PPT 1- Infants, Children, and Adolescents
Physical Development in Infancy and Toddlerhood
Body Growth:
- Gain 50% in height from birth to age 1; 75% by age 2
- Grow in spurts
- Gain “baby fat” until about 9 months then get slimmer
- Girls slightly shorter and lighter than boys, some ethnic differences
Growth Trends:
Cephalocaudal
- Head to tail
- Lower part of body grows later
than the head
Proximodistal
- Near to far
- Extremities grow later than
head, chest, and trunk
Brain Development:
- Human brain has 100 to 200 billion neurons that store/transmit
information
- At birth, brain closest to adult size than any other physical structure
- Neurons send messages by releasing chemicals called neurotransmitters
Lateralization and Plasticity of the Cerebral Cortex:
Specialization of the left and right hemispheres of the brain is called
lateralization
- Left hemisphere: best at processing information in a sequential, analytic
way
- Right hemisphere: best at processing information in a holistic, integrative
manner
Brain Plasticity Insights:
- With injuries to the cerebral cortex occuring before birth or in the first 6
months, language delays persisted to about 3 ½ years of age
- By age 5, the children caught up in grammatical and vocabulary skills;
the undamaged area of the brain-either hemisphere-had taken over the
language function
- Spatial skills showed more impairment after a brain injury, likely because
spatial processing is more lateralized at birth
- Brain plasticity can occur later in adulthood (e.g stroke victims)
Sensitive Periods in Brain Development:
- Early, extreme sensory deprivation results in permanent brain damage and
loss of function
- Babies born with cataracts in both eyes who have corrective surgery
within 4 to 6 months show rapid improvement in vision
- The longer the surgery is postponed, the less complete the recovery of
visual skills
Brain Development in Orphanage Children:
- Children adopted from Romanian orphanages before age 6 mots showed
dramatic cognitive and physical hains
- Those adopted after 5 months showed serious intellectual deficits
- The chronic stress of early deprived orphanage rearing disrupts the
brain’s ability to manage stress with long- term consequences
Appropriate Stimulation:
Experience expectant growth
- Ordinary experiences “expected” by brain to grow normally
- Occurs early and naturally
Experience-dependent growth
- Specific experience, varies widely across cultures
- Rushing early learning can overwhelm young brains
Influence on early growth
- Heredity nutrition
- Breast v bottle feeding
Emotional well being
- Problems can cause
- Failure to thrive
Benefits of Breastfeeding
- Correct fat protein balance
- Nutritionally complete
- Promote healthy growth patterns
- Disease protection
- Better jaw and tooth development
- Ensures digestibility
- Easier transition to solid food
Malnutrition
Types
- Marasmus
- Kwashiorkor
- Iron deficiency anemia
- Food insecurity
Consequences
- Physical symptoms
- Growth and weight problems
- Poor motor development
- Learning attention problems
- Passivity irritability anxiety
Emotional well being
Affection is as vital as food for healthy physical growth
Growth faltering applies to infants whose weight height and head circumference
are substantially below age related growth norms
- Infant are withdrawn and apathetic
- Often a result of disturbed parent child relationship disturbance may be at
fault
- Unhappy marriage or parental psychological disturbance may be at fault
- May cause lasting cognitive and emotional difficulties
Operant conditioning terms
Reinforcer:
- Increases probability of behavior occurring again
- Presenting desirable stimulus
- Removing unpleasant stimulus
Punishment:
- Reduces probabilities of behavior
- Occurring again
- Presenting unpleasant stimulus
- Removing desirable stimulus
Imitation
- Imitation is powerful method of learning
- It is more difficult to induce in babies 2 to 3 months old than right after
birth
- Andrew meltzoff newborns imitate as much as older children and adults
- Mirror neurons enable us to observe another person's behavior while
simulation that behavior in our own brain
- Meitoffs theory of newborn imitation as a voluntary capacity is
controversial
The sequence of motor development
Gross motor development
- Crawling standing walking
Fine motor development
- Reaching and grasping
Motor skills as Dynamic Systems:
Increasingly complex
- Systems of action with each skills
Four factors in each new skills
1. CNS development
2. Body;s Movement capacity
3. Child’s goals
4. Environmental Supports
Cultural variations in Motor Development:
Home environments and infant rearing practices affect motor development
- Some cultures discourage rapid motor progress
- Kipsigis of Kenya and the west indians of jamaica teach early motor
skills
- Western parents consider crawling and”tummy time” essential, but not all
cultures do
Bowel and Bladder control:
Toilet training is best delayed until the months following the second birthday
effective training techniques include:
- establishing regular toileting routines
- Using gentle encouragement
- Praising children for their effort
Developments in Hearing:
4-7 months
sense of musical phrasing
6-8 months
“Screen out” sounds from non-native
languages
7-9 months
Decide the speech stream into
word-like units
10 months
Can detect words that start with weak
syllables
Improvements in vision:
Brain development helps infants reach adult levels of vision skills
2-4 months:
- Focus and colour vision
6 months:
- Acurity, scanning, and tracking
6-7 months:
- Depth perception
Steps in Depth Perception:
Birth-1 month
Sensitivity to motion cues
2-3 months
Sensitivity to binocular cues
6-7 months
Sensitivity to pictorial cues
Wariness of heights
Steps in Pattern perception:
3 weeks
Poor contrast sensitivity
Prefer large simple patterns
2 months
Can detect fine-grained detail
Prefer complex patterns
4 months
Can detect patterns even if boundaries
are not really present
12 months
Can detect objects if two-thirds of
drawing is missing
PPT 2 -Infants, Children and Adolescents
Brain development:
- Human brain has 100 to 200 billions neurons that store/transmit
information
- At birth, brains closet to adult size than any other physical structure
- Neurons send messages by releasing chemicals called neurotransmitters
The Brain and Nervous System:
- Brian growth, synapse formation, and myelination continue in early
childhood, although at a pace slower than infancy
- Lateralization:
- The corpus callosum (connects the right and left hemispheres)
grows and matures most during this time
- Genes provide the mechanism for lateralization but experience
shapes the pace
- Language is primarily centred in the left brain
- Young children whose language skills are the most advanced also
show the strongest degree of ;lateralization, but is it cause or
effect?
- Myelination of the reticular formation, the brain structure that
regulates attention and concentration, is another important
milestone of early childhood brain development
- Hippocampus: a brain structure that is essential for the formation of
memories
- Maturation of the hippocampus probably accounts for
improvements in memory function across the preschool years
- Handedness: a strong preference for using one hand or the other
that develops between 2 to 6 years of age. Right handedness is a
dominant gene
Cognitive Changes:
- The changes in thinking that happen during the early childhood years are
indeed staggering
- At the beginning of the period, children are just beginning to learn how to
accomplish goals, but by the end, they are manipulating symbols and can
make accurate judgements about others’ thoughts, feelings, and
behaviours
Piaget’s preoperational stage:
- Preoperational stage: children become proficient in the use of symbols in
thinking and communicating but still have difficulty thinking logically
- egocentrism: the young child’s belief that everyone sees and
experiences the world the way she does
- Centration: the child thinks of the world in terms of one variable at
a time
- Conservation: the understanding that matter can change in
appearance without changing in quantity
Challenges to Piaget’s view:
- Studies of conservation have generally confirmed Piaget’s observations,
but preschoolers are a great deal more cognitively sophisticated than
piaget thought
- Egocentrism and Perspective Taking
- Flavell’s stage 1 (2-3 years old) the child knows that others
experience things differently
- Flavell’s stage 2 94-5 years old) the child develops rules to figure
out what the other person experiences
- Children use emotion to elicit a response from others
- Appearance and reality
- 4-5 year olds understand that the same object can represent
different things
- False belief principle: an understanding that enables a child to look
at a situation from another person’s point of view and determine
what kind of information will cause that person to have false belief
Theories of Mind:
- Understanding thoughts, desires & beliefs
- 10 months
- Rudimentary beginnings
- Age 3
- Understand some aspects of the link between people’s
thinking, feelings, and behaviour
- Age 4
- Basic principle that each person’s actions are based on her or
his representation reality
Lateralization and plasticity of the cerebral cortex:
- Specialization of the left and right hemispheres of the brain is called
lateralization
- Left hemisphere: best art processing information in a sequential,
analytical way
- Right hemisphere: best at processing information in a holistic,
integrative manner
- In a highly plastic cerebral cortex, many areas are not yet committed to
one function; consequently, the cortex has a high capacity for learning
Brain plasticity Insights:
- With injuries to the cerebral cortex occuring before birth or in the first 6
months, language delays persisted to about 3 ½ years of age
- By age 5, the children caught up in grammatical and vocabulary skills;
the undamaged area of the brain-either hemisphere-had taken over the
language function
- Spatial skills showed more impairment after a brain injury, likely because
spatial processing is more lateralized at birth
- Brain plasticity can occur later in adulthood 9e.g., in stroke victims)
Sensitive periods in brain development:
- Early, extreme sensory deprivation results in permanent brain damage and
loss of function
- Babies born with cataracts in both eyes who have corrective surgery
within 4 to 6 months show rapid improvement in vision
- The longer the surgery is postponed, the less complete the recovery of
visual skills
Alternative theories of Early Childhood Thinking:
- Vygotsky’s socio-cultural theory:
- Egocentric speech Stage
- Uses language as a guide to solve problems
- Becomes internalised by 6-7
- Ingrowth stage
- Logical thinking results from internalisation of speech
acquired from children and adults in a social world
Changes In Language
- Children enter the early childhood period producing only a limited
number of words and simple sentences but leave it as accomplished,
fluent speakers of at least one language
Fast mapping:
- Vocabulary grows rapidly in this timeframe:
- Age 1 year= a dozen words
- Age 2 ½ = 600 words
- Age 5 or 6 = 15,000 words
- Fast mapping is the ability to categorically link new words to real-world
referents
- The child rapidly forms a hypothesis about a new word’s meaning, then
uses the words often, getting feedback to help them judge the accuracy of
their hypothesis
The grammar explosion:
Inflections
- Additions that change meaning
- Earliest infection in English is the addition of -ing: “where going?”
Questions and Negatives
- A set of rules is used that doesn’t match adult speech
Overregulation (overregularization)
- Using rules when they don’t apply
Complex sentences
Using conjunctions to combine two ideas or using embedded clauses
Phonological awareness:
- Children’s understanding of the sound patterns of the language they are
acquiring
- Knowledge of the language’s system for representing sounds with letters
- Can be learned in school through instruction
- The greater a child’s phonological awareness, the faster he/she leans to
read
- Primarily develops through word play
- Nursery rhymes
- Games involving repetitive words
- Invented spelling: a strategy young children with good phonological
awareness skills use when they write
Language and numeracy:
- Canadian author malcolm Gladwell haws put forth the notion that
language plays a role in our ability to master numbers
- Children who speak chinese are able to remember a larger quantity of
numbers than those who speak english because the length of the words
which represent numbers are shorter in chiens; also, there are fewer
chinese number words for the same numerals in English
- Numeracy Is the ability to use numbers
- Early parental/caregiver influences are important
- Development of numeracy abilities in preschoolers helps to
facilitate the learning of more learning of more advanced
mathematical concepts in school
Brain development in orphanage children:
- Children adopted from Romanian orphanages before age 6 months
showed dramatic cognitive and physical gains
- Those adopted after 6 months showed serious intellectual deficits
- The chronic stress of early, deprived orphanage rearing disrupts the
brain’s ability to manage stress, with long-term consequences
Appropriate Stimulation:
Experience-expectant growth
- Ordinary experiences “expected” by the brain to grow normally
- Occurs early and naturally
Experience-dependent growth
- Specific xperience, varies widely across cultures
- Rushing early learning can overwhelm young brains
***Ways to prompts language and literacy development:
- Provide a variety of developmentally appropriate materials to promote
thinking, talking, drawing, reading, and writing
- Role model an interest in reading, writing, and drawing
- Provide opportunities to read to toddlers individually and in small groups
- Respect cultural, linguistic and socioeconomic differences among young
children and their families
- Understand how toddlers process information and respond appropriately
- Writing and drawing
- Model good listening skills
- Use engaging oral language with children
*development:
- A small motor development achievement for an average 2 year old may
be to line up objects in sequence
- 2 year old may build things with the following:blocks, crayons, opencils,
sand, and playdoh
- At age 3, the visual acuity for the average child is 20/30
- Hearing impairments interfere with the child’s ability to understand
speech
sounds and can delay speech and language development
- Constructive play-is the use of objects to build or construct things
- By age 2 ½ the average child has a vocabulary of about 600 words
- A sentence which is a 23 month old child might say is “it’s a flower”
- By age 2, the average 2 yer old child can kick a large ball
Egocentrism:
- The young child’s belief that everyone sees the experiences the world in
the same way that he/she does
First Pretend Play:
- The simple use of an object to represent something else
- (ex. Pretending to drink from a toy cup)
A toddler’s early understanding of self are based on his/her interactive
experiences with:
a. Important others
b. Primary caregivers
c. Parents
Toddlers have been classed as “premoral” 9unaware of moral rules and
values). As such toddlers are guided by:
a. External rules
b. Expectations of rewards
c. avoidance of punishment
Types of Play:
- Types of play:
- Solitary play
- Parallel play
- Cooperative Play
- Associative Play
*Parallel Play:
- Toddlers often engage in Parallel play**
- Parallel play was introduced by Mildred parten in 1932
- 2 ½ yrs to 3 years
- Play alongside others but will not play together with them
*Solitary Play:
- Solitary play:
- 0-2 years
- This first stage is called solitary play because during this stage
children play alone
- Eg. they rattle, shake and bang things with both hands and there is
limited interaction with other children
*Cooperative play:
- Cooperative play
- 6 years +
- Plates together with shared aims of play with others. Play may be
quite difficult and he’s supportive of other children in his play. As
he reaches primary school age, play is normally in single sex
groups
*Associate Play:
- Associate play: 3-4 years
- A group of children participate in similar or identical activities without
formal organization, group direction, group interaction, or a definite goal.
The children may borrow or lend toys or pieces of play equipment and
they may imitate others in the group, but each child acts independently, as
on a playground or among a group riding tricycles for bicycles
PPT 4 - Emotional and social development in infancy and toddlerhood
Psychodynamic stages:
Age
Erikosn’s Stage
First Year
Basic trust
Versus
mistrust
Second year
Autonomy
Versus
Shame and Doubt
Emotional development:
Emotions play powerful roles in social relationships, exploration of
environment and discovery of self
- Energize development
- Become more varied, complex with age
In children, facial expressions provide best clues to emotions
Interpreting Emotions:
- Assuming a close correspondence between a pattern of behaviour and an
emotional state can lead to error
- Emotional expressions are flexibly organized and vary with the child’s
developing capacities, goal, and context
- Cues can be vocal, facial, gestural and situational
First Appearance of Basic Emotions:
Happiness
- Smile- from birth
- Social smile- 6 to 10 weeks
- laugh - 3 to 4 months
Anger
- General distress- from birth
- Anger- 4 to 6 months
Sadness
- Distress to “still face”- 2 to 7
months
Fear
- First fears- 6 to 12 months
- Stranger anxiety- 8 to 12
months
Understanding emotions of others:
- Emotional contagion
- Early infancy
- Recognize others’ facial expressions
- From 5 months
- Social referencing
Self-conscious emotions:
- Shame
- Embarrassment
- Guilt
- Envy
- Pride
Emerge middle of second year
Need adult instruction about when to feel them
Emotional Self-regulation
Effortful control improves gradually, with the development of the cerebral
cortex and the assistance of caregivers
- Young infants rely on caregivers to soothe them
- Self-regulation grows over the first year, with brain development
- In the second year, growth in representation and language leads to new
ways of regulating emotions
Caregivers contribute to child’ self regulation style
Structure of temperament:
- Easy = 40%
- Difficult = 10%
- Slow to warm up = 15%
- Unclassified = 35%
Biological development of shyness and sociability:
Inhibited, Shy
- React negatively withdraw
from new stimuli
- High heart rates, stress
hormones and stress
symptoms
- Higher right hemisphere
frontal cortex activity
Uninhibited, sociable
- React positively approach
new stimuli
- Low heart rate, stress
hormones and stress
symptoms
- Higher left hemisphere
frontal cortex activity
Stability of temperament:
Temperament develops with age
- Long-term prediction best achieved after age 3
- Development of prefrontal cortex impulse suppression) rapid in early
preschool years
- Overall, extreme changes are unlikely
Many factors influence temperament, including the biological systems on which
temperament is based, effortful control, and parenting experiencing
Genetics and Environment in temperament:
Genetic influences
- Responsible for about half of
individual differences
Environmental influences
- Cultural caregiving styles
- Boys and girls treated
differently
- Parents emphasize sibling
differences
Goodness-of-fit
- Combines genetics and
environment
Temperament and child rearing:
Effective parenting also depends on life conditions
- Good parental mental health
- Martial happiness
- Favourable economic conditions
Cultural values also affect fit between parenting and child temperament
Overall, babies possess unique dispositions that parents must accept
Bowlby’s Ethological Theory of Attachment:
1. Preattachment
2. Attach,ent in the making
3. Clear-cut attachment
a. Separation anxiety
4. Formation of a reciprocal relationship
Measuring the security of Attachment:
Secure attachment
- Use the parents as secure base
- Activity seek contact with parental when he or she returns
Avoidant Attachment
- Seem unresponsive to the parent
- Show to greet the parent upon reunion
Resistant attachment
- Seek closeness to the parent
- Distressed and angry when parent returns
disorganized/disoriented Attachment
- Pattern reflects what the greatest insecurity
- At reunion, often show confused, contradictory behaviours
Measuring the security of attachment”
- Secure = 60
- Avoidant = 15%
- Resistant = 10%
- disorganized/disoriented = 15%
Multiple attachments:
- Fathers
- Grandparents
- Siblings
- Professional caregivers
Powerful role of Parental warmth in development:
- Fathers sensitive caregiving and interactional synchrony with infants, like
mothers predict attachment security
- Fathers often build attachments through play
- Young fathers involvement with their children continues to increase each
year
Grandparent primary caregivers:
2-4 million children live in skipped-generation families
- Families with grandparents as primary caregivers continue to increase
- Many grandparents take over during times of stress
Attachment and Later development:
A Secure attachment often (but not always) related to positive outcomes in
- Preschool
- Middle childhood
Continuity of caregiving may link infant attachment and later development
Effects of early attachment security are conditional and dependent upon quality
of future relationships
self-Awareness:
Beginnings:
- At birth, infants have a sense of self as a distinct agent, separate from the
surrounding worlds
- Self-awareness is limited
Self-recognition:
-sense of self as object of knowledge and evaluation
Aware of qualities that make self unique at 20 months
Self-Awareness:
- At the end of the first year, learn that their own goals frequently conflict
with those of others
- Empathy emerges and improves easily though early childhood
- Cultural variations influence emergence of self-awareness behaviours
Self-control:
- Effortful control
- Capable of compliance between 12 and 18 months
- Toddlers assert autonomy by sometimes not complying
- Delay of gratification shows self-control
- Warm, sensitive caregiving increases compliance
Helping toddlers develop compliance and self-control:
- Respond with sensitivity and support
- Give advance notice of change
- Offer many prompts and reminders
- Reinforce self-0controlled behaviour
- Encourage selective/sustained attention
- Supported language development
- Increase rules gradually
**toddler fears:
Some toddlers fears include:
- Speratarion fears
- Stranger fears
- Fear of dark, bathtub, animals, monsters, ghosts, lightening and thunder