UNIT 4

• Height and Weight


  Growth in height and weight is the obvious physical change that characterizes childhood
• Height and Weight growth

  • Average child grows 2 and ½ inches in height and gains 5 to 10 pounds a year during early childhood
  • During preschool years, both boys and girls slim down as the trunks of their bodies lengthen
  • Growth patterns vary individually due to heredity and environmental experiences
• Growth hormone deficiency


  Absence or deficiency of growth hormone produced by the pituitary gland to stimulate the body to grow
• Reasons for unusually short children

  • Congenital factors (genetic or prenatal problems)
  • Growth hormone deficiency
  • Physical problem that develops in childhood
  • Maternal smoking during pregnancy
  • Emotional difficulty
• Brain development


  • Brain continues to grow in early childhood, but not as rapidly as in infancy
  • Myelination - an important process that increases the speed and efficiency of information traveling through the nervous system
• Brain changes


  • At age 3 - Brain is three-quarters of its adult size
  • At age 6 - Brain has reached about 95 percent of its adult size
  • Between ages 3 to 15 - Brain undergoes dramatic anatomical changes
  • Between ages 3 to 6 - Rapid growth in frontal lobe areas involved in planning, organizing, and maintaining attention
• Gross motor skills


  • At age 3 - Enjoy simple movements like hopping, jumping, and running
  • At age 4 - More adventurous
  • At age 5 - Even more adventurous, enjoy races
• Children with higher motor proficiency have high levels of physical activity in adolescence
• Fine motor skills


  • At age 3 - Clumsy at picking up tiny objects, building block towers
  • At age 4 - Improved coordination, still some trouble stacking objects
  • At age 5 - Further improved coordination, hand-eye-body movement better coordinated
• Sleep


  • Getting a good night's sleep is important for children's development
  • Experts recommend 11 to 13 hours of sleep each night
  • Most young children sleep through the night and have one daytime nap
• Children can experience sleep problems like narcolepsy, insomnia, and nightmares
• Sleep problems in early childhood

  Associated with subsequent attention problems that persist into early adolescence
• Preschool children who slept 7 hours or less per day


  Had worse school readiness profile (language/cognitive deficits, emotional immaturity)
• Preschool children who used electronic devices 3+ hours per day


  Had shortened sleep durations
• Preschool children with longer sleep duration


  More likely to have better peer acceptance, social skills, and receptive vocabulary
• Short sleep duration in children


  Linked with being overweight
• Additional hour of daily screen time in 2-5 year olds


  Decreased sleep time, less likelihood of 10+ hours per night, later bedtime
• Insomnia in 4-year-olds


  Characterized by hostile-aggressive and hyperactive-distractible problems
• Improving children's sleep


  • Make bedroom cool, dark, comfortable
  • Maintain consistent bedtimes and wake times
  • Build positive family relationships
  • Slow down before bedtime with quiet activities
• Eating habits


  Important aspects of development during early childhood
• Exercise and physical activity


  Very important aspects of young children's life
• Overweight young children


  Serious health problem in early childhood
• Improving young children's eating behavior

  • Caregivers eat with children on predictable schedule
  • Caregivers model choosing nutritious food
  • Make mealtimes pleasant occasions
  • Engage in certain feeding styles
• Forceful and restrictive caregiver behaviors are not recommended
• Physical activity guidelines for young children

  • 15+ minutes per hour over 12 hours, about 3 hours per day total
  • Child's life should center around activities, not meals
• Devastating effects on young children's health occur in countries with high poverty rates
• Characteristics that enhance young children's safety


  • Steps can be taken in each context of a child's life to improve safety and reduce injury
• Piaget's preoperational stage


  Lasts from 2 to 7 years, children begin to represent the world with words, images, and drawings, form stable concepts and begin to reason, but thought is dominated by egocentrism and magical beliefs
• Piaget's preoperational stage

  • Symbolic function substage (2-4 years) - child gains ability to mentally represent absent objects
  • Intuitive thought substage (4-7 years) - child uses primitive reasoning, asks many "why" questions
• Centration


  Centering of attention on one characteristic to the exclusion of all others, evidenced in lack of conservation
• Conservation


  Awareness that altering an object's or substance's appearance does not change its basic properties
• Failing Piaget's conservation-of-liquid task is a sign of preoperational stage, demonstrating centration and inability to mentally reverse actions
• Vygotsky's theory


  Children actively construct their knowledge and understanding through social interaction, their cognitive development depends on cultural tools and context
• Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)


  • Range of tasks too difficult for child to master alone but can be learned with guidance from more skilled person
  • Lower limit - child's independent skill level
  • Upper limit - level of additional responsibility child can accept with assistance
• Scaffolding


  Skilled person adjusts level of support to fit child's current performance, using direct instruction when learning new task and less guidance as competence increases
• Private speech


  Children use language to plan, guide, and monitor their own behavior, an important tool of thought in early childhood
• For Vygotsky, language and thought initially develop independently and then merge, with all mental functions having external, social origins
• Scaffolding


  The use of dialogue as a tool for supporting a child's development
• Vygotsky's theory


  • Children use speech not only to communicate socially but also to help them solve tasks
  • Children use language to plan, guide, and monitor their behavior
  • This use of language for self-regulation is called private speech
• For Piaget, private speech


  Is egocentric and immature