Infancy

Physical Development

o   Cephalocaudal Principle – growth starts from the top part of the body (i.e., brain to foot)

o   Proximodistal Principle – growth proceed from the center of the body outward (e.g., Palm (grasping) to fingers)

o   Children grow faster during the first 3 years

o   Teething usually begins around 3-4 months

o   Growth slows in the second year of life

o   Growth isn’t often smooth and continuous but rather is episodic, occurring in spurts

Benefits of Breastfeeding

o   Babies are less likely to contract infectious illnesses

o   Lower risks of SIDS and of Post-neonatal death

o   Lesser risks of inflammatory bowel disease

o   Better visual acuity, neurological development, and long-term cardiovascular health

o   Less likely to develop obesity, asthma, eczema, diabetes, lymphoma, etc.

o   Less likely to show language and motor delays

o   Score higher on cognitive tests

o   Fewer cavities and are less likely to need braces

o   Mothers can quickly recover with childbirth

o   They are more likely to return to the pre-pregnancy weight

o   Reduced risk of anemia and lowered risk of repeat pregnancy while breastfeeding

o   Report feeling more confident and less anxious

o   Less likely to develop osteoporosis or ovarian and premenopausal breast cancer

o   Reduction in type 2 diabetes

o   The only acceptable alternative to breast milk is Iron-Fortified Formula based on either cow’s milk or soy protein

o   Babies should consume nothing but milk during the first 6 months of life

Brain and Reflex Behavior

o   By age of 6, the brain is almost adult size but some parts are still continuously developing

o   Brain Growth Spurts – brain’s growth occurs in fits and starts

o   By birth, spinal cord and brain stem has nearly run its course (responsible for breathing, heart rate, temp, and sleep-wake cycle)

o   Cerebellum (maintains balance and motor coordination) grows the fastest during the first year of life

o   Lateralization – specialization of the hemispheres

o   Left Hemisphere – concerned with language and logical thinking

o   Right Hemisphere – concerned with visual and spatial functions

o   Corpus Callosum – tough band of tissue that joins the two hemisphere which allows them to share info and coordinate commands

o   Occipital – smallest; concerned with visual processing

o   Parietal – involved with integrating sensory info from the body; movement and manipulation of objects

o   Temporal – interpret smells and sounds and involved in memory

o   Frontal Lobe – involved in high-order processes such as reasoning and problem solving

o   Cerebral Cortex – outer surface of the cerebrum; grows rapidly in the first few months and are mature by age 6 months

o   Brain Growth Spurt begins at about the third trimester of gestation and continues until at least the 4^th year of life

o   Neurons – send and receive info in the brain

o   Glia or Glial Cells – nourish and protect the neurons

o   Axon – sends signals to other neurons

o   Dendrites – receive incoming messages

o   Synapses – tiny gaps which are bridged with the help of chemicals

o   Integration – neurons that control various groups of muscle coordinate their activities

o   Differentiation – each neuron takes on a specific, specialized structure and function

o   Cell Death – pruning of cells which is a way to calibrate the developing brain to the local environment and help it work more efficiently, beings during the prenatal period and continues after birth

o   Myelination – enables signals to travel faster and more smoothly by coating the neural pathways with myelin

o   Children who grew up in deprived environment may have depressed brain activity

o   Neuroconstructivist View – biological process and environmental conditions influences development, the brain is plastic, and the child’s cognitive development is closed linked to development of the brain

▪        Emphasized the importance of considering interactions between experience and gene expression in the brain’s development

o   Reflex Behavior – automatic, innate response to stimulation which are controlled by the lower brain centers that govern involuntary processes

o   Primitive reflexes – includes sucking, rooting, and the Moro reflex are related to instinctive needs for survival and protection or may support the early connection to the caregiver

o   Postural Reflexes – reactions to changes in position or balance

o   Locomotor Reflex – resemble voluntary movements that do not appear until months after the reflexes have disappeared

o   Early Reflexes Disappear during the first 6-12 months

o   Brain is Plastic, they are living, changeable organs which responds to environmental influences (Plasticity)

Early Sensory Capacity

o   Touch is the first sense to develop, the most mature sensory system for the first several months

o   Newborns can and do feel pain

o   Sense of smell and taste begin to develop in the womb

o   Newborns strongly dislike bitter flavors

o   Auditory Discrimination develops rapidly after birth

o   At 4 moths, infant’s brain responds preferentially to speech

o   Vision is the least developed sense at birth

o   Binocular Vision (the use of both eyes to focus) does not develop until 4-5 months

o   Infants like attractive faces

Sleep

o   Sleep restores, replenishes, and rebuilds our brains and bodies

o   Evolutionary Perspective: all animals sleep and this sleep is necessary for survival (to protect themselves at night)

o   Restorative Perspective: sleep replenishes and rebuilds the brain and the body such as clearing out neural tissues

o   Plasticity Perspective: sleep is critical for brain plasticity, i.e., increases synaptic connections between neurons which is linked to improved consolidation of memories

o   Newborns sleep approx. 18 hrs/day

o   Non-REM Sleep – no eye movement and sleep is more quiet

o   Rapid Eye Movement (REM Sleep) – the eyes flutter beneath the closed lids

▪        Usually appears 1 hr after non-rem (adults)

▪        Half of infant’s sleep is REM

▪        May provide infants with added self-stimulation

▪        Promote brain development in infancy

▪        When adults wake up from REM Sleep, they report dreaming

o   There is a positive link between infant sleep and cognitive functioning

Motor Development

o   Denver Developmental Screening Test – used to chart progress between ages 1 month and 6 years and to identify children who are not developing normally

▪        Measures Gross Motor Skills (using large muscles), Fine Motor Skills (using small muscles), Language Development, Personality, and Social Development

o   Crawling – helps babies learn to judge distances and perceive depth

o   Social Referencing – babies learn to look at caregivers for clues as to whether a situation is secure or frightening

o   Sensory Perception – enable infants to learn about themselves and their environment so they can make better judgements about how to navigate in it

o   Visual Guidance – the use of eyes to guide the movements of the hands

o   Clumsy corrective movements are more likely to be illustrating immature cerebellar development

o   Depth Perception – the ability to perceive objects and surfaces in three dimensions

o   Kinetic Cues – produced by movement of the object or the observer or both

o   Haptic Perception – ability to acquire information by handling objects rather than just looking at them

o   Posture – dynamic process that is linked with sensory information in the skin, joints, and muscles which tell us where we are in space

o   Swaddling shows slight delays in motor development

o   Perceptual Constancy – sensory stimulation is changing but perception of the physical world remains constant

▪        Allows infants to perceive that their world as stable

▪        Size Constancy – recognition that an object remains the same even though the retinal image of the object changes as you move toward or away from the object

▪        Shape Constancy – an object remains the same shape even though its orientation changes

Ecological Theory of Perception

o   Locomotor movement depends on infants’ increasing sensitivity to the interaction between their changing physical characteristics and new and varied characteristics of their environment

o   Babies learn to continually gauge their abilities and adjust their movements to meet the demands of their current environment

o   Baby is somewhat a small scientist testing out new ideas in each situation

o   Gibson’s Ecological View: we directly perceive info that exists in the world around us

o   Affordances – opportunities for interaction offered by objects that fit within our capabilities to perform activities

o   Newborns cannot see small things that are far away

Thelen’s Dynamic Systems Theory

o   Behavior emerges in the movement from the self-organization of multiple components

o   Opportunities and constraints presented by the infant’s physical characteristics, motivation, energy level, motor strength, and position in the environment at a particular moment in time affect whether and how an infant achieves a goal

o   A solution emerges as the baby explores various combinations of movements and assembles those that most efficiently contribute to that end

o   Infants modulate their movement patterns to fit a new task by exploring and selecting possible configurations

o   Infant actively put together skill to achieve a goal within the constraints set by the infant’s body and environment

Cognitive Development

Behaviorist Approach

o   Classical Conditioning – a person learns to make a reflex, or involuntary, response to a stimulus that originally did not bring about the response

o   Extinction – if the conditioned learning is not reinforced by repeated association

o   Operant Conditioning – focuses on the consequences of behaviors and how they affect the likelihood of the behavior occurring again

o   Babies were able to use contextual cues (e.g., odor) to retrieve memories

o   Infant memory is context-dependent and appears to be strongly linked to the original cues encoded during learning

Psychometric Approach

o   Intelligent Behavior – presumed to be goal-oriented, meaning it exists for the purposes of attaining a goal

o   IQ Tests – consists of questions or tasks that are supposed to show how much of the measured abilities a person has by comparing that person’s performance with norms

o   Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development – developmental test designed to assess children from 1 month to 3 ½ years

▪        Cognitive, Language, Motor, Social-Emotional, and Adaptive Behavior

▪        Accompanied by Behavior Rating Scale taken from the caregiver

o   Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment (HOME) – 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

▪        Number of books and toys, parents involvement with the child, parental emotional and verbal responsiveness, acceptance of the child’s behavior, organization of the environment, and opportunities for daily and varied stimulation

o   Early Intervention – systematic process of planning and providing therapeutic and educational services for families that need help in meeting infants’, toddlers’, and pre-school children’s developmental needs

Jean Piaget’s Sensorimotor Stage

o   The first stage of Jean Piaget’s cognitive development is Sensorimotor Stage

o   Approx. from birth to 2 years old

o   Circular Reactions – an infant learns to reproduce events originally discovered by chance

o   Schemes – actions or mental representations that can be performed on objects

o   Assimilation – occurs when children use their existing schemes to deal with new information

o   Accommodation – occurs when children adjust their schemes to take new information and experiences into account

o   Organization – grouping of isolated behaviors and thoughts into higher-order system

o   Disequilibrium – cognitive conflict

o   Children constantly assimilate and accommodate as they seek equilibrium

o   Equilibration – children shift from one stage of thought to the next

o   Representational Ability – the ability to mentally represent objects and actions in memory, largely through symbols such as words, numbers, and mental picture

o   Infants develop the abilities to think and remember

o   Visible Imitation that uses body parts that babies can see develops first followed by Invisible Imitation (involves with parts of the body that babies cannot see)

o   Piaget believed that children under 18 months could not engage in Deferred Imitation

▪        Reproduction of an observed behavior after the passage of time

▪        Children lacked the ability to retain mental representations

o   Infants under the age of about 8 months act as if an object no longer exists once it is out other line of sight

o   Object Permanence – the realization that something continues to exist when out of sight

o   Until about 15 months, infants use their hands to explore pictures as if they were objects

o   By 19 months, children are able to point at a picture of an object while saying its name, demonstrating an understanding that a picture is a symbol of something else

o   Dual Representation Hypothesis – proposal that children under age of 3 have difficulty grasping spatial relationships because of the need to keep more than one mental representation in mind at the same time

Information-Processing Approach

o   Habituation – a type of learning in which repeated or continuous exposure to a stimulus, reduces attention to that stimulus

▪        Familiarity breeds loss of interest

o   Dishabituation – if a new sight or sound is presented, the baby’s attention is generally captured once again, and the baby will reorient toward the interesting stimulus and once again sucking slows

o   Visual Preference – tendency to spend more time looking at one sight rather than another

o   Visual Recognition Memory – ability that depends on the capacity to form and refer to mental representations

o   Babies like to look at new things

o   Senses are unconnected at birth and are only gradually integrated through experience

o   Cross-Modal Transfer – the ability to use information gained from one sense to guide another – as when a person negotiates a dark room by feeling for the location of familiar objects

Cognitive Neuroscience Approach

o   Examines the hardware of the CNS to identify what brain structures are involved in specific areas of cognition

o   Implicit Memory – refers to remembering that occurs without effort or even conscious awareness

▪        Habits and skills

▪        Develop early and is demonstrated by such actions as an infant’s kicking

o   Explicit Memory – declarative memory; conscious intentional recollection, usually of facts, names, events, or other things that can be stated or declared

o   During the second half of the first year, the prefrontal cortex and associated circuitry develop the capacity of working memory (short-term storage of information the brain is actively processing)

o   Working memory may be responsible for the slow development of object permanence

Social-Contextual Approach

o   Guided Participation – refers to mutual interactions with adults that help structure children’s activities and bridge the fap between a child’s understanding and an adult’s

Language

o   Language – communication system based on words and grammar

o   Infinite Generativity – the ability to produce and comprehend an endless no. of meaningful sentences using a finite set of words and rules

o   Pre-linguistic Speech – sounds that progress from crying to cooing and babbling

o   Crying – newborn’s first means of communication

o   Between 6-3 months, babies start cooing

o   By 6-10 months, they start babbling

o   Phonology – sound system of a language

o   Morphology – system of meaningful units involved in word formation

o   Syntax – the system that involves the way words are combined to form acceptable phrases and sentences

o   Semantics – the system that involves the meaning of words and sentences

o   Pragmatics – the system of using appropriate conversation and knowledge of how to effectively use language in context

o   Infants start using gestures at about 7-15 months

o   As early as 5 months, infants recognize their name

o   Receptive Vocabulary – words that the child understand

o   Spoken Vocabulary – words the child expresses/uses

o   Overextension – tendency to apply a word to objects that are inappropriate for the word’s meaning by going beyond the set of referents an adult would use (e.g. “Dada” not only for her Dad but also to other male strangers)

o   Underextension – tendency to apply the word too narrowly; occurs when children fail to use a word to name a relevant event or object

o   Children  between 18 to 24 months, speak in two-word utterances

o   Telegraphic Speech – the use of short and precise words without grammatical markers such as articles, etc. (“Momi give water”)

o   Regions involved in Language: Broca’s Area (Speech Production) and Wernicke’s Area (Language comprehension, sounds)

o   Aphasia – loss or impairment in language processing

o   Language Acquisition Device – biological endowment that enables the child to detect certain features and rules of language

o   The support and involvement of caregivers and teachers greatly facilitate a child’s language

o   Child-Directed Speech – language spoken with a higher-than-normal pitch, slower tempo, and exaggerated intonation, with simple words and sentences

o   Recasting – rephrasing something the child has said that might lack appropriate morphology

o   Expanding – adding information to a child’s incomplete sentence

o   Labeling – name objects that children

o   Storybook reading especially benefits children

Psychosocial Development

o   Personality – the relatively consistent blend of emotions, temperament, thought, and behavior that makes each person unique

Emotions

o   Subjective reactions to experience that are associated with physiological and behavioral changes

o   During the 1^st month, babies cries when they are unhappy and become quiet at the sound of human voice or when they are picked up

o   Four Patterns of Crying of Infants:

1. Basic Hunger Cry – rhythmic pattern that usually co sist of cry, followed by a briefer silence

2. Angry Cry – more excess air is forced through vocal cords

3. Pain Cry – sudden long, initial loud cry followed by breath holding

4. Frustration Cry

o   A higher pitch an a more monotonic vocalization is associated with autonomic system activity during stressful procedures in infants

o   Earliest smiles resulted from subcortical nervous system activity

o   Involuntary smiles appear during periods of REM Sleep

o   Social Smiling – newborn infants gaze and smile at their parents; smile that occurs in response to external stimulus (2 months)

o   Reflexive Smile – a smile that does not occur in response to external stimuli and appear during the first month after birth

o   Anticipatory Smiling – infants smile at an object then gaze at an adult while continuing to smile

o   Self-Conscious emotions arise only after children have developed self-awareness

o   Altruistic Behavior – acting out of concern with no expectation of reward

o   Mirror Neurons – underlie empathy and altruism

Temperament

o   An early-appearing, biologically based tendency to respond to the environment in predictable ways

o   Easy Children – generally happy, rhythmic in biological functioning, and accepting of new experiences

o   Difficult Children – more irritable and harder to please

o   Slow-to-Warm-Up Children – mild but slow to adapt to new people and situations

o   Strong links between infant temperament and childhood personality at age of 7

o   Goodness of Fit – the match between a child’s temperament and the environmental demands and constraints the child must deal with

Developmental Issues in Infancy

o   According Erik Erikson, as babies, our first challenge involves forming basic sense of Trust versus Mistrust

o   Ideally, babies develop a balance between trust and mistrust

o   If trust predominates, as it should, children develop Hope and the belief that they can fulfill their needs and obtain their desires

o   Maladaptive Tendency for Infancy: Sensory Maladjustment – overly trusting and gullible, unrealistic, spoiled

o   Malignant Tendency: Withdrawal – never trust anyone, paranoid, neurotic, depressive

o   Significant Individual: Mother

o   Attachment – reciprocal, enduring emotional tie between an infant and a caregiver, each of whom contributes to the quality of the relationship

o   Strange Situation – by Mary Ainsworth; designed to assess attachment patterns between infant and adult

o   Secure Attachment – flexible, resilient

o   Avoidant Attachment – outwardly unaffected by a caregiver leaving or returning

o   Ambivalent (Resistant) Attachment – generally anxious even before the caregiver leaves

o   Disorganized-Disoriented Attachment – lack a cohesive strategy to deal with the stress of the strange situation; they show contradictory, repetitive, or misdirected behaviors; confused and afraid

o   According to Bowlby, attachment styles resulted from repeated interactions with a caregiver

o   Stranger Anxiety – wariness of a person she does not know

o   Separation Anxiety – distress when a familiar caregiver leaves her

o   Separation Protest – crying when caregiver leaves

o   Babies react negatively to strangers by 8 or 9 months

o   Mutual Regulation – the ability of both infant and caregiver to respond appropriately and sensitively to each other’s mental and emotional states

o   Social Referencing – seeking emotional information to guide behavior

Developmental Issues in Toddlerhood

o   Maladaptive Tendency for Toddler: Impulsiveness – shameless willfulness that leads to jump into things without proper consideration

o   Malignant Tendency for Toddler: Compulsiveness – perfectionism, rule follower

• Sphincter Muscle is developed

o   Self-Concept – our image of ourselves; it describes what we know and feel about ourselves and guides our actions

o   By at least 3 months, infants pay attention to their mirror image

o   Pretend Play – an early indication of the ability to understand other’s mental states and their own

o   Usage of person pronouns (me, mine) usually at 20-24 months

o   Socialization – process by which children develop habits, skills, values, and motives that make them responsible and productive members of the society

o   Children obey societal or parental dictates because they believe them to be right and true

o   The eventual goal is the development of conscience

o   Situational Compliance – extra assistance provided by their parents reminder and prompts to complete the task

o   Committed Compliance – they were committed to following request and could do so without their parents direct intervention

o   Receptive Cooperation – eager willingness to cooperate harmoniously with a parent, not only in disciplinary actions, but in variety of daily interactions

Maltreatment in Infancy and Toddlerhood

A.     Nonorganic Failure to thrive – slowed or arrested physical growth with no known medical cause, accompanied by poor developmental and emotional functioning

B.     Shaken Baby Syndrome – baby has a weak neck muscles, and a large, heavy head, shaking makes the brain bounce back and forth inside the skull

Moral Development

o   According to Kohlberg, children in Infancy stage is at the first level of Moral Development which is the Pre-Conventional Level

o   Infants or children from 0-2 yrs old is in Pre-conventional Level, specifically in Stage 1 whereas they desire to obey rules and avoid being punished

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