Infancy (4)

Defintion (#f7aeae)

Important (#edcae9)

Extra (#fffe9d)

Physical Growth & Development Physical Growth:

The Cephalocaudal pattern:

• Sequence in which the earliest growth always occurs at the top with physical growth and differentiation of features gradually working their way down from top to bottom.

• Motor development generally proceeds according to the cephalocaudal principle.

• Infants see objects before they can control their torso, and they can use their hands long before they can crawl or walk; but they are not rigid. Some infants reached their toys with their feet before their hands.

The proximodistal pattern:

•  Growth starts at the center of the body and moves toward the extremities.

•  Eg: infants use their whole hands before they can control several fingers.

Height & Weight:

• Most of the newborns are 18 to 22 inches long and weigh between 2.5 kg and 5kg.

•  Grow about 1 inch per month during the first year.

•  By 2 years of age:

  • Infants weigh approximately 10 kg to 14 kg.

  • Average 32 to 35 inches in height.

The Brain:

• Contains approximately 100 billion neurons at birth

• The infant's head should be protected from falls or other injuries.

• Shaken baby syndrome: Brain swelling and haemorrhaging.

• While most of the brain’s neurons are present at birth, they are not fully mature

• During the next several years dendrites, or branching extensions that collect information from other neurons, will undergo a period of exuberance.

Brain’s development:

• Neurons: a nerve cell that handles information processing

• Myelin sheath: a layer fat cells that helps electrical signals travel faster down the axon

• Neurotransmitters: Tiny gaps between neuron’s fibers

Mapping the brain:

• Cortex: Most of the neural activity is occurring here as it involves in voluntary activity and thinking

• Frontal lobe: involves in voluntary movement, thinking, personality, and intentionality or purpose.

• Occipital lobes function in vision.

• Temporal lobes have an active role in hearing, language processing, and memory.

• Parietal lobes play important roles in registering spatial location, attention, and motor control.

• Lateralization: the process in which different functions become localized primarily on one side of the brain.

• At birth, the hemispheres of the cerebral cortex already have started to specialize: Newborns show greater electrical brain activity in the left hemisphere than the right hemisphere when they are listening to speech sound.

Changes in neurons

• Myelination: involved in providing energy to neurons and in communication.

• Connectivity among neurons increases allowing information to pass from neuron to neuron.

  

Changes in regions of the brain

• Blooming and pruning vary by brain region

• Peak of synaptic overproduction in the visual cortex followed by a gradual retraction

• Heredity and environment influence the timing and course

• The pace of myelination varies in different areas of the brain.

• Myelination for visual pathways occurs rapidly after birth and is completed in the first six months. Auditory myelination is not completed until 4 or 5 years of age.

​​Early experience and the brain

• Children in deprived environment may have depressed brain activity

• Brain demonstrates both flexibility and resilience

• Brain has plasticity and is context-dependent

• Development of the brain and the child’s cognitive development are closely linked

Sleep & SID:

Sleep:

1. Evolutionary perspective - Survival 

2. Replinishes and rebuilds the brain and body

   • Restorative Function 

   • Clearing out waste in neural tissue 

3. Critical for brain Plasticity

   • Increases synaptic connections between neurons 

SIDs - Findings:

• Sudden death infant syndrome: A condition that occurs when infants stop breathing usually during the night and die suddenly without an apparent cause.

• Risk Factors:

  • Low birth weight infants.

  • Infants whose siblings have died of SIDS.

  • More common in lower socioeconomic groups.

  • More common in infants who are passively exposed to cigarette smoke.

  • More often in infants with abnormal brain stem functioning.

  • Involving the neurotransmitter serotonin.

Nutrition:

• Nutritional needs and eating behaviour

• Infants should consume approximately 50 calories per day for each kg they weigh

• As motor skills improve, infants change:

  • From using suck-and-swallow movements

  • To chew-and-swallow movements with semisolid and then complex foods

• Need to have a diet that includes:

  • Fruits and vegetables

• Breast vs bottle feeding: (which one is better)

  • For the first four to six months of life, human milk or an alternative formula is the baby’s source of nutrients and energy.

  • The growing consensus is that breast feeding is better for the baby’s health

• Benefits of breast feeding: outcomes for the child

  • Lower gastrointestinal infections

  • Lower respiratory tract infections

  • No evidence reduction in the risk of allergies

Motor Development:

1. Dynamic systems view:

   • Dynamic systems theory: Infants assemble motor skills for perceiving and acting.

   • Motor skills are developed by:

     • Development of the nervous system 

     • Body’s physical properties and its possibilities for movement 

     • Child’s motivation to reach a goal 

     • Environmental support for the skill 

2. Reflexes:

   • Built in reactions:

     • To stimuli that govern the newborn’s movements.

     • Are automatic and beyond the newborn's control.

   • Rooting reflex:

     • Occurs when the infant's cheek is stroked or the side of the mouth is touched.

     • Turns his or her head in an effort to find something to suck.

   • Sucking Reflex:

     • Occurs when newborns automatically suck an object placed in their mouth.

     • Enables newborns to get nourishment before they have associated a nipple with food.

   • Motor Reflex:

     • A neonatal startle response that occurs in reaction to a sudden intense noise or movement.

     • Believed to be a way of grabbing for support while falling.

     • Grasping Reflex: Occurs when something touches the infant’s palms.

     • Respond by grasping tightly.

3. Gross Motor Skills:

   • Involve large muscle activities: Walking, Slow running.

   • Development of posture:

     • Posture: Dynamic process linked with sensory information in the skin, joints and muscles which tells us where we are in space.

   • The first year: Motor development milestones and variations.

     

4. Fine Motor Skills:

   • Involve more finely tuned movements such as finger dexterity.

   • Types of grasps: Palmer gasp and Pincer grasp

Sensory and Perceptual Development:

• The Ecological view:

  • In ecological view, we directly perceive information that exists in the world around us.

  • The view is called ecological “because it connects perceptual capabilities to information available in the world of the perceiver”.

•  Affordances:

  • Opportunities for interaction offered by objects that fit within our capabilities to perform activities.

  • We directly and accurately perceive these affordances by sensing information from the environment

  • When babies who could walk were faced with a squishy waterbed, they stopped and explored it, then chose to crawl rather than walk across it

• Visual perception:

  • Infants show an interest in human faces soon after birth

  • As infants develop, they change the way they gather information from the visual world, including human faces

Cognitive Development in Infancy:

Cognitive development in infancy

• Piaget’s theory of infant development

• Learning, remembering and conceptualising 

• Language development

Memory:

• Memory involves the retention of information over time: Encoding the process by which information gets into memory.

• Implicit Memory: Memory without conscious recollection - memories of skills and routine procedures that performed automatically.

• Ex: Brushing teeth, singing your favourite song and driving back home.

• Explicit Memory: Refers to the conscious memory of facts and experiences.

Imitation:

• Infants’ imitative abilities are biologically based, because infants can imitate a facial expression within the first few days after birth.

• The infant’s imitative abilities do not resemble an inborn response but rather involve flexibility and adaptability.

• Deferred imitation: occurs after a delay of hours or days.

Language:

Recognizing language sounds

• Infants recognize when sounds change most of the time, no matter what language the syllables come from.

• But over the next six months, infants get even better at perceiving the changes in sounds from their “own” language and gradually lose the ability to recognize differences that are not important in their own language

Babbling and other vocalizations

• Crying, cooing, babbling

Gestures

• Infants start using gestures, such as showing and pointing, at about 8 to 12 months of age.

First words

•  Receptive vocabulary considerably exceeds spoken vocabulary

• 18 months (50 words), 24 months (200 words) -Vocabulary spurt

Two-word utterances:

• By the time children are 18 to 24 months of age, they usually utter two-word utterances.

•  Ex: Dog there; big car.

Language Sites in the brain:

Socioeconomic Development in Infancy:

• Emotional and personality development

• Social orientation and attachment

• Social contexts

Emotional Development

• Emotion: Feeling or affect that occurs when a person is in a state or interaction that is important to them.

• Plays important roles in: Communication with others and behavioral organisation.

• Early Emotions: Primary emotions are emotions that are present in humans and other animals; these emotions appear in the first 6 months of the human infant’s development.

• Basic emotions: Self conscious: emotions require self awareness that involves consciousness and a sense of “me”. Jealousy, empathy, embarrassment, pride, shame and guilt.

Emotional Expression and Social Relationships 

1. Crying:

   • The most important mechanism newborns have for communicating with their world.

2. Basic cry:

   • A rhythmic pattern that usually consists of a cry, followed by a briefer silence, then a shorter whistle that is somewhat higher in pitch than the main cry, then another brief rest before the next cry.

3. Anger cry:

   •  A variation of the basic cry in which more excess air is forced through the vocal cords.

4. Pain cry:

   • A sudden long, initial loud cry followed by breath holding; no preliminary moaning is present. The pain cry is stimulated by a high-intensity stimulus

5. Smiling:

   • Reflexive smile: Smile that does not occur in response to external stimuli.

   • Social smile: In response to an external stimulus.

6. Fear:

   • Stranger anxiety: Fear and wariness of strangers, appears during the second half of the first year of life

   • Separation protest: Distressed crying when the caregiver leaves

7. Emotional Regulation and Coping:

   • Caregivers’ actions and contexts can influence emotional regulation.

   • Soothing a crying infant helps infants develop a sense of trust and secure attachment to the caregiver.

Temperament

• Individual differences in behavioural styles, emotions, and characteristic ways of responding.

• Describing and classifying temperament:

• Easy child: Generally in a positive mood

  • Quickly establishes regular routines in infancy.

  • Adapts easily to new experiences.

• Difficult child: Reacts negatively and cries frequently

  • Engages in irregular daily routines.

  • Slow to accept change.

• Slow-to-warm-up child: Low activity level

  • Somewhat negative.

  • Displays a low intensity of mood.

Social Orientation:

• The focused social interaction of face-to-face play may include vocalizations, touch, and gestures

Locomotion skills

• Body is moved in one direction, or a combination of directions, from one point to another.

• The infant’s and toddler’s push for independence also is likely paced by the development of locomotion skills

Intention and goal-directed behaviour

•  Joint attention and gaze-following help the infant to understand that other people have intentions

Social referencing

•  Reading emotional cues in others to help determine how to act in a particular situation.

•  The development of social referencing helps infants to interpret ambiguous situations more accurately.

Attachment:

1. Freud:

   • Infants become attached to the person that provides oral satisfaction

2. Harlow:

   • Contact comfort preferred over food.

   • Rhesus Monkey Experiment: Harlow removed infant monkeys from their mothers at birth; for six months they were reared by surrogate “mothers.” One surrogate mother was made of wire, the other of cloth.

3. Erikson:

   • Trust arises from physical comfort and sensitive care.

4. Bowlby:

   • Stresses the importance of attachment in the first year of life and the responsiveness of the caregiver.

   • Bowlby maintains both infants and their primary caregivers are biologically predisposed to form attachments.

   • Argues that the newborn is biologically equipped to elicit attachment behaviour.

Steps Towards Attachment 

•  According to Bowlby, children who form an attachment to an adult— an enduring socioemotional relationship—are more likely to survive.

• The key is a strong emotional relationship with a responsive, caring person.

•  Attachments other than mothers can form with fathers, grandparents, or someone else.

1. Preattachment (birth to 6 – 8 weeks):

   • During prenatal development and soon after birth, infants rapidly learn to recognize their mothers by smell and sound.

2. Attachment in the making (6 – 8 weeks to 6 – 8 months):

   • Babies begin to behave differently in the presence of familiar caregivers and unfamiliar adults.

   • Babies are gradually identifying the primary caregiver as the person they can depend on.

3. True attachment (6 – 8 months to 18 months):

   • Most infants have singled out the attachment figure as a special individual and the attachment figure is infant’s stable socioemotional base.

Child Attachment Theories:

1. Secure Attachment

   • Child is content, ready to learn and engaged with tasks.

   • Can be independent and seek out caregiver for comfort.

2. Avoidant Attachment 

   • A child often feels rejected. They do not show distress.

   • Can appear withdrawn and quiet.

3. Ambivalent Attachment

   • Child express anxiety in their environment.

   • Often asks questions and can appear distracted or lacking focus.

4. Disorganised Attachment:

   • Child does not have a predictable pattern of attachment.

   • Can appear angry, sad and scared. Can be passive with limited ability to maintain friendships.

Caregiving styles and attachment

• Maternal sensitivity is linked to secure attachment

• Although maternal sensitivity is positively linked to the development of secure attachment in infancy, it’s important to note that the link is not especially strong.

• Securely attached babies have caregivers who are sensitive to their signals and are consistently available to respond to their infants’ needs

• Caregivers of insecurely attached infants tend to be:

  • Rejecting

  • Inconsistent

  • Abusive

  • Not affectionate

The family and childcare

• Studies emphasize that marital relations, parenting, and infant behaviour and

development can have both direct and indirect effects on each other.

1. Transition to parenthood:

   • When people become parents through pregnancy, adoption or step-parenting they face disequilibrium and must adapt.

   • Ex: A baby places new restriction on partners: parents no longer will be able to rush out to a movie on a short notice and money may not readily be available for vacation.

2. Reciprocal socialisation:

   • Socialization that is bidirectional. Children socialize parents just as parents socialize children.

3. Scaffolding:

   • Parents time interactions in such a way that the infant experiences turn-taking with the parents.

   • Involves parental behaviour that supports children’s efforts, allowing them to be more skillful than they would be if they were to rely only on their own abilities

   • In using scaffolding, caregivers provide a positive, reciprocal framework in which they and their children interact