Early Childhood

Early Childhood-Part 4

Physical Development And Health In Early Childhood

Chapter 9

Physiological Development

Bodily Growth And Change

Abdominal muscles develop so that the toddler’ potbelly tightens
Trunk, arms, and legs grow longer
The head is still relatively large

Bodily Growth and Change

At 3, bodies take on slender, athletic appearance
Boys become taller, heavier, more muscle
Girls have more fatty tissue
Grow 2-3 inches and gain 4-6 pounds

Physiological Development

Nutrition

Preschoolers eat less in proportion to their size than infants do
Obesity today is more common among preschoolers
Much television advertising aimed at young children fosters poor nutrition by promoting fats and sugars rather than proteins and vitamins. How might parents counteract these pressures?

Physiological Development

Oral Health

Tooth decay in early childhood often stem from overconsumption of sweetened milk and juices in infancy
Permanent teeth, which begin to develop long before they appear at age 6, may be affected if thumb-sucking does not stop after age 4

Physiological Development

Sleep Patterns And Problems

Children in different cultures may get the same amount of seep each day, but its timing may vary
Young children may develop elaborate routines to put off retiring
Transitional objects, bedtime companions, help a child shift from dependence in infancy to independence in later childhood
Nightmares or sleep terrors, bed-wetting

Motor Development

Motor Skills

Gross motor skills involve the large muscles, such as running and jumping used in sports, dancing, etc.
Fine motor skills involve small muscles in hands and fingers, such as tying shoelaces and cutting with scissors, writing, drawing, etc.

Motor Development

Handedness=the preference for using one hand over the other

Usually evident by 3 year of age
Is handedness genetic or learned?

Existence of a single gene for right-handedness?
Artistic Development

Children’s early pictures show energy and freedom; later, they show care and accuracy

Health and Safety

Minor Illnesses

These illnesses help build natural immunity
Coughs, sniffles, stomachaches, and runny noses are a part of early childhood

Health and Safety

Accidental Injuries

Motor vehicle injuries
Ingestion of toxic substances
Burned by scalding liquids or in fires
Fall from heights

Health and Safety

Health in Context: Environmental Influences

Genes contribute some predisposition toward some medical conditions
Environment children live in makes tremendous difference

Health and Safety

3 to 5 year olds, catch 7 to 8 colds a year
Accidents are the leading cause of death
1-5 deaths come from auto crashes
Airbags can increase fatal injuries
52 percent of poisonings are from medications
Temperament may cause some to be accident prone

Health in Context: Environmental Influences

Preschoolers in day care centers, have 2 to 4 times more infections
Second hand smoke increases risk of medical problems
Low income is the chief fact associated with poor health
Many of their health problems begin before they are born
Lead exposure-is greatest hazard for those under 6, and causes lower IQ, poor academics

Maltreatment: Abuse And Neglect

Maltreatment=Deliberate or avoidable endangerment of a child

Abuse=action that inflicts harm, i.e. physical, sexual, verbal
Neglect=inaction that leads to harm, i.e. not meeting a child’s basic needs, such as food, clothing, medical care

Child Abuse

900,000 reported cases of abuse or neglect each year
54 percent are neglect
25 percent are physical abuse
12 percent are sex abuse
Girls-3 times more sex abuse
25 percent of girls, 10 percent of boys are sexually abused
8-10 perpetrators are their own parents

Maltreatment: Abuse And Neglect

Contributing Factors: An Ecological View

Aggravated by other family problems, such as poverty, alcoholism, or antisocial behavior
Many abuser are lonely, unhappy, anxious, depressed, angry, or aggressive
Abusive parents tend to have marital problems and to fight physically

Cultural Values and Patterns

Two cultural patterns associated with child abuse are:

A. Societal violence
B. Use of physical punishment

Maltreatment: Abuse And Neglect

Long-Term Effects: Physical, emotional, cognitive, and social

Often have disorganized-disoriented attachments to their parents and negative, distorted self-concepts
May become either aggressive or withdrawn

Other Long-Term Effects

Often speak late
More likely to repeat a grade in school
Do poorly on cognitive tests
Become behavior problems
Have difficulty making friends
Low self-esteem
More commit suicide
Mistrust people
Resilience is associated with attachment to a supportive adult, combined with a high IQ

Maltreatment: Abuse And Neglect

Helping Families In Trouble Or At Risk

Intervention strategies should be:

Comprehensive, neighborhood-based, centered on protecting children, and aimed at strengthening families
State and local Child Protective Services agencies investigate reports of child maltreatment; determine what steps, if any, need to be taken

Helping Families at Risk

Some abuse-prevention programs teach basic parenting skills
Parents Anonymous
Average foster home stay is 5 years and leads to a series of placements
31 percent are in kinship placements

Cognitive Development in Early Childhood

Chapter 10

Piagetian Approach: The Preoperational Child

Cognitive Advances

Ages 2 to 7 yrs. there develops a great expansion in the use of symbolic thought, or representational ability, which first emerges at the end of the sensorimotor stage
Growing understanding of space, causality, identities, categorization, and number

Preoperational Thought

Symbolic Function-the ability to use symbols, or mental representations to which a person has attached meaning
Uses deferred imitation
Involved in pretend play
Uses transductive reasoning-view one situation as the basis for another situation

Understanding of Identities and Categorization

By 4, can classify by two criteria, such as color shapes, helps to categorize people as “good,” “bad,” or “friend”
Number-at 3-4, can compare quantities such as bigger, more, and fewer
By age 5, can count to 20- and do single digit addition or subtraction, by counting on their fingers

Piagetian Approach: The Preoperational Child

Immature Aspects Of Preoperational Thought

Cannot reason logically as to cause and effect
Attribute life to inanimate objects=animism
Failure to understand conservation: two things remain equal if their appearance changes but nothing is added or taken away
Center so much on their own point of view that they cannot take in another’s

Other Immature Aspects

Centration-tendency to focus on one aspect of a situation and neglect others
Conversation-the fact that two things that are equal remain so if their appearance is altered
Decenter-think simultaneously about several aspects of situation
Irreversibility-failure to understand that an operation can go in two or more directions
Egocentrism-inability to consider another person’ point of view (three mountain task)

Piagetian Approach: The Preoperational Child

Do Young Children Have Theories Of Mind, i.e. awareness of their own mental processes and those of other people?

Piaget: children younger than 6 cannot distinguish between thoughts or dreams and real physical entities and have no theory of mind

Piagetian Approach: The Preoperational Child

Theories Of Mind

By age 3, children’s understanding of other’s emotional and mental states is becoming more mature. They realize that a person who does not immediately find what she wants will keep looking.
Children tend to believe that everyone else knows what they know and believes what they do

Preoperational Thinking

4-year-olds, realize that other people differ in beliefs
Deception or lying represents cognitive development
Between 18 months and 3 year, distinguish between real and imagined events
How should parents respond to imaginary playmates?

Language Development

Vocabulary

Fast mapping causes them to absorb the meaning of a new word after hearing it only once or twice in conversation
The use of metaphor, a figure of speech in which a word or phrase that usually designates one thing is applied to another, becomes increasingly common

Language Development

Grammar and Syntax

At 3, children typically begin to use plurals, possessives, and past tense
Still make errors of overregularization because they have not yet learned exceptions to rules

Language Development

At 3,can use 900 to 1000 words
At 6, can speak 2600 words and understand 20,000
At entry in high school, can understand 80,000 words

Language Development

Pragmatics and Social Speech

Pragmatics=the practical knowledge of how to use language to communicate
Social speech=speech intended to be understood by a listener

Language Development

Private Speech

Talking aloud to oneself with not intent to communicate with others
Normal and common in childhood, accounting for 20 to 50 percent of what 4 to 10-year-old children say

Language Development

Delayed language Development

Some late speakers have a history of otitis media between 12 and 18 months of age
Delayed language development can have far-reaching cognitive, social, and emotional consequences
Children who do not speak or understand as well as their peers tend to be judged negatively by adults and other children

Language Development

Social Interaction and Preparation for Literacy

Emergent Literacy=development of skills, knowledge, and attitudes that underlie reading and writing
Social interaction can promote emergent literacy
Reading to children is one of the most effective paths to literacy

Preparation for Literacy

Phonemes-the basic sounds of language
Dinner table talk helps children develop their vocabulary
Too much television watching can rob children of interactive language opportunities

Information Processing

Memory Development:
Recognition and Recall

Recognition=ability to identify something encountered before
Recall=ability to reproduce knowledge from memory

Information Processing

Forming Childhood Memories: three types

Generic=general outline of a familiar, repeated event without details of time or place
Episodic=awareness of having experienced a particular incident that occurred at a specific time and place
Autobiographical=memories that form a person’s life history

Information Processing

Influences on Autobiographical Memory

Preschoolers tend to remember things they did better than things they saw
How adults talk with a child about a shared experience affects how well the child will recall it
Elaborative parents focus on having a mutually rewarding conversation and affirming the child’s responses
Repetitive parents focus on checking the child’s memory performance

Information Processing

Implicit Memory

Memories are conscious (explicit) or unconscious (implicit)

Psychometric Approach

Traditional Psychometric Measures

Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale: measure memory, spatial orientation, and practical judgment in real-life situations
Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence: separate verbal and performance scores as well as a combined score

Influences on Measured Intelligence

At 5 years, there becomes a high correlation between IQ scores
Child’s temperament may contribute to the way parents perceive them
When mothers feel a child is “difficult,” may give them more assistance an be more critical
Family life has greatest influence early in childhood, and diminishes greatly in adolescence

Psychometric Approach

Influences on Measured Intelligence

The IQ score is a measure of how well a child can do certain tasks in comparison with others of the same age
Factors affecting test result include temperament, match between cognitive style and the tasks posed, social and emotional maturity, ease in the testing situation, preliteracy, or literacy skills, socioeconomic status, and ethnic background

Vygotskian Approach

Testing and Teaching Based on Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development”

Adults direct children’s learning most effectively in the zone of proximal development (ZPD)
The ZPD, along with scaffolding can help parents and teachers efficiently guide children’s cognitive progress

How meaningful is intelligence testing of young children? If you were a preschool or kindergarten teacher, how helpful do you think it would be to know a child’s IQ? The child’s ZPD?

Can you think of an effective way in which you have used scaffolding, or seen it used?

Early Childhood Education

Goals and Types of Preschool Education: A Cross-Cultural View

Most preschools in the United States and many other western countries have followed a “child-centered” philosophy stressing social and emotional growth in line with young children’s developmental needs
In countries such as China, preschools provide academic preparation for schooling

Early Childhood Education

Compensatory Preschool Programs

For children of low-income families in the United States, Project Head Start, a federally funded program, was started in 1965
The program provides medical, dental, and mental health care, social services, and at least one hot meal a day

Compensatory Preschool Programs

The most successful programs have the most parental participation
Those involved in Project Head Start, need less special education services, are less likely to repeat a grade, and more likely to graduate from high school
IQ increases associated with the program tend to disappear once they start school

Early Childhood Education

Entering kindergarten

Partly because of pressures for academic achievement and partly to meet the needs of working parents, many kindergartners now spend a full day in school rather than the traditional half day

The Transition to Kindergarten

Children in 210 day programs out perform those in the 180 day one
Children adjust best if attend with peers they already know
Child’s relationship with their kindergarten teacher greatly affects child’s later success
IQ is one of the best predictors of academic success
The most important behavioral measure is attentiveness

Psychosocial Development in Early Childhood

Chapter 11

The Developing Self

The Self-Concept And Cognitive Development

Self-concept is our image of ourselves
Cognitive construction is how we describe and evaluate ourselves

The Self-Concept

At 4 years, begin to have a self-definition
At 4 years, statements about self are “single representations” from a particular to a particular
The child talks about self in positive, all-or-nothing terms

The Developing Self

Understanding Emotions

Helps children guide their behavior in social situations and talk about feelings
Controls how children show feelings and to be empathetic
Affected by family relationships
At 7 to 8, begin to show a sense of shame and pride

The Developing Self

Erickson: Initiative Versus Guilt:

Growing sense of the child wanting to plan and carry out activities versus pangs of conscience the child may have about such plans due to conflict with parent
Self-esteem-judgment children make about their worth
With high self-esteem, they are motivated to achieve

Initiative versus Guilt

Conflicts over a growing sense of “purpose” and pangs of conscience
Children must reconcile their desire to “do” with their desire for approval
If conflict is not adequately resolved, as an adult may be constantly striving for success or showing off, or is inhibited and unspontaneous

Self-Esteem

Children can’t articulate self-worth until age 8, but show by their behavior that they have one
Young children usually overrate their abilities
Self-esteem is contingent on success
About 1/3 to ½ preschoolers or 1^st graders show a “helpless” pattern that may persist into adulthood

Gender

Gender Differences

Intelligence test scores show not gender differences
Females tend to do better at verbal tasks (but not analogies), at computation, and at tasks requiring fine motor and perceptual skills
Males excel in most spatial abilities and in abstract mathematical and scientific reasoning

Gender

Perspectives on Gender Development:

Nurture: social expectations on boys and girls from birth with regard to gender roles, gender-typing, and gender stereotypes.
Nature: the lack of strong evidence of biological bases of behavior suggests that the role of biology in gender differences is limited

Gender

Gender identity-awareness of one’s femaleness or maleness
As early as 2 years, sexes make different choices of toys and play activities
Girls and boys are more alike than different
Boys are more aggressive
Girls are more empathetic, prosocial

Gender

Gender roles-traits a culture considers appropriate for males and females
Gender typing-the acquisition of gender roles
Gender stereotypes-preconceived generalizations about male and female behavior

Biological Approach

At age 5, brains reach approximate adult size
Boys’ brains are 10 percent larger, girls’ have more density
Girls’ brains have a lager corpus collosum
Males have extra testosterone and lower amount of serotonin, seem related to aggressiveness, competitiveness
Girls with “congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) develop into “tomboys”

Psychoanalytic Approach

Identification-adoption of characteristics, beliefs, attitudes, values, and behaviors of parent of same sex
This comes about when child represses or gives up the wish to possess the parent of the opposite sex
This theory has little research support

Cognitive Approach

According to Kohlberg, children adopt behaviors they perceive as consistent with their gender
Gender constancy-realization that their sex will always be the same, comes from ages 3 to 7
Gender-schema theory—children socialize themselves by developing information about what it means to be male or female

Socialization-Based Approach

Children pick models they see as powerful or nurturing
Boys are more strongly gender-socialized than girls
Fathers show more discomfort if boy plays with a doll or girl with a truck
Girls have more freedom in clothes, games, and choice of friends

Play: The Business of Early Childhood

The Social Dimensions of Play:

Parton found that as children get older, their play tends to become social and interactive.
Imaginative play, which shift from solitary pretending to dramatic play involving other children, becomes more social

Play: The Business of Early Childhood

Types of Play:

Active functional play involves repetitive muscular movements
Constructive play uses objects or materials to make something
Pretend play, also called fantasy play, dramatic play, or imaginative play, rests on the symbolic function
Formal games with rules, such as hopscotch

Play: The Business of Early Childhood

How Gender Influences Play:

Most boys like rough-and-tumble play in fairly large groups; girls are inclined to quieter play with one playmate
Dramatic play—boys’ stories often involve danger and discord (such as mock battles); girls’ plots generally focus on maintaining or restoring orderly social relationships (playing house)

Parenting and Form of Discipline

Discipline-methods of teaching self-control and acceptable behavior
Children learn best by being reinforced for their good behavior
External reinforcers-may be candy, money, gold stars, a smile etc.
Internal reinforcers-a sense of pleasure or accomplishment

Discipline

Parents should strive to not reinforce misbehavior by giving their attention to what they do not want to be repeated
Punishment should be consistent, immediate, and clearly tied to the offense
Punishment is most effective when given with a short explanation
Corporal punishment can lead to serious negative consequences

Parenting

Forms of Discipline:

Corporal punishment-physical force
Power assertion-physical or verbal force
Inductive techniques-setting limits, reasoning with child
Withdrawal of love-ignoring showing dislike for child

Parenting

Parenting Styles:

Authoritarian parents, (Baumrind), value control and unquestioning obedience.
Permissive parents value self-expression and self-regulation
Authoritative parents value a child’s individuality but also stress social constraints.
Neglectful, or uninvolved—to describe parents who, focus on their own needs rather than on those of the child (Maccoby & Martin)

Parenting

Promoting Altruism And Dealing With Aggression And Fearfulness:

Altruism=acting out of concern for another person with no expectation of reward.
Prosocial behavior, voluntary activity intended to benefit another.
The family is important as a model
Children act appropriately since they want to earn praise and avoid disapproval.

In a society in which “good Samaritans” are sometimes reviled for “butting into other people’s business” and sometimes attacked by the very persons they try to help, is it wise to encourage children to offer help to strangers?

Parenting

Causes of Aggression And Fearfulness:

Instrumental aggression=used as an instrument to reach a goal
Hostile aggression=action intended to hurt another person
A negative early relationship with the mother is a factor
Harsh punishment, especially spanking
Fears may come from personal experience or from hearing about other people’s experiences

Fearfulness

Fears are common at 2-4 years, and disappear as grow older and lose sense of powerlessness
Parents can help by not being too overprotective and by offering reassurance
Systematic desensitization-gradual exposure to a feared object or situation

Relationship With Other Children

Siblings—Or Their Absence:

By competing with and comparing themselves with other children, they can gauge their physical, social, cognitive, and linguistic competencies and gain a more realistic sense of self (Bandura, 1994)
Ties between brothers and sisters often set the stage for later relationships

Relationships With Other Children

Playmates And Friends:

Through friendships and interactions with casual playmates, young children learn how to get along with others.
Well-liked preschoolers and kindergartners, and those who are rated by parents and teacher as socially competent, generally cope well with anger.

Siblings

Earliest sibling disputes are over property rights
Among 2 and 4 year old siblings, disputes arise over property rights about every 15 minutes
Squabbling can be a bid for parental attention

Playmates and Friends

Children start having friends at 3 year, play with others own sex and age
They like school better when start the year by having friends in their classroom
Popular ones tend to have a warm, positive relationship with their parents
Parents can help their child’s adjustment by arranging “play dates” with others

Physical Development and Health in Middle Childhood

Chapter 12