cog development

• Childhood is a beautiful phase of life for most of us. It is a period associated with play, fantasy, and innocence. It is the crucial phase in life and involves important aspects of growth and development which are critical for the entire life span.
• Childhood period can be further classified into four sub-stages


  • Infancy (birth to 2 years)
  • Early childhood (2 to 6 years)
  • Middle childhood (6 to 11 years)
  • Adolescence (12 to 19 years)
• Infancy


  • Provides the foundation for all areas of development
  • Marked by extremely rapid physical growth and development of sensori-motor skills
  • Important for cognitive, language and socio-emotional development

  
• Adolescence will be taken up in the next lesson. In this lesson, we will try to understand how various aspects of development such as physical, motor, cognitive, social and personality development proceed during childhood. We will also study the socialization process during childhood in the cultural context.
• Physical growth


  Extremely rapid during infancy, comparatively slower in childhood
• Physical and motor development

  • Sequence is fairly uniform across different cultures
  • Large individual differences
• Milestones of Physical and Motor Development


  • Lifting chin up while lying on stomach (1 month)
  • Lifting head and chest (2 months)
  • Rolling over (4 months)
  • Picking up objects with palm without sitting with support (5 months)
  • Finer use of thumb and fingers (7 months)
  • Sitting alone (without support) (8 months)
  • Standing with support (holding on to furniture) (8-9 months)
  • Crawling (9 months)
  • Standing independently (9-10 months)
  • Taking few steps without holding on and walking holding on (12-13 months)
  • Grasping objects with thumb and forefingers (13-14 months)
  • Walking alone (15 months)
  • Running and climbing stairs (2 years)
  • Walking on tip toe (2½ years)
  • Riding a tricycle (3 years)
  • Throwing ball over head, walking down stairs with one foot to a step (4 years)
  • Copying a complex figures (6 years)
• Gross motor development


  Control over large muscle groups that enable the child to get around, e.g. crawling, standing and walking
• Fine motor development


  Control over smaller muscle movements e.g. grasping, pinching etc.
• Milestones of Fine Motor Skills Development


  • Holding an object (0 and 3 months)
  • Trying to reach out for objects, putting things in mouth (3 and 6 months)
  • Trying to hold food, using hand and fingers to play games (6 months and 1 year)
  • Scribble on paper, trying to play throw and catch with the ball (1 year and 1-1/2years)
  • Drawing lines with pencil, using a spoon to eat food with little help (1-1/2 and 2 years)
  • Brushing teeth and buttons cloths with help (2 and 3 years)
  • Builds using building blocks, uses a pencil to draw, turn pages of a book (3 and 5 years)
  • Draws various shapes very easily, brushes and combs without support, cuts shapes very clearly (5 and 7 years)
• Early childhood (2-6 years)


  • Child who has become mobile is now able to widen the sphere of activities beyond the immediate family
  • Through interaction with the wider society and the environment the child learns the rules of appropriate social behavior and develops mental abilities which prepare him/her for formal education and schooling
• Most infants appear to be quite clumsy in their physical and motor activities. But gradually their locomotion skills become refined and graceful.
• Between 2 and 3 years, young children stop "toddling," and develop a smoother gait. They also develop the ability to run, jump, and hop. They can participate in throwing and catching games with larger balls.
• Children who are 3 to 4 years old can climb up stairs using a method of bringing both feet together on each step before proceeding to the next step. However, they may still need some assistance to prevent fall as they are likely to be unsteady in this new skill.
• During this period, children become better at catching and throwing, can hit a stationary ball with a bat, learn to ride a tricycle, and can kick a ball placed directly in front of their bodies. They can create things with their hands, such as building towers out of blocks, molding clay into rough shapes, and scribbling with a crayon.
• Between 3 and 4 years, children improve in eating food themselves and can use utensils like forks and spoons. They can now hold a crayon or pencil by the writing hand rather than just grasping it with the fist. They can also make twisting motion with their hands, useful for opening door knobs or twisting lids to open jars. Most children are toilet trained by 4 years of age.
• As children reach the age of schooling, the rate of physical growth becomes slower until puberty when there is a rapid 'growth spurt'.
• By the age of six, the child is physically capable of coordinated actions which require body balance. Small muscle coordination required for fine motor activities, such as putting on shirt buttons or copying a simple figure, improves quite dramatically during the early childhood years.
• During 5 to 6 years of age, young children continue to refine the earlier skills. They can run faster and can start to ride bicycle with training wheels for added stability. In addition, they can step sideways. Children of this age begin mastering new forms of physical play such as the jungle gym, and begin to use the see-saw, slide, and swing on their own.
• During middle childhood (6-11years) physical growth becomes more gradual and rate of overt change becomes slower until puberty at about 11-13 years when there is again a rapid 'growth spurt'. There are changes in height, weight and muscular strength and swiftness.
• During middle childhood, there are large gender differences. Girls are slightly shorter than boys during 6 to 8 years but then the trend reverses. Girls start putting on weight. A 10 year old girl may look taller and heavier than a boy of the same age. The growth spurt for boys comes later than for girls.
• During middle childhood, children achieve greater control over large and small muscle groups. They keep getting stronger, faster and attain better motor co-ordination. School children are energetic and enjoy all types of outdoor games. Increase in cognitive capacity also helps them learn the rules of new games.
• The 6-7 year-old children can copy complex figures such as a diamond, color patterns and figures and assemble tools and model toys. They also become more skillful in games requiring skillful eye-hand coordination such as throwing, catching and hitting targets. They continue to refine fine motor skills and build upon earlier skills.
• Cognitive development


  Refers to the way children learn and process information. It includes improvement in attention, perception, language, thinking, memory and reasoning.

  
• Piaget's cognitive developmental theory


  • Our thoughts and reasoning are part of adaptation
  • Cognitive development follows a definite sequence of stages
• Piaget's four major stages of cognitive development


  • Sensori-motor stage (Birth- 2 years)
  • Pre-operational stage (2-7 years)
  • Concrete operational stage (7-11 years)
  • Formal operational stage (11+ years)
• During early childhood (2 to 6 years) children become increasingly proficient in using symbols such as words and images to represent a variety of objects, situations and events. By the time children enter school they have a reasonably good vocabulary.
• Children who are exposed to multiple languages in different contexts often grow up as bilingual or multilingual children. They have better understanding of language compared to monolingual children who use only one language.
• Capacity for sustained attention improves during the early childhood. A 3-year-old child may persist on a task such as coloring with crayons, playing with toys or watching television for not more than 15-20 minutes at a stretch. By contrast, a 6-year-old can be found to be working on an interesting task for an hour or more.
• Children also become more selective in their attention. As a result their perceptual skills also improve.
• Thinking becomes more logical and capacity to remember and process information also improves. Through interaction with the environment the child learns the rules of appropriate social behavior which prepare him/her for schooling.
• Pre-operational stage (2 to 6 years)


  • Symbolic Function (2 to 4 years)
  • Intuitive Thought (4 to 7 years)
• Symbolic Function sub-stage


  Children can create mental images of objects and store them in their minds for later use
• Intuitive Thought sub-stage


  • Children learn by asking questions such as, "Why?" and "How come?"
  • Children show "Centration" - they focus on one characteristic of object and base their decisions or judgment on that only
• During early childhood, children's ability to understand, process, and to produce language also improves.
• Pre-operational children


  Have a style of thinking characterized by Egocentrism, or the inability to see the world from someone else's point of view

  
• Egocentrism


  Children explain situations from their own perspective and understanding
• Intuitive Thought sub-stage


  Children learn by asking questions such as, "Why?" and "How come?" and tend to be so certain of their knowledge and understanding that they are unaware of how they gained this knowledge
• Centration


  Children focus on one characteristic of an object and base their decisions or judgment on that only
• Language development in early childhood


  • There is a '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 anywhere between 8,000 and 14,000 words