Ch 10

• Childhood is a beautiful phase of life associated with play, fantasy, and innocence
• Childhood is crucial for growth and development throughout the lifespan
• Childhood can be classified into four sub-stages: Infancy, Early childhood, Middle childhood, and Adolescence
• Infancy provides the foundation for development, including physical, cognitive, language, and socio-emotional aspects
• Physical growth is rapid in infancy and slower in childhood
• Motor skills develop as the child's body size, height, and weight increase
• Gross motor skills involve large muscle groups for activities like crawling, standing, and walking
• Fine motor skills involve smaller muscle movements for activities like grasping and pinching
• In early childhood (2-6 years), children refine locomotion skills and improve body balance
• Fine motor skills development milestones include dressing, drawing, and using utensils
• In middle childhood (6-11 years), physical growth is gradual with changes in height, weight, and muscular strength
• Children achieve greater control over large and small muscle groups in middle childhood
• Cognitive development in childhood includes improvement in attention, perception, language, thinking, memory, and reasoning
• Piaget's cognitive developmental theory describes four stages: Sensori-motor, Pre-operational, Concrete operational, and Formal operational
• During early childhood (2-6 years), children become proficient in using symbols like words and images to represent objects and events
• Children in early childhood have better language understanding and capacity for sustained attention
• In the Pre-operational stage of early childhood, children progress through the Symbolic Function and Intuitive Thought sub-stages
• Children in the Symbolic Function sub-stage can create mental images of objects and engage in role-playing
• Piaget's Preoperational cognitive development stage:

  • Egocentrism: inability to see the world from someone else's point of view
  • Intuitive Thought sub-stage (ages 4-7): children learn by asking questions like "Why?" and "How come?"
  • Children in this sub-stage show "Centration," focusing on one characteristic of an object for decisions or judgments
• Language development in early childhood:

  • 'Language explosion' between 3 and 6 years
  • At age 3, spoken vocabularies consist of roughly 900 words
  • By age 6, spoken vocabularies expand dramatically to 8,000-14,000 words
  • Children start to learn and understand grammar rules and form more complex sentences
• Cognitive Development in Middle Childhood:

  • Children are curious and keen to explore the environment
  • Memory and conceptual knowledge improve, facilitating logical thinking beyond the immediate situation
  • Characteristics of the Concrete Operational Stage during middle childhood include understanding of logical principles, improvement in spatial reasoning, and logical thinking limited to real and concrete situations
• Language development in middle childhood:

  • Children acquire more adult definitions of words they know
  • They create relationships among words, understand synonyms and antonyms, and how prefixes and suffixes affect word meaning
• Social and Emotional Development:

  • Children in early childhood start to develop self-conscious emotions like shame and guilt
  • They become better at understanding the thoughts and feelings of others, improving social skills
  • In middle childhood, children use social comparison to distinguish themselves from others and start seeing things from other's perspectives
• Socialization:

  • Process of acquiring norms, values, and beliefs in society
  • Influenced by parents, families, peer groups, schools, religious institutions, and mass media
  • Parenting styles (Authoritarian, Permissive, Authoritative, Neglectful) impact socialization and personality development