Unit 3

• Early childhood:

  • ages 2 and 1/2 to 6
  • Beginning: toddlers developing language and movement skills
  • Ending: developing more abstract thinking
• Body changes:

  • Changes in belly and face; from soft/round to long/lean
  • lowest BMI at age 5 or 6 than any other time
  • From age 2-6: each year 3 in height and 4.5 lbs
  • reflects genetic predisposition
  • Head ~ same size, but arms double
  • head to body becomes more adult like
  • Center of gravity moves down (cephalocaudal)
• Obesity:

  • Rates increasing worldwide
  • Using growth charts: if heavier than 97.5 percentile
  • 1 in 7 are classified as obese
  • Historical trends for ages 2-5 olds:
  • 2018, rate was double than in 1998
  • dipped in 2011-13 then increased
  • worsened during COVID
  • Concerns?
  • if overweight by 4, likely to be obese by age 10
  • Correlates with adult health problems
• Nutrition:

  • May get enough calories, but not enough adequate iron, zinc, and calcium
  • North Americans drink less milk than before
  • Sugar should be limited, good oral health
  • Recommend max 6 tsp of sugar.. children get 3x more
  • ads of sweets, many sugars added in foods, candy and sweets are normative
• Picky eating:

  • Occurs worldwide
  • occurs in half if preschool age children
  • evolutionary roots: safety when exploring new foods
  • Most picky eating resolves by KG, but 1 in 6 will continue to be picky
• • Allergies:
  • 27% of children have an allergy
  • 6 to 8 percent have a specific food allergy
  • EX: milk, eggs, nuts, wheat, fish
  • Worldwide: highest in Western nations
  • Variety in diagnostic standards and medical conditions
  • Treatment varies:
  • total avoidance
  • medically supervised exposure
  • can be outgrown, increase, or decrease with age
• Hygiene:

  • number of children with immune-related illness has increased
  • Immune system matures by age 3
  • Hygiene hypothesis: regular exposure to a variety of microbes helps ppl develop a robust microbiome, which makes protection
• Brain growth:

  • Size
  • by age 2, brain weighs 75% of adult brain.. extensive pruning of dendrites
  • growth happens between ages 3 to 6, but slower
  • by age 6, brain is about 90% of adult weight
• Myelination: white matter, coating axons, speeds up signals btwn neurons

  • most increase in brain weight
  • increase of mylenation between 3 and 6 years .. primary reason for complex thinking
• Corpus callosum: long, think band of nerve that allows fiber connection and comms btwn two hemispheres

  • CC growth is rapid during early childhood= increase coordination
  • hand preference by age 1
  • lefties have thicker and better mylenated CC
  • Abnormalities in CC: ASD, heavy drinking mothers
• Lateralization: 2 hemispheres

  • Right: emotion and creative .. controls left side
  • Left: logic and language ... controls right side
  • CC is plastic: compensates for damaged side
  • Thicker CC when both hemispheres are used
• Nap time:

  • 10 to 13 hours of sleep is recommended for children
  • "dropping" naps, most kids in US stop napping by age 5
  • sleep difficulties are common due to lack of screen time and naps
• Potty time:

  • Peds recommend child to be potty trained by age 18 month to 4 years
  • Learning to use bathroom allows for independence and adjustments to formal schooling
• Advancing motor skills:

  • Age 2: can kick a ball, jump, up and down stairs and get undressed
  • Age 6: physical maturation (size and skeletal) and brain development (mylenation) gives more advances motor skills
• Supporting gross motor skill development:

  • 3 hours of daily physical activity is recommended for healthy dev
  • Factors affecting dev of motor skills:
  • motivation and attitude (historical changes)
  • guided practice
  • opportunity and time for outdoor play
  • safe play spaces with appropriate equipment
• Fine motor skills: more difficult to master

  • Age 2: self feed with spoon, draw spirals
  • Age 3: shapes
  • Age 4: self feed with fork, dresses, scissors
  • Age 5: more complex shapes
  • Age 6: draw and paint recognizable images
  • influenced by gender, practice, maturation, and culture
  • scaffolding to support dev
• Harm to children:

  • more children are harmed by deliberate or accidental violence by commission or omission than from disease
  • in US almost 4x 1 to 4 year olds die of accident than cancer
  • 1 in 8 preschooler go to ER each year due to accident
  • Motor vehicle accidents have gone down, but still leading cause of child death
• Levels of prevention:

  • Primary prevention: targets background, change overall background conditions to prevent some unwanted conditions
  • Secondary prevention: targets high-risk individuals or situation
  • Tertiary prevention: treatment, it has already happened
• Prevention is the best medicine:

  • Immunization (primary) and treatment(tertiary) have decreased childhood deaths due to illness
  • Effective primary preventions:
  • safety measures on household items
  • laws
  • education of parents abt safety measures
  • equable access of safe spaces and safety measure
• Child maltreatment:

  • US maltreatments have not decreased, usually one or both parents
  • Child maltreatment: intentional harm or avoidable endangerment
  • Child Abuse: physical, emotional, sexual
  • Child Neglect (more common): physical (most), educational, emotional
• • Reported maltreatment:
  • someone has noticed authorities
  • many professionals are required to report
  • increased since 50s
  • Substantiated maltreatment:
  • reported, investigated, and verified
  • sometimes, not enough info
• Signs of maltreatment: ages 2 to 10

  • Physical: repeated injuries, delayed growth, unusual appetite, headaches
  • Behavioral: fantasy play with violence or sex, immature communication or social interactions, lack of curiosity, fear, frequent absences
  • Psychological: hyper vigilance, fear, startled by noise, impulsive responses, confusion with reality and fantasy
• Consequences of Maltreatment:

  • depends on age and durations, worse if abuse starts earlier and continues longer
  • low self-esteem, distrust, less friendly
  • may experience enduring consequences
  • substance use disorder, social isolation
  • can also be resilient
• Preventions of child maltreatment:

  • Tertiary prevention: medial and psychological treatment, permanency planning
  • Secondary prevention: repairing insecure attachment, support
  • Primary prevention: family cohesion, financial stability, no unwanted/teen pregnancy
• Piaget: pre operational thinking

  • Preoperational intelligence (2 to 6 years): logical operations and reasoning processes NOT yet used
  • Intuitive thought: "why", more logical sense of how the world works
  • often have illogical explanations or magical thinking
  • Symbolic thought: thinking occurs in symbols
  • Includes language, vocab has increased quickly, words become symbols beyond specific label
  • can use object to symbolize others
• Animism: belief that natural objects have human like sensations, feelings, and abilities

  • difficulty distinguishing btwn our mental states and those of others
  • projecting own experiences and emotions onto the world around them
• Piaget: it's all about me

  • difficulty distinguishing btwn our mental states and those of others
  • Egocentrism: inability to take perspective of other accounts, difficulty understanding that others might have different thought, feelings, or viewpoint
  • The mountain task
• Piaget: 4 obstacles to logic

  • Limitation of preoperational thought make logic difficult until about age 6
  • Centration: focuses of fixates on one idea and excludes other
  • egocentrism is a type of centration
  • Focus on appearance: ignores all attributes that are not apparent, focuses on how something appears rather than reality
  • Static reasoning: nothing changes, concentrates on how something looks at that time
  • Irreversibility: nothing can be undone
• Lack of conservation: NOT realizing that certain properties of objects can remain the same even when it changes appearance

  • Grasp conversation at age 6 or 7
  • All 4 characteristics of preoperational though are evident in errors
• Criticism of Piaget:

  • Underestimated cognition during early childhood
  • Piagetian conservation task require words and some exposure to similar objects
  • Modification of tasks result in better performance
  • May use logical thinking in some domains but not others
  • Generalizability to other cultures and environments, lack of attention to social influence on cognition
• Vygotsky: social learning

  • belief that sociocultural context was important for learning
  • parents act as mentors to help children learn what is important as someone in there culture
• • Guided participation: form of social learning provided by parents, social interaction and active collaboration with more knowledge
  • Presenting challenged within the Zone of Proximal Development
  • Offering assistance w/o taking over aka scaffolding (ppl learn from others)
  • Adding crucial information
  • Encouraging motivation
• Overimitation: tendency of children to cop an action that isn't relevant of behavior to be learned

  • common in children ages 2 to 6
  • socially motivated and universal
  • makes mentors very influential in guided participation
• Vygotsky: language as part of culture

  • social mediation: children imitate verbal language and gestures to comm
  • social interaction and language can facilitate understanding in math/science
  • private speech (internal dialogue): talking aloud when thinking , later it becomes internalize
• Executive function:

  1. Working Memory: short term memory
  2. Inhibition: implies, control, emotional reg.
  3. Flexibility: shifting perspectives

  • Brain maturation leads to gains in EF
  • EF skills are not determined at conception
  • Cannot solely rely on tech, focus on interactions that encourage planning and thoughtful interactions
• Information processing:

  • Episodic memory: type of explicit memory (recall) that is long term, for events
  • Rapidly improves with dev language skills, story telling, and brain maturity (hippocampus and neural circuits)
  • Working memory:
  • Slow to mature memory (late dev) becomes more efficient and reliable during preschool
  • Infants have implicit memory
• Theory of Mind: a person's theory of what other people might be thinking

  • Before age 3: child thinks you'll believe what they believe
  • By 4: realizes other ppl aren't thinking the same thoughts that they are, prefrontal cortex maturation contributes to ToM
  • False belief tests for ToM: crayon box, sally-anne, three mountains, to pass you must see other person as separate and both ppl's perspective in working memory
• ToM and social interactions:

  • culture and context matter!
  • develops earlier if children are bilingual and have a lot of social interactions .. peers and siblings
  • develops later for children with limited conversational experiences, ASD, and hearing impairments
• ToM and lying:

  • ToM is demonstrated by ability to tell a more plausible lie (either to avoid punishment or not hurt someone's feeling)
  • Between ages 3 and 12 children become better liars
• Language explosion:

  • early childhood is a sensitive pd, best for mastering vocab, grammar, and prononciation
  • Avg 2 year old knows about 100 to 2,000 words
  • Avg 6 year old know about 5,000 to 30,000 words
  • Vocab explosion: builds quickly and comprehension is greater than production