devpsych early childhood to adolescence

• The average child grows 21⁄2 inches in height and gains 5

  to 10 pounds a year during early childhood
• Growth hormone deficiency is the absence or deficiency of growth hormone produced by the pituitary gland to stimulate the body to grow 


  Growth hormone deficiency may occur during infancy or later in childhood
• By the time children reach 3 years of age, the brain is three-quarters of its adult size. By age 6, the brain has reached about 95 percent of its adult size
• Some of the brain’s interior changes involve increases in dendritic connec- tions as well as myelination, in which nerve cells are covered and insulated with a layer of fat cells
• myelination The process by which the nerve cells are covered and insulated with a layer of fat cells, which increases the speed at which information travels through the nervous syst
• Gross Motor Skills The preschool child no longer has to make an effort simply to stay upright and to move around. As children move their legs with more confidence and carry themselves more purposefully, moving around in the environment becomes more automa
• Fine Motor Skills At 3 years of age, although children have had the ability to pick up the tiniest objects between their thumb and forefinger for some time, they are still somewhat clumsy at it
• VISUAL EXPECTATIONS ABOUT THE

  PHYSICAL WORLD. When young children

  see the ball dropped into the tube, many of

  them will search for it immediately below the

  dropping poin
• Experts recommend that young children get 11 to 13 hours of sleep each night
• Cognitive Theory

  Object permanence is an important accomplishment in the sensorimotor stage.
• The preoperational stage, which lasts from approximately 2 to 7 years of age, is the second Piagetian stage. In this stage, children begin to represent the world with words, images, and drawings. They form stable concepts and begin to reason. At the same time, the young child’s cognitive world is dominated by egocentrism and magical beliefs.
• symbolic function substage Piaget’s first substage of preoperational thought, in which the child gains the ability to mentally represent an object that is not present (between about 2 and 4 years of age).
• Egocentrism is the inability to distinguish between one’s own perspective and someone else’s perspective. Piaget and Barbel Inhelder (1969) initially studied young children’s egocentrism by devising the three mountains task
• Animism, another limitation of preoperational thought, is the belief that inanimate objects have lifelike qualities and are capable of action. A young child might show animism by saying, “That tree pushed the leaf off, and it fell down,”
• The intuitive thought substage is the second sub- stage of preoperational thought, occurring between approximately 4 and 7 years of age. In this substage, children begin to use primitive reasoning and want to know the answers to all sorts of questions.
• One limitation of pre- operational thought is centration, a centering of attention on one characteristic to the exclusion of all others. Centration is most clearly evidenced in young children’s lack of conservation, the awareness that altering an object’s or a substance’s appearance does not change its basic properties.
• Zone of proximal development (ZPD) is Vygotsky’s term for the range of tasks that are too difficult for the child to master alone but can be learned with guidance and assistance from adults or more-skilled children.
• Scaffolding means changing the level of support.
• social constructivist approach An approach that emphasizes the social contexts of learning and asserts that knowledge is mutually built and constructed. Vygotsky’s theory reflects this approach.
• attention is defined as the focusing of mental resources on select information. The child’s ability to pay attention improves significantly during the preschool years (Rothbart & Posner, 2015; Wu & Scerif, 2018).
• Executive attention involves action plan- ning, allocating attention to goals, error detection and compensation, monitoring progress on tasks, and dealing with novel or difficult circumstances
• Sustained attention is focused and extended engagement with an object, task, event, or other aspect of the environment. Sustained attention also is called vigilance
• Memory—the retention of information over time—is a central process in children’s cognitive development.
• short-term memory, individuals retain information for up to 30 seconds if there is no rehearsal of the information.
• Autobiographical Memory Another aspect of long-term memory that has been exten- sively studied in research on children’s development is autobiographical memory
• Autobiographical memory involves memory of significant events and experiences in one’s life. You are engaging in autobiographical memory when you answer questions such as: Who was your first-grade teacher and what was s/he like? What is the most traumatic event that happened to you as a child?
• executive function, an umbrella-like concept that consists of a number of higher- level cognitive processes linked to the development of the brain’s prefrontal cortex
• theory of mind Awareness of one’s own mental processes and the mental processes of others.
• Between the ages of 3 and 5, children come to understand that the mind can represent objects and events accurately or inaccurately
• The average 2-year-old can speak about 200 words.
• fast mapping, which involves children’s ability to make an initial connection between a word and its referent after only limited exposure to the word
• fast mapping A process that helps to explain how young children learn the connection between a word and its referent so quickly.
• Montessori approach An educational philosophy in which children are given considerable freedom and spontaneity in choosing activities and are allowed to move from one activity to another as they desire.
• child-centered kindergarten Education that involves the whole child by considering both the child’s physical, cognitive, and socioemotional development and the child’s needs, interests, and learning styles.
• developmentally appropriate practice (DAP)

  Education that focuses on the typical developmental patterns of children (age- appropriateness) and the uniqueness of each child (individual-appropriateness)
• Project Head Start A government-funded program that is designed to provide children from low-income families with the opportunity to acquire the skills and experiences important for school success.
• Body growth and change — The average child grows 21⁄2 inches in height and gains 5 to 10 pounds a year during early childhood. Growth patterns vary individually, though. Some of the brain’s interior changes in early childhood are due to myelination. From 3 to 6 years of age, the most rapid growth in the brain occurs in the frontal lobes.
• Motor and Perceptual Development — Gross motor skills increase dramatically during early childhood. Children become increasingly adventuresome as their gross motor skills improve. Fine motor skills also improve substantially during early childhood. Young children also make advances in perceptual development.
• Sleep —Experts recommend that young children get 11 to 13 hours of sleep each night. Most young children sleep through the night and have one daytime nap. Helping the young child slow down before bedtime often leads to less resistance in going to bed. Sleep problems in young children are linked to other problems, such as being overweight and being depressed. Disrup- tions in sleep in early childhood are related to less optimal adjustment in preschool.
• According to Piaget, in the preoperational stage, children cannot yet perform operations, which are reversible mental actions