Chapter 4 Early Childhood

• Early Childhood


  1. 6 years old
• Early Childhood


  • Time period of rapid language and cognitive development
  • Have more control over their emotions
• Physical Development in Early Childhood

  • Grow 3 inches high and 4 to 5 pounds each year
  • By age 6, torso has lengthened and body proportions have become more like those of adults
  • Reduced appetite between 2 and 6 years
• Brain Maturation


  • Brain gains 75% of its adult weight by 3 years and 95% by 6 years
  • Left hemisphere: language skills
  • Right hemisphere: spatial skills
  • Corpus callosum: dense band of fibers that connects the two hemispheres of the brain
  • Growth spurt between ages 3 and 6
• Toilet training


  1. If started too early, it might take longer to train a child

  2. If resists being trained or unsuccessful, take a break and try again later
• Enuresis


  Repeated voiding of urine into bed or clothes
• Encopresis


  Repeated passage of feces into inappropriate places
• Sleep


  • 2 year olds: 15-16 hours
  • 3-5 year olds: 10-13 hours
• Sexual Development in Early Childhood

  • Sexuality begins in childhood as a response to physical states and sensation
  • Infancy: Boys and girls are capable of erections and vaginal lubrication even before birth
  • Stimulation is for comfort or to relieve tension rather than to reach orgasm
• Just-right or just-so phenomenon


  • Desire consistency and may be upset if there are even slight changes to their daily routines
  • Bring a sense of security and general reduction in childhood fears and anxiety
• Caregivers need to keep in mind that they are setting up taste preferences at this age
• Keeping mealtime pleasant, providing sound nutrition and not engaging in power struggles over food
• Cognitive Development in Early Childhood

  Time of pretending, blending fact and fiction, and learning to think of the world using language
• Piaget's Preoperational Stage


  • Preoperational stage: children use symbols to represent words, images, and ideas
  • Symbolic function substage (2-4 years old): mentally represent an object that is not present and a dependence on perception in problem solving
  • Intuitive thought substage (4-7 years old): greater dependence on intuitive thinking rather than just perception
• Egocentrism


  Tendency of young children not to be able to take the perspective of others, and instead the child thinks that everyone sees, thinks, and feels just as they do
• Conservation


  Recognize that moving or rearranging matter does not change the quantity
• Centration


  Focused only on one characteristic of an object to the exclusion of others
• Transductive


  Making faulty inferences from one specific example to another
• Animism


  Attributing life-like qualities to objects
• Piaget's critique: underestimated intellectual capabilities of the preoperational child
• Vygotsky's Sociocultural Theory of Cognitive Development

  • Zone of proximal development: occurs when children can almost perform a task, but not quite on their own without assistance
  • Scaffolding: temporary support that parents or teachers give a child to do a task
  • Egocentric speech: speech that is focused on the child and does not include another's point of view
  • Private speech: inner speech
• Attention


  • Divided attention/Multitasking: ability to switch our focus between tasks or external stimuli
  • Selective attention: focus on a single task or stimulus, while ignoring distracting information
  • Sustained attention: stay on task for long periods of time
• Memory


  • Clustering rehearsal: the person rehearses previous material while adding in additional information
  • Declarative memories/Explicit memory: memories for facts or events that we can consciously recollect
  • Non-declarative/Implicit memory: typically automated skills that do not require conscious recollection
  • Autobiographical memory: personal narrative
• Neo-Piagetians


  Theorists who provide new interpretations of Piaget's theory
• Constructivism


  Children actively try to understand the world around them
• Piaget: cognitive constructivist


  Independent learning
• Vygotsky: social constructivist


  Social interactions for learning
• Theory-theory


  Tendency of children to generate theories to explain everything they encounter
• Theory of mind


  Ability to think about other people's thoughts
• Language Development


  • Fast-mapping: words are easily learned by making connections between new words and concepts already known
  • Overregularization: May apply grammar rules inappropriately
  • Bilingual: understand and use two languages
  • Mutual-exclusivity bias: assumption that an object has only a single name