Child Development: A Cultural Approach - Infancy

Growth and Change in Infancy

Growth Patterns

• Objective 5.1: Describe changes in weight and height during the first year and explain the two basic principles of physical growth.
• Infants experience rapid growth during their first year.
• Weight:
  • Doubles in the first 5 months.
  • Triples by the end of the first year.
• Height:
  • Grows unevenly compared to weight.
• Two fundamental principles of physical growth:
  • Cephalocaudal principle: Growth progresses from head to tail.
  • Proximodistal principle: Growth proceeds from near to far (center of the body outwards).

Brain Development

• Objective 5.2: Identify the key parts of the brain and describe how the brain changes in the first few years of life.
• Most neurons develop before birth.
• Brain size:
  • At birth, it's about 25% of an adult's brain.
  • Reaches 70% by age 2.
• Brain growth is attributed to:
  • Synaptic exuberance: Dendritic connections multiply.
  • Myelination: Axons become encased in a myelin sheath.
• Efficiency increases through synaptic pruning.
• Brain divided into three major regions:
  • Hindbrain.
  • Midbrain.
  • Forebrain
    • Limbic System: Hypothalamus, Thalamus, Hippocampus
    • Cerebral Cortex: Lobes
• Hindbrain and midbrain mature early, controlling basic biological functions.
• Cerebral cortex:
  • Distinctly human part of the brain.
  • Divided into two hemispheres (lateralization).
  • Each hemisphere has four lobes with distinct functions:
    • Occipital lobes.
    • Temporal lobes.
    • Parietal lobes.
    • Frontal lobes.
• Infant brain plasticity:
  • Highly responsive and adaptable to environmental influences.
  • Vulnerable to environmental deprivation, which can have lasting effects.
  • Romanian adoptions example: Cognitive abilities were affected by the age of adoption.

Sleep Changes

• Objective 5.3: Describe how sleep changes in the course of the first year, and evaluate the risk factors for sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), including the research evidence regarding cosleeping.
• Infants typically sleep 16 to 17 hours a day.
• Around 3 to 4 months, they may sleep 6 to 7 hours at night.
• Cultural patterns influence sleep duration. For example:
  • American infants: 14 hours.
  • Kipsigis infants: 12 hours.
  • Dutch infants: 16 hours.
• Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS):
  • Unexplained death within the first year, without any apparent illness or disorder.
  • Infants aged 1 to 4 months are at the highest risk.
  • Involves three factors: a critical developmental period, a vulnerable infant, and environmental risks.
• Cosleeping:
  • Western countries often advise against it due to concerns about dependence, emotional health, and SIDS risk.
  • Developing countries often view it as normal and promoting parent-child attachment.
  • Considered a custom complex, reflecting underlying cultural beliefs.

Infant Health

Nutritional Needs

• Objective 5.4: Summarize how infants’ nutritional needs change during the first year of life, and identify the reasons for and consequences of malnutrition in infancy.
• Breast milk is essential, providing a high-fat diet necessary for infants.
• Solid foods are generally introduced around 4 to 6 months.
• Cultural variations exist in the types of food introduced:
  • Western cultures: Rice cereal and easily digestible foods.
  • Traditional cultures: Mashed, prechewed, or pureed foods.
• Malnutrition in infancy:
  • Rates are declining in developing countries but remain higher than in developed countries.
  • Can be severe and have long-lasting effects.
  • May occur due to a mother's inability or unwillingness to breastfeed.
  • Increased risk of marasmus, a disease characterized by body wasting due to nutrient deficiency.

Infant Mortality

• Objective 5.5: List the major causes of infant mortality and name some cultural approaches to protecting infants.
• Most infant mortality happens in the first month of life.
• Rates are significantly higher in developing countries.
• Main causes after the first month but within the first year:
  • Malnutrition.
  • Disease.
  • Malaria.
  • Diarrhea leading to dehydration.
• Diarrhea can be treated with oral rehydration therapy (ORT), which has reduced infant deaths.
• Vaccines have eliminated various diseases, offering immunization.
• Cultural beliefs and practices to protect infants:
  • Traditional cultures often have practices influenced by awareness of infant vulnerabilities.
  • These practices help infants avoid harm, even without understanding the physiological causes of illness or medical remedies.
  • Magical practices may still be used where knowledge is limited.

Motor and Sensory Development

Motor Development

• Objective 5.6: Summarize the major changes in gross and fine motor development during infancy.
• Gross motor development:
  • Involves whole-body movements like crawling.
  • Skills develop in a sequence, with variations in the timing of milestones.
  • Sequence is mainly ontogenetic (genetic) with environmental influences.
  • Cultural variations in stimulating motor skills, but early stimulation doesn't guarantee long-term gains.
• Fine motor development:
  • Infants improve at grasping and exploring objects during the first year.

Sensory Development

• Objective 5.7: Specify when and how infants develop depth perception and intermodal perception.
• Depth perception:
  • Binocular vision develops at 2 to 3 months.
  • Important for mobility.
  • Visual cliff experiments are used to understand when infants learn depth perception.
  • Bidirectional relationship between perceptual and motor development.
• Intermodal perception:
  • Integration and coordination of sensory information.
  • Progresses in the first year.
  • Helps infants learn about their physical and social world.

Theories and Assessments of Cognitive Development

Piaget’s Stage Theory of Cognitive Development

• Objective 5.8: Describe the sensorimotor stage and explain how object permanence develops over the course of the first year.
• Sensorimotor stage:
  • Occurs during the first 2 years of life.
  • Infants learn to coordinate sensory and motor activities.
  • Progress from reflex behavior to intentional actions.
  • Assimilation: Fitting new information into existing schemes.
  • Accommodation: Changing schemes to adapt to new information.
• Object permanence:
  • Understanding that objects continue to exist even when not perceived.
  • Infants initially have little understanding of this.
  • Develops around 8 to 12 months.
  • A-not-B error: Believing one's own action causes an object to appear.
• Motor Coordination and Object Permanence
  • Baillargeon tested infant abilities using the violation of expectations method.
    • Showed that young infants perceive objects as permanent and whole
    • Supported in other cultures.

Information-Processing Approaches

• Objective 5.9: Summarize information-processing approaches and describe how attention and memory change during infancy.
• Information-processing approaches view cognitive change as continuous.
• Different components of thinking operate simultaneously.
• Researchers study attention, memory, and executive function.
• Attention:
  • Focus selectively on information.
  • Studied using habituation and dishabituation.
  • Infants improve at processing stimuli to habituate faster.
  • Joint attention emerges at the end of the first year.
• Memory:
  • Short-term and long-term memory improve.
  • Object permanence tasks demonstrate infants' ability to remember hidden object locations.
  • Difference between recognition memory and recall memory.

Assessing Infant Development

• Objective 5.10: Outline the Bayley Scales of Infant Development (BSID) and explain how habituation assessments are used to predict later intelligence.
• Bayley Scales of Infant Development (BSID):
  • Measures development from 3 months to 3.5 years.
  • Three main scales: Cognitive, Language, Motor.
  • Developmental quotient (DQ) is not predictive of later IQ but can be used as a screening tool.
• Information-Processing Approaches to Infant Assessment
  • Use habituation to asses intelligence
  • Infants with short habituation time process quicker
  • Longitudinal studies show a connection between habituation time and IQ and higher achievement

The Beginnings of Language

First Sounds and Words

• Objective 5.11: Describe the course of language development over the first year of life.
• Language Development:
  • Cooing at 2 months.
  • Babbling at 4 to 6 months.
  • Gestures used to communicate at 8 to 10 months.
  • First words spoken at 12 months.
  • Language comprehension exceeds language production.

Infant-Directed (ID) Speech

• Objective 5.12: Compare how cultures vary in their stimulation of language development.
• Infant-Directed (ID) Speech:
  • Higher pitch with simplified grammar.
  • Exaggerated intonation and repeated phrases.
  • Infants prefer it due to its emotional charge.
  • Common in many Western cultures.

Temperament

Conceptualizing Temperament

• Objective 5.13: Define infant temperament and name its main dimensions.
• Temperament:
  • Innate responses to physical and social environments.
  • Thomas and Chess classified babies into three categories: easy, difficult, slow to warm up.
  • Temperament in infancy can predict later development.
  • Current research adds self-regulation or sociability.
  • Two Conceptions of Infant Temperament
    • (Thomas and Chess): Activity level, attention span, intensity of reaction, rhythmicity, distractibility, approach/withdrawal, adaptability, threshold of responsiveness, quality of mood
    • (Rothbart): Activity level, attention span/persistence, fearful distress, irritable distress, positive affect, self-regulation

Goodness-of-Fit

• Objective 5.14: Explain how the idea of goodness-of-fit pertains to temperament on both a family level and a cultural level.
• Goodness-of-Fit:
  • A good fit between a child's temperament and environmental demands.
  • Parents need to be aware of temperaments and respond accordingly.
  • Cultures value different traits, leading to cultural goodness-of-fit.

Infants’ Emotions

Primary Emotions

• Objective 5.15: Identify the primary emotions and describe how they develop during infancy.
• Primary Emotions:
  • Basic emotions shared with other animals.
  • Secondary emotions (socio-moral emotions) develop later.
  • Distress, interest, and pleasure appear in the first weeks of life.
  • Evolve into anger, sadness, fear, surprise, and happiness.
  • Social smiling depends on caregivers.

Infants’ Emotional Perceptions

• Objective 5.16: Describe infants’ emotional perceptions and how their emotions become increasingly social over the first year.
• Perceiving Emotions:
  • Crying in response to hearing another cry is emotional contagion.
  • Infants perceive emotions by hearing before seeing.
  • Still-face paradigm: Infants learn to expect certain emotional reactions.
  • Ability to match auditory and visual emotions emerges.
  • Infants gradually show social referencing.

The Social World of the Infant

Cultural Themes of Infant Social Life

• Objective 5.17: List the main features of infants’ social worlds across cultures.
• Infants’ Social World:
  • Key themes across cultures:
    • Infants almost constantly with mothers in early months.
    • After 6 months, daily care is often done by older girls.
    • Infants are around many other people during the day.
    • Infants are held or carried almost constantly.
    • Fathers are often remote or absent during the first year.
  • Infants develop well socially in various cultural contexts.

The Foundation of Social Development: Two Theories

• Objective 5.18: Compare and contrast the two major theories of infants’ social development.
• Trust versus Mistrust:
  • Erikson’s first stage of development.
  • Centers around emotional and social bonds, not biological bonds.
  • Developing trust in infancy provides a foundation for future social development.
• Attachment Theory:
  • Bowlby emphasized the importance of early quality relationships.
  • Crucial for the primary caregiver to be sensitive and responsive.
  • Babies learn that others can be trusted in social relationships.
  • Has an evolutionary basis and is supported by research on mother-offspring relationships in animal species.