier. Shows up as early as 6 months of age

Dual representation

Representing something as 2 things: object & symbol; viewing a symbolic object as both an object & a symbol

Centration

Focusing on one dimension of an object or event & neglecting others; also focusing on static states rather than transformations

Hypothetico-deductive reasoning

Ability to think abstractly & reason hypothetically.