Chapter 8 

• Drawings of preschoolers 

• Progress from scribbles to representational forms (age 3)

  • Better, more realistic art, around 5-6

• Cultural differences influence drawing skills

  • EX: Chinese children tend to have a better understanding of brush strokes for painting and drawing

• Brain growth in early childhood (parts of the brain and their roles) 

• Brain growth involves a reshaping and refining process

• Ages 2-6: brain increases 90% of its adult weight

• Ages 8-10: cognitive functioning becomes localized in distinct neural systems 

• Prefrontal cortical areas: executive functioning

  • Experiences rapid growth during ages 8-10 

• Childhood poverty can negatively affect brain development

  • Brain structures that have control of cognitive functioning and emotional abilities

    • Frontal lobes, temporal lobes, and hippocampus 

• Motor development in early childhood – progress and milestones made during this time 

• Improvements in gross and fine motor skills

• Bodies become less top heavy

  • Better balance and new motor skills

• Fine motor skills develop more in preschool

  • Allows for dressing, using utensils like forks and spoons, and drawing representational forms

• Individual differences can influence the development of motor skills

  • EX: Taller, muscular kids develop these skills faster

• Gender variations in skill development

  • Boys excel in power related motor skills

  • Girls excel in fine motor activities that require balance and foot movement

  • Social pressure influences participation in certain activities

• Balance improvements in children 

• Children become less top heavy

• Center of gravity shifts outward, which improves balance

  • Paves the way for new motor skills to develop 

  • Allows upper and lower body skills to get more refined actions

• Immunizations 

• Widespread immunization leads to significant decrease in childhood disease

• 28% infants and 32% of poverty stricken children are not fully vaccinated 

  • Lack of health insurance, misinformation about the effects, and religious/philosophical exemptions

• Poor diet and immune system 

• Makes the immune system worse, making children more susceptible to disease

• Malnutrition causes physical growth and cognitive development 

  • EX: widespread diarrhea due to poor nutrition causes stunted growth and leads to death

    • Oral rehydration therapy (ORT) and zinc supplements are used to prevent these outcomes

 • Adaptiveness of “picky eating” 

• Picky eating starts at age 2

  • Normal adaptive behavior

• Appetites decline as growth slows which leads to picky eating

• A way to ensure they eat safe foods, which ensures survival and health 

• Ways to introduce new foods 

• Introduce through by repeating and not pressuring the child, which can increase acceptance

• Social environment plays a role

  • Imitating eating the foods that people they admire eat 

  • Emotional climate at mealtime effects eating habits; hostility will not make the child eat the food (avoidance) and passive approaches will not allow it either (falling into habit)

  • Restricting foods increase the child's desire for it, meaning they will overeat it when they get access to it. Allow it, but only on occasion. 

• Sleep and release of GH

• Healthy sleep patterns important for growth and cognitive development

• Growth Hormones (GH) necessary for development of all body tissues, which is typically released during sleep

  • Sleep improves physical growth

• Conditions that stunt growth (psychosocial dwarfism) and catch-up growth 

• Poor diet, disease, and sleep leads to stunted growth

• Catch up growth occur with proper intervention like ORT

• Heredity and hormones play a role in children's physical size and growth rate.

• Handedness 

• Children develop dominant hand for writing and other tasks around ages 4-6

  • Maturation of brain and motor skills during early childhood

• Body growth pattern in early childhood 

• Growth slows after first 2 years of life

• Individual differences in size become more apparent

• Skeletal changes continue with the new growth centers where cartilage hardens into bone

• Primary teeth replaced by permanent teeth

• Role of pituitary gland 

• Important for physical growth

  • Releases GH and Thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH) that help body development

• TSH makes the thyroid gland release thyroxine, which is crucial for brain development and enhance GH 

• Epiphyses and skeletal age 

• Epiphysis is growth centers that cartilage turns to bone (skeletal changes in early childhood) 

• Primary teeth turn to permanent teeth

• New epiphyses contributes to growth 

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Chapter 9

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• Sociodramatic play 

• Sociodramatic play: make-believe with others 

  • Increases complexity during early childhood

• Pretend play detached from real-life conditions

• Less self centered and more complex themes

• End of 2nd year

  • Becomes more complex as children interact with others in pretend situations

• Connection between sociodramatic play and social competence 

• Sociodramatic play enhances social competence by allowing the child to practice roles, problem solving, and cooperation with others

  • Based on Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory

• Errors in Piaget’s preoperational stage 

• Egocentrism 

  • Failing to understand others’ views

    • EX: Three mountain problem

• Class inclusion

  • Unable to distinguish between an object or an object’s specific features

    • EX: Cannot distinguish between red flowers and flowers as a whole

• Piagetian tasks and how children perform 

• Perform better in Piagetian tasks when actively participating rather than just watching

  • Conservation tasks

  • Children who are actively involved do better than children who just watch

• Active participation enhances children’s cognitive abilities

• Differences between Piaget and Vygotsky’s views of cognitive development 

• Piaget: focused on individual exploration

  • Independent discovery and construction of knowledge through experience on their own

  • Self discovery and adaptation

• Vygotsky: social interaction

  • Children learn through interactions with others 

  • Learn with guidance and support in order to reach higher levels of understanding

• Private speech (and when it is used) 

• Vygotsky: private speech– talking to yourself– is a foundation of cognitive processing

• Used more when tasks are challenging

  • Helps with self-guidance

• As tasks get more difficult, private speech declines. 

• Private speech switches to inner speech– talking to yourself, only internal. Thinking to yourself.

• Children with difficulty learning use private speech more and longer than other children

• Scaffolding 

• Scaffolding by parents help children have advanced executive functioning and better intellectual performance

• Different forms of scaffolding

  • Emphasize independence, interdependence and child obedience

• Scaffolding: adjusting support during teaching to match a child's current level of performance 

• Scripts 

• Scripts: person's knowledge about the sequence of events in a situation

• Helps predict what will happen next and guide the behavior

• Autobiographical vs. episodic memory 

• Autobiographical: scaffolded by adults

  • Helps recall and organize stories 

  • Autobiographical: representation of personally meaningful one-time events 

• Episodic: 3-6 years old; recalling everyday scenarios with things like time, place, person

  • Improves between ages 3-6

  • Scripts: general descriptions of what occurs and when it occurs in a particular situation

• Repetitive vs. elaborative recall 

• Parents that use a repetitive approach repeat the same questions with little information, which becomes less effective when helping children recall memories

• Elaborative style scaffolds memories to better recall and organize detailed stories

• Overlapping waves theory 

• When faced with problems, children try multiple approaches at the same time, then work out which ones were most effective to then create strategies with more efficiency and speed; Creating correct solutions to problems and store them in long term memory

• Theory of mind and false beliefs 

• Around age 4, children realize that beliefs and desires influence behavior, which helps them become aware of false beliefs. A false belief is understanding that an individual can hold a belief that doesn't actually align with a situation or reality.

  • Predict the thoughts or outcomes based on incorrect information

• Semantic and syntactic bootstrapping 

• Semantic bootstrapping: using word meanings to figure out grammar rules 

  • Relying on semantics to understand grammar rules

• Syntactic bootstrapping: discovering word meanings by how they're used 

• Phonological awareness and its relationship to other skills 

• Phonological awareness: reflect on and manipulate sound structures of a spoken language 

  • Children with more phonological awareness end up having better literacy

  • Lack of phonological awareness can hinder memory and recall

• Rapid and vast development of vocabulary during early childhood 

• In early childhood, vocab expands rapidly through “fast mapping” where children connect new words with concepts or encounters

  • Benefit from multiple exposures and examples consistently in different contexts

• Vocab growth relies on a combination of perceptual, social, and linguistic components that improve with age

• Mathematical skills (ordinality, cardinality, estimation) 

• Toddlers: grasp ordinality

  • Ordinality: order, or sequence of events. “One after another”

• Age 3.5-4: grasp, or mastery, of numbers 1-10 and understand cardinality 

  • Cardinality: understanding that the last number in a sequence shows how many things are in a set. The last number is the total. 

• Age 4: use counting to learn the ability of estimation

  • Estimation: make educated guesses without numbers. Allows rough estimates. 

• All highlight the skill of mathematical development

• Errors children make during this time

• Errors in theory of mind

  • Viewing the mind as a place to put passive information

    • underestimates mental activity and struggle to infer others’ thoughts

  • Overregularization of grammar, applying them to exceptions

    • “Goed” instead of “went” 

    • Overextension of “-ed” to past tense

    • Shows active engagement, even with mistakes 

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Chapter 10

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• Self-concept (how do children describe themselves during this period) 

• Self Concept: set of attributes, attitudes, and values that an individual believes defines them and who they are.

• For children/during this time, it’s mostly observable characteristics

  • name , physical appearance, possessions, and everyday behaviors

• By 3.5, children can describe themselves in terms of emotions and attitudes

• By 5, personality assessments match what their parents think

• Parent child relationships foster positive, coherent self-concept

• Erikson’s stage during early childhood 

• Children develop initiative vs guilt

• Developing sense of purpose 

• Exploration and activity initiation

• Self-esteem & children’s high self-esteem 

• Self esteem: the judgements we make about our own worth and the feelings associated with those judgements

  • Effects our emotional experience, behavior, and long term psychological adjustment

• Age 4: several self-judgements

  • Learning in school, making friends, getting along with parents, treating others kindly

  • High self esteem: rate their own ability as high and underestimate task difficulty

    • Mastery of new skills give a higher self esteem

    • Children who are criticized and have more emphasis on performance will have higher level of shame and crumble under challenge

• Friendships in early childhood 

• Based on spending time with someone the child likes, rather than a mutual trust reliance on each other

  • Preschoolers show this by greeting each other, complementing, or praising someone else's achievements. 

  • These friendships made are essential for social support

• Ease of making friends shows how cooperative they are in a classroom as well as other skills like task persistence and academic skills (specifically for kindergarteners) 

  • Small groups, good teacher-child ratio, and daily activities important for this social competence 

• Morality development 

• Innate moral sense

• Social experiences and cognitive factors play in

• Conscience begins to take shift in early childhood, but influenced by adults and then eventually becoming inner standards

• Preschoolers have rigid moral reasoning and morally relevant experiences are important for moral progress

• Psychoanalytic perspective: inducing empathy based guilt is effective in influencing children without coercion

  • Adult guidance helps in conscience development and providing information on how to behave

• Four parenting styles 

• Authoritative

  • Effective

    • High involvement

    • Adaptive control

    • High acceptance

    • Appropriate autonomy

• Permissive

  • High acceptance

  • Low involvement

  • Low control

  • High autonomy

• Authoritarian

  • Low acceptance

  • Low involvement

  • High control

  • Low autonomy

• Uninvolved

  • Low acceptance

  • Low involvement

  • Low control

  • Indifferent autonomy

• Parent-child relationship and self-concept of children 

• Positive relationships with parents create positive self-concepts

  • Preschoolers develop self-concepts like attributes, abilities, attitudes, and values

  • Development of high self-esteem helps initiative

• Parents play a role in promotion of adaptive skills

• Guilt vs. shame – when is it most adaptive? 

• “Vigorous unfolding” Ages 3-6

• Initiative VS Guilt

  • Initiative: Eagerness to try new tasks and join others, play permits trying new skills, act out highly visible occupations

  • Guilt: overly strict superego (conscience) causing too much guilt, related to excessive threat, criticism, and punishment from parents

• Helps children develop responsibilities and feel guilt when overstepping boundaries

• Emotional understanding and attachment security 

• Emotional understanding enhanced when parents label and explain emotions

• Attachment security provides open parent-child communication about feelings, which allow navigation of their own emotions 

• Effortful control 

• A component of self-regulation influenced by language, self-talk, and repairing relationships

• Empathy-based guilt 

• Effective in influencing children without using correction 

• Preschoolers anticipate feeling guilty when considering that they would be defying their parent

  • More common in early childhood

• Powerful for guiding children into moral behaviors

• Gender development (gender identity, gender typing, gender constancy) 

• Influenced by a combination of environmental and cognition

  • Gender Schema theory

• Children pick up gender stereotype preferences and behaviors from others 

  • Parents and peers

• Gender identity linked with decision making and personal behavior or the behavior of others

  • Categorizations of the world

• Both social learning and cognitive development play a role in shaping gender roles and preferences 

• Different types of play

• Nonsocial activity: unoccupied, onlooker behavior, and solitary play 

• Parallel play: Playing with other children nearby with similar toys, but not necessarily interacting with them

• Associative play: engaging in separate activities, but exchanging toys and comments

• Cooperative play: common goal or make believe play