Early Childhood

• Early Childhood


  1. 6 years old
• Aspects of Early Childhood Development

  • Physical Development
  • Cognitive Development
  • Psychosocial Development
• Physical Development


  • Bodily Growth and Change
  • Sleep Patterns and Problems
  • Brain Development
  • Motor Development
  • Influences on Physical Growth, Health, and Safety
• Bodily Growth and Change


  • Children slim down and shoot up
  • Lose "baby fat" or babyish roundedness and becomes thinner and more slender
  • Grow 2-3 inches and gains 2-3 kg. annually
  • Body proportions steadily become adultlike
  • Individual differences in body size are more apparent
• Muscular and Skeletal Growth

  • Makes children stronger which enables motor development as the brain also develops
  • Cartilage turns to bone at a faster rate
  • Bones become harder that gives the child a firmer body shape and protection for the internal organs
  • Loss of primary (baby) teeth towards the end of preschool
• Sleep Patterns


  Cultural differences influence sleep patterns
• Sleep Patterns


  • Gusii of Kenya, Javanese in Indonesia, and Zuni in New Mexico: no regular bedtime and children may stay up late until they are sleepy
  • Canadian Hare: no naps, sleep after dinner until the time they wish to sleep
  • Filipinos: afternoon naps and sleep is encouraged at around 8-10 PM

  
• Sleep Problems


  • Sleep disturbances: tend to run in families and associated with separation anxiety
  • Night terrors, sleepwalking and sleep-talking, nightmares
  • Accidental activation of the brain's motor control system, incomplete arousal from a deep sleep, disordered breathing, restless leg movements
  • Enuresis: repeated urination in clothing or in bed; common in childhood
  • Majority are behavioral: refusal (difficult) to sleep, frequent night waking
  • Associated causes: ineffective parenting, emotional, physiological, or neurological conditions, colic, difficult temperament, preterm birth, and altered circadian rhythm

  
• Encouraging Good Sleep Habits

  • Establish a regular, unrushed bedtime routine
  • Allow no scary or loud TV shows
  • Avoid highly stimulating, active play before bedtime
  • Keep a small nightlight on if it makes the child more comfortable
  • Don't feed or rock a child at bedtime
  • Stay calm but don't yield to requests for any "one mores"
  • Offer rewards to good bedtime behaviors
  • Try sending the child to bed a little later

  
• Brain Development


  • Brain's weight is around 90% of its adult weight
  • Overproduction of synapses that will eventually undergo synaptic pruning of those that are seldom stimulated
  • Myelination of corpus callosum continues and it allows improved coordination of the senses, attention and arousal, and speech and hearing
  • Rapid growth of prefrontal-cortical areas that are devoted to various aspects of executive functioning
  • Lateralization: left cerebral hemisphere (executive functions) is especially active and right hemisphere (spatial) steadily develops
  • Language development
• Brain Development


  • Cerebellum: linked to the cerebral cortex by fibers that grow and myelinate and contribute to dramatic gains in motor coordination
  • Reticular formation: as it myelinates and generates synapses, controlled attention is better observed especially with its connection with the prefrontal cortex
  • Amygdala: connections between the amygdala and prefrontal cortex form and myelinate and governs regulation of emotion
  • Hippocampus: establishment of connections with the prefrontal cortex and lateralization towards greater right-sided activation leads to dramatic gains in memory and spatial understanding
  • Corpus callosum: supports smooth coordination of movements on both sides of the body and integration of many aspects of thinking
• Motor Development


  • Gross motor skills
  • Fine motor skills
  • Handedness
• Gross Motor Skills


  • Balance improves greatly as their center of gravity shifts toward their trunk
  • Smoother and more rhythmic gaits
  • Legs and feet allow for movements that leave the ground: running, jumping, hopping, galloping, and skipping
  • Arms and torsos: throw and catch balls, steer tricycles, and swing on horizontal bars and rings
  • More refined and coordinated movements of upper- and lower-body skills
• Fine Motor Skills


  • Progress is apparent in children's self-help skills and their ability to draw
  • Self-sufficiency in feeding and dressing themselves
  • Scribbles
  • First representational forms
  • More realistic drawings
• Handedness


  • Preference for using a particular hand is usually evident at age 3
  • Reflects the capacity of the dominant cerebral hemisphere
  • Joint contribution of nature and nurture to brain lateralization
  • Left hemisphere is commonly dominant which may account for 90% of people favoring being right-handed
  • Heritability is weak to modest
• Influences on Physical Growth and Health

  • Heredity and Hormones
  • Nutrition
  • Infectious disease
  • Childhood injuries
  • Environmental Influences
• Heredity and Hormones


  • Pituitary gland's production of growth hormone (GH) and thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH)
  • Obesity can be hereditary but environmental factors drive the epidemic
  • Undernutrition: decline in appetite or deprivation due to social circumstances
  • Most common food allergies: milk, eggs, peanuts, tree nuts, fish, soy, wheat, and shellfish – usually outgrown
• Influences on Physical Growth and Health

  • Infectious disease interacts with malnutrition for undernourished kids especially in developing countries
  • Inadequate immunization: inability to afford vaccines, little education of parents, and failure to schedule vaccination because of stressful daily lives
  • Oral rehydration therapy (ORT): giving glucose, salt, and water solution to quickly replace fluids in the body as a response to diarrhea
  • Accidental injuries (and death) often occur in homes – fires, drowning, suffocation, poisoning (medicine), car accidents (car seats) and falls
• Environmental Influences


  • SES and Race/Ethnicity: lower SES greater risk of illness, injury ,and death; affordability of health insurance
  • Homelessness: force people to choose among basic needs – lack of employment opportunities, declines in public assistance funds and affordable healthcare, domestic violence, mental illness, and addiction
  • Air pollution risks of death and chronic respiratory disease; role in childhood cancers, neurological disorders, ADHD, and intellectual disabilities
  • Home products: chronic pesticide damage, lead poisoning from food, water, and toys –cognitive development interference
• Cognitive Development Approaches


  • Piagetian Approach
  • Information-Processing Approach
  • Psychometric Approach
  • Vygotskian Approach
  • Theory of Mind
  • Language Development
  • Early Childhood Education

  
• Piagetian Approach


  • Preoperational stage
  • Second stage of Piaget's cognitive development stages
  • Symbolic thought expands but children cannot yet use logic effectively
  • Blossoming of mental representation
• Advances of Preoperational Thought


  • Symbolic function
  • Understanding of Space, Causality, Number, Identities, and Categorization
  • Theory of Mind
  • Empathy
• Symbolic function

  • Ability to use mental representations (words, numbers, images) to which a child has attached meanings
  • Pretend play (aka make-believe, fantasy, dramatic, imaginative play): play involving imaginary people and situations and changes are observed
  • Play detaches from real-life conditions associated with it (cup hat)
  • Play becomes less self-centered
  • Play includes more complex combinations of schemes: sociodramatic play
  • Benefits: more socially competent and having a wider variety of cognitive capacities, advances intrinsic motivation, positive emotion, and child control
• Understanding of Space, Causality, Identities, Categorization, and Number

  • Space: understanding of symbols that describe physical spaces, and grasp relationships between pictures, maps or scale models and the objects they represent
  • Causality: uses transduction – tendency to mentally link two events, especially those close in time, whether or not there is logically a causal relationship
  • Identities: understanding that people and many things are basically the same even if they change in outward form, size, or appearance
  • Categorization: classification which requires a child to identify similarities and differences of objects, people, and events into meaningful categories
  • Animism: tendency to attribute life to non-living things when they share characteristics with living things
  • Number: grounded in practical situations where children understand that the number of items in a set is the same regardless of their arrangement and that the last number counted is the total count
• Immature Aspects of Preoperational Thought

  • Centration
  • Conservation; irreversibility
  • Egocentrism
• Centration


  • Tendency to focus on one aspect of a situation and neglect others
  • Piaget believes that children in the preoperational stage cannot decentre – ability to think about several aspects of a situation at one time
  • Limits young children's thinking about both social and physical relationships
  • Reason for egocentrism or inability to see other's perspective
  • Inability to observe conservation
• Egocentrism


  • Form of centration
  • Inability to consider another person's point of view
  • Three-mountain task is used to study egocentrism
• Conservation


  • Awareness that two objects are equal according to a certain measure remain equal in the face of perceptual alteration so long as nothing has been added or taken away from the object
  • Kinds of conservation: number, length, liquid, mass, weight
  • Immature aspects of thought: centration and irreversibility – failure to understand that an action can go in two or more directions (focus on successive states)
• Piaget and Education

  • Children are encouraged to discover for themselves through spontaneous interaction with their environment as they are provided with activities designed to promote exploration
  • Introduction of activities that build on children's current thinking that challenges their incorrect way
• Egocentrism

  Inability to consider another person's point of view
• Three-mountain task


  • Used to study egocentrism
• Conservation


  Awareness that two objects are equal according to a certain measure remain equal in the face of perceptual alteration so long as nothing has been added or taken away from the object
• Kinds of conservation


  • Number
  • Length
  • Liquid
  • Mass
  • Weight
• Centration


  Inability to understand conservation
• Immature aspects of thought

  • Centration
  • Irreversibility - failure to understand that an action can go in two or more directions (focus on successive states)
• Discovery learning


  Children are encouraged to discover for themselves through spontaneous interaction with their environment as they are provided with activities designed to promote exploration
• Sensitivity to children's readiness to learn

  Introduction of activities that build on children's current thinking that challenges their incorrect way of viewing the world
• Encoding


  Information is prepared for long-term storage and later retrieval
• Storage


  Retention of information in memory for future use
• Retrieval


  Information is accessed or recalled from memory storage