Study Unit 5 Flashcards
Early childhood: General physical development
Height and weight
- 80% increase in height during the first 30 months and 300% increase in weight
- 2kg per year, and 5-8cm per year
Physical proportions
- lose their ‘baby fat’ and increase in muscle and bone growth
Teeth
- by the end of preschool they start to lose their primary teeth
Brain development
- at age three the brain has reached 75% of its adult weight
- at age five; 90%
- development in frontal lobes (planning and organising)
- development of the left cerebral hemisphere (language development)
- high neuroplasticity (ability to learn quickly)
- plasticity also includes the ability of one area of the brain to take over the function of another that has been damaged
Perceptual development
- 4-6 years: figure-ground perception improves (ability to distinguish between the object on which attention is focused and the rest of the perceptual field)
- distinguish between different letters at 6 years
- label colours correctly at the age of 4
- tend to be farsighted
- age 2: auditory acuity (can hear soft sounds as well as adults)
Motor development
Gross motor development
- age 3: running and jumping
- age 4: riding a tricycle, and throw and catch a ball
- age 5: ride a bicycle and do gymnastics (stronger muscles, better physical coordination, and improved balance)
Fine motor skills:
- age 3: still struggle to tie shoelaces and fasten buttons
- age 4: can draw lines, circles and pictures
- age 5: cut with scissors, eat with a knife and fork and begin writing. Iimproved coordination of the small muscles and dexterity enables them to be able to play a musical instrument
Bilateral coordination:
- fixed hand preference at age 5
Influence of heredity and hormones
- lack of GH: slow growth and short stature, no effect on brain and cognitive development
- TSH and Thyroxine: needed for the normal development in nerve cells of the brain and for GH to have its full effect on the body
- thyroxine deficiency in infants: mental impairment
Influence of nutrition
- Malnourishment refers to deficiencies, excesses, or imbalances in a person’s intake of nutrients, with the result that the diet causes health problems and even death
- Undernutrition is associated directly or indirectly with 50% of child deaths
- Obesity is a body weight of at least 20% above normal
Influence of emotional well-being
- Psychosocial or deprivation dwarfism: children show delayed physical growth because of stress and emotional deprivation
- unstable family environment leads to delayed physical growth:
1. Affects pituitary gland (GH)
2. Affects digestion (less resistance to illness)
3. Affects the immune system
Cognitive development during early childhood: Piaget’s theory
The preoperational stage
- age 2-7
- refers to illogical thinking, which implies that children are not yet ready to engage in logical mental operations
- divided into two substages
1. Symbolic or preconceptual period (2-4 years): use of symbols and mental representations
2. Intuitive period (4-7 years): primitive reasoning and lots of questions
Advances of preoperational thought
- skills such as deferred imitation, symbolic play and spoken language
- these skills start to develop near the end of the sensorimotor stage, and intensify in the preoperational stage
- they can reflect on absent objects and people, recall the past, and imagine future events
- development of spoken language is very important
- during the sensorimotor stage, children need to act to think
- in the preoperational stage, the learning of language reverses this
Immature aspects of preoperational thought
Perceptual-bound thinking
- preschoolers solve problems based on what stands out vividly and perceptually
- if you cut a piece of meat into smaller pieces, you have more meat
Perceptual concentration
- can only perceive and thus reason about one dimension of a situation at a time
- unable to explore all aspects of a stimulus
- centre their attention on what to them seems to be more salient
- do not grasp the concept of conservation
- the short-tall glass problem
Irreversibility
- inability to reverse an operation
- do not understand that if 5 + 3 = 8; then 8 - 3 = 5
Egocentrism
- view world from one perspective
- believe that others think, feel and perceive in the same way that they do
- child sits in room drawing and asks the mother, in the kitchen, if she likes the drawing
- think that everyone knows what they know
- natural events serve their own needs
Animism
- believe inanimate objects have feelings
Transductive reasoning
- reason from event to event rather than in a more logical fashion
- link two separate events in a cause-and-effect fashion, whether it is logical or not
- Why does it rain? So that we can use the umbrella
Early childhood: Language development
Mean Length of Utterance (MLU)
- the average number of morphemes in a set of utterances
Vocabulary
- fast mapping: learning new words after hearing it once or twice
- draw on their knowledge about the rules of forming words, similar words, the immediate context, and the subject under discussion
- nouns seem to be easier to fast map than verbs
- extended mapping: refinement in the understanding of words as exposure continues
- underextensions: ‘juice’ only refers to the favourite juice
- overextension: everything with fur and four legs is a dog
Phonology and morphology
- Phonology refers to the speech sounds of language
- at 3 years old can produce all the consonant sounds and most of the vowel sounds
- Morphology refers to the smallest language unit that has meaning in order to structure a word
- adding -s to a plural or -ed to the past tense, -ing to the continuous tense. They use prepositions and articles
- overgeneralisation proves the development of morphological rules within children (foots instead of feet)
Grammar and syntax
- grammar refers to the rules of language, and syntax refers to combining words in meaningful phrases and sentences according to grammatical rules
- by age 3 they begin to use plurals, possessives, and the past tense
- 4-5 years: increase of MLU, use different sentence types such as negatives, questions, imperatives, and compound sentences
- 5-7 years: can use longer sentences characterised by conjunctions, prepositions, articles, and multiple clauses. Rarely use passive voice or conditional sentences. Tend to overgeneralise
Early childhood: Cognitive development and the media
displaced time view: argues that television viewing harms cognitive development because it takes away time from other activities that are more beneficial, such as reading or pretend play
passivity view: holds that, because it takes little effort to watch television, habitual inactivity may result
the shallow information processing view: the rapid and short segments typical of many television programmes over time result in shorter attention spans and difficulty in sustaining focus
the visual/iconic view: argues that television viewing selectivity enhances visual information processing at the possible expense of verbal processing, which can lead to lowered ability to imagine or infer information that is not explicitly present
- what children watch is more important than how much
- well designed, age appropriate educational programmes enhance preschoolers’ social, vocabulary, school readiness, literacy and numeracy skills
- video games can improve spatial skills
Early childhood: Personality development
Theories on personality development
Freud:
- phallic stage
- foundation for personality is laid when the child has worked through their Oedipus complex
- identity with opposite sex parent
Erikson:
- Initiative vs Guilt
- explore new environment, joining activities with peers and problem solving
- when they are constantly discouraged or punished, they develop guilt feelings
Emotional expression involving basic emotions
Happiness:
- happiness positively affects the creativity, cognitive development and emotional maturity of children
- correlation between unhappiness and a variety of emotional, cognitive, learning and behavioural problems that can continue into adulthood
Fear:
- younger children experience fear more
- exposure to violent media may increase fear
- they should be encouraged to talk about their fears
- they should see other people handling the object or subject that they fear, without fear
- exposure to fear
- learning coping skills
Anxiety:
- a constant feeling of worry about a perceived and possible threat
- when the worry begins to interfere with their psychological wellbeing, it’s anxiety
- hypersensitivity, shyness, crying easily, sleep difficulties
- common cause: parental overprotection and high behavioural inhibition
- nightmares peak at 10
Anger:
- a strong emotional reaction due to a threat or frustration
- family dysfunction, parental style, trauma
- children learn to control anger through socialisation
- feelings need to be acknowledged
Emotional expression involving others
- empathy
- empathy encourages tolerance and acceptance of others
- development of empathy is related to the child developing self-awareness, language and cognitive skills
- parenting styles play an important role in empathy
Emotional regulation
- children learn avoidance strategies, i.e avoiding situations that lead to negative emotions
- as they grow older they learn language strategies (self soothing words) and cognitive strategies (trying not to think about a negative emotion)
- masking: pretending to feel an emotion you don’t
- masking is related to display rules: cultural guidelines for when, how, and to what degree emotions may be displayed
- children with poor emotional regulation have problems adjusting and interacting with others
- parents also play an important role (emotion-coaching approach vs emotion-dismissing approach)
Early childhood: The self-concept
- development of the self-concept begins with the development of self awareness during the first year of life
- establish categorical self: they can describe themselves in terms of their name, gender, age, skills and possessions, where they live and who their friends are
- they have some form of awareness of their internal self: psychological aspects such as emotions and attitudes
- young children’s self concepts is closely related to their possession, leading to the development of self-definition (learning to define boundaries between themselves and others)
Early Childhood: Self esteem
- refers to the personal evaluation of their characteristics
- the degree to which individuals feel that they receive love, acceptance, support, and encouragement from others
- the degree to which a person accepts the various aspects of the self, especially when comparing oneself to others
- a healthy self esteem provides an emotional buffer to setbacks and enable children to develop resilience towards failure
- low self esteem leads to anxiety
Early childhood: Gender role development
- Gender identity refers to children’s knowledge of themselves as male or female
- at the age of 2.5 years a child can identify themselves as male or female
- Gender constancy develops between ages 5-7
- They also become aware of gender stereotypes as soon as they discover their gender identity
- Gender-typed behaviour: children display typical behaviour of their gender at an early age, as well as a preference for playmates their age
Early childhood: Theories of gender-role development
Biological theory
- psychological and behavioural differences between male and females are due to biological differences that begin at conception
- the difference in chromosomes leads to hormonal differences
- hormonal differences explain the psychological differences
- boys’ brains is 15% larger with more grey matter, while girls have more white matter
Psychoanalytic theory of Freud
- gender roles develop in the phallic stage
- identification with the parent of the same sex, take on their characteristics
- occurs on unconscious level
- if the parents are poor role models, the children won’t acquire the correct gender roles, but potentially the opposite
Social learning theory
- gender roles are learnt through differential reinforcement, and observation and modelling.
Differential reinforcement: children are rewarded for gender-appropriate behavior, and punished for inappropriate behavior. Fathers are more inclined to reward gender-appropriate behavior than the mothers.
Observation and modelling: children see how people of the same gender act, and begin to imitate these individuals.
Cognitive developmental theory
- as soon as a child acquires a concept of their gender, they organize their world based on their gender
- “I am a girl, and therefore I will do everything in my power to find out how to behave like a girl”
- two assumptions: children need to firstly understand the concept of gender to be influenced by social factors, and they are actively involved in their own socialisation
- Gender identity leads to Gender stability leads to Gender constancy
Gender schema theory
- based on the principle of self-socialisation
- at the age of 2-3, when children develop gender identity they begin to organize their social world, where they develop two gender schemas
- a gender schema is a cognitive structure that organises the social world into male and female
- firstly they develop a same gender schema, and thereafter an opposite gender schema
- secondly they develop an own-gender schema
Early childhood development: Racial and Ethnic Identity
- the formation of a racial self-concept and ethnic identity also develops along with children’s development of the self, self-identity and gender-identity
-develops from ages 5-8
Five components
Ethnic knowledge knowledge of distinguishable characteristics of their ethnicity such as behaviors, physical traits, values, customs and language
Ethnic self-identification is children’s categorization of themselves as members of a certain ethnic group
Ethnic constancy involve children’s understanding that the distinguishable characteristics of an ethnic group remains constant over time
Ethnic role behaviors involve children’s engagement in the behaviors associated with their ethnic group
Ethnic feelings and preferences refer to children’s feelings about belonging to a certain ethnic group and its members
Early childhood development: Parenting styles
-work of Diana Baumrind
Dimensions of parenting
1. Warmth and nurturing
2. Consistent control
3. Expectations
4. Communication
Parenting styles:
Authoritative:
- meet the standards of all four dimensions
- high acceptance and involvement
- regarded as the most successful approach
Authoritarian:
- high in control and expectations
- low in nurturing and acceptance
- they shout, command and criticize to gain control
- children are anxious, unhappy with high rates of anger
Permissive
- high on nurture and warmth
- low on expectations, control and communication
- children are impulsive, rebellious and demanding
Uninvolved
- parent do not meet the expectations of any of the dimensions
- leads to disruption in all areas of development
Early childhood: Types of play
Functional play
- repetitive activities such as skipping and jumping
Constructive play
- children manipulating toys to make something such as a tower from blocks
Social pretend
- they use their imagination to change the functions of objects (a stick becomes a horse), create imaginary situations (riding a magic carpet) and enact pretend roles (playing Mommy or Daddy)
Games-with-rules
- hide and seek, board games, hopscotch
Sequence of children’s play:
Solitary play to parallel play to cooperative play
Early childhood: Aggressive behaviour
- emerges at 2 years
Two types of aggression
- Instrumental aggression (proactive): used as a means to an end. Not deliberately hostile
- Hostile aggression (reactive): intended to hurt others deliberately
Three forms of aggression
- Physical aggression: hurts others through bodily injury
- Verbal aggression: harms through threats of physical injury, name calling or hostile teasing
- Relational aggression: the goal is to inflict damage to another person’s relationships, social standings or relationships. Shows growth in cognitive and social understanding
Causes for aggression:
- biological theories
- instinct theories
- the frustration-aggression hypothesis
- cognitive factors
- social factors
The effect of exposure to aggression through the media
- the desensitisation effect
- the aggressor effect (aggressive thoughts and feelings)
- the victim effect (increases hostile perception of the world, increases fear)
- the bystander effect (decreases empathy and prosocial behaviour)
- the appetite effect ( increased appetite for viewing violent entertainment)
Early childhood: Prosocial behaviour
- cooperation and altruism (sharing)
- empathy motivates altruistic behaviour
- sympathy is more emotionally laden
- develop at ages 2-3
