Toddler Development - Lecture Four Flashcards
(25 cards)
What dual focus do toddlers have in their development?
Maintaining attachment and exploring themselves and the world.
What are transitional objects and what purpose do they serve?
Transitional objects symbolize the attachment relationship and help toddlers cope with separations or stressful situations by representing the primary caregiver.
What functions does attachment serve during the toddler period?
If toddlers have a secure base, they explore their world but return to the secure base for comfort when distressed, helping them restore security.
How do parents help toddlers construct an understanding of the world?
By explaining events, encouraging and scaffolding language and communication (fast-mapping), supporting dyadic regulation of affect and impulse, and promoting internalization of rules.
What social development tasks are major for toddlers?
Sharing and reciprocity, controlling impulses for social reasons, understanding status and roles.
What cognitive developments occur in toddlers?
Rapid motor and language development, interest in their bodies and physical/social world, noticing how things work, and beginning to understand cause and effect.
How does language develop and function during toddlerhood?
There is a surge in cortical areas related to language; rapid development between ages two and three; language organizes experience, allows sharing inner life, constructs representations, and helps understand emotions.
How does language contribute to self-regulation in toddlers?
Toddlers begin substituting words for actions, allowing them to express wants and begin impulse control.
What are the stages of play in toddlers?
Starts with sensorimotor play (exploring cause and effect), moves to representative play, including solitary, parallel, social, and imaginative play.
How does play serve as a coping strategy?
It allows toddlers to distance themselves while mastering stressful situations through symbolic communication and representation of experience.
What are common sources of anxiety in toddlers?
Difficulty understanding or communicating, inability to do what they imagine, fear of unfamiliar things, imaginary fears, and separation or threat of separation from caregivers.
What is the “terrible twos” phase?
A stage marked by toddlers’ drive for autonomous self-regulation, often leading to negative behavior.
What causes aggression in toddlers?
Disagreements about safety, desire to have it all, opposition, and negativism linked to wanting their way.
What strategies do toddlers use for self-regulation and coping?
Mutual regulation, self-stimulation for tension relief, play, language, internalized standards, effortful control, and familiarity.
What difficulties affect toddler self-regulation?
Temperamental factors, intrinsic regulatory disorders, sensory integration disorders, and anxiety-producing experiences.
When does moral development start in toddlers, and how is feedback best given?
Between 18-26 months; calm feedback is effective because the child is less distressed and can think about the lesson within a reassuring context of parental love.
What behaviors are included in prosocial behavior?
Comfort, sympathy, helping, sharing, cooperation, rescue, protection, and defense.
What factors support toddlers’ development of empathy and prosocial behavior?
Secure attachment and parents modeling empathic perspective taking.
What does Mahler’s Separation-Individuation Theory say about toddler awareness?
Up to 16-18 months, infants lack full awareness of separateness; around this age, they become more anxious about attachment and separation due to cognitive advances.
How do toddlers typically react to separation fears?
Increased distress, clinginess, controlling behavior, negative reactions like depression or anger toward the mother.
What steps help toddlers master separation fears?
Parents maintaining secure base, tolerating demanding behavior, welcoming closeness needs, leading to gradual understanding of autonomous connection.
What is theory of mind in toddlers?
Awareness that others have their own thoughts and intentions, which may be similar or different from their own.
What are signs of developing theory of mind?
Joint attention, reacting to others’ emotions, reading cues, imitative behavior.
What is self-consciousness in toddlers?
Awareness of how others see them, experiencing pride, embarrassment, shame, and pleasure based on feedback.
