HUMAN DEVELOPMENT DEVELO0PMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY CHAPTER 8

PERIOD FROM 2-6 IS CALLED EARLY CHILDHOOD OR THE PRESCHOOL PERIOD BUT WE CALL IT THE PLAY YEARS TO UNDERSCORE THE IMPORTANCE OF Play AS CHILDREN'S"WORK"-- ACQUIRING THE SKILLS, IDEAS, AND VALUES CRUCIAL TO GROWING UP.

PHYSICAL PLAY SENSORIMOTOR PLAY: Play that captures the pleasures of using the senses and motor abilities. Children enjoy exploring their sense of motion and balance. MASTERY PLAY: Play that leads to mastery of new skills. Walk to store can become numerous mastery play experiences. ROUGH AND TUMBLE PLAY: Mimicry of aggression but children almost always smile and laugh during this kind of play whereas they frown and scowl in real fighting.

IMPORTANCE OF PLAY Play is children's work--major means through which physical and social skills are strengthened and cognitive development occurs. Healthy animals of all species play when they are young--they practice the motor skills they will need as adults. Nurturing behaviors are also learned through play.

PHYSICAL GROWTH/DEVELOPMENT Body lengthens, child becomes slimmer. By age 5 the average child weighs about 40 lbs. and is about 43 inches tall. By age 6, proportions are similar to adult. According to Lowrey,1978 study, girls tend to be heaviest because they are more likely to eat too much and exercise too little. Most common nutritional problem is iron deficiency anemia, chief symptom chronic fatigue. –Sweets can be a contributor to nutritional problems. –Tooth decay is a chronic disease directly correlated with sugar intake

GROWTH PROBLEMS Dwarfism: abnormal shortness Giantism: abnormal tallness. When growth abnormality is result of genetic condition or prenatal abnormality hormones can be given to regulate growth. Earlier treatment the better.

CHANGES IN THE CENTRAL NERVOUS SYSTEM AND IN VARIOUS ORGANS ARE IMPORTANT TO THE CHILD'S DEVELOPMENT FOR THEY UNDERLIE MANY EMERGING ABILITIES.

BRAIN MATURATION By age 5 brain has attained 90% of its adult weight; even thought the child's body weighs only about one-third of adult's. Part of increase in brain's size is due to MYELINATION which is an ongoing process providing the nerves with insulating sheathing that speeds up transmission of neural impulses. Areas of the brain associated with eye-hand coordination do not become fully myelinated until about age 4. Unless the child is neurologically able to concentrate, sitting in one place and keeping an eye on the teacher can be a difficult task

LEFT AND RIGHT BRAIN Left hemisphere controls right side of body, right hemisphere controls left side. In 95% of right handed adults and 70% of left handed adults, LEFT SIDE of brain deals with logical analysis and language development RIGHT SIDE deals with visual and artistic skills. Clear emergence of hand preference comes during preschool years although there is some indications that even infants show a preference

EYE MATURATION Children younger than 6 do not usually have sufficiently developed eye muscles to allow them to move their eyes slowly and deliberately across a series of small letters. Even 3 year olds can focus on tiny images momentarily.

BODY CHANGES Children appear "healthier" because of physiological changes as well as exposure and production of more antibodies. Patterns of eating and sleeping become more adult like. About 21% of all 6 year olds still wet the bed and one in eight has this problem at age 10.

READINESS FOR SCHOOL Ilg and Ames: Readiness Tests--gross and fine motor skills correlated with later school achievement. Gesell Institute, center for study of child development/Yale maintains that two thirds of all American children begin formal education before they are ready. David Elkind thinks that formal reading instruction should be delayed until age 6-7 unless they are very ready and then younger children should be allowed to learn. Some very gifted children teach themselves. Reading to preschool children, listening to them, helping them with vocabulary and concepts are far better for developing "readiness" than teaching them to recite the alphabet, write their names, and recognize letters and numbers.

MASTERING MOTOR SKILLS

GROSS MOTOR SKILLS Between 2 and 6 as child's body becomes slimmer, stronger, and less top heavy gross motor skills improve dramatically. By 5 most children can ride a trike, climb a ladder, pump a swing, and throw, catch and kick a ball. Preschool children learn basic motor skills by teaching themselves and learning from other children, rather than by specific adult instruction.

FINE MOTOR SKILLS Skills involve small body movements, are much harder than large for preschoolers to master than gross motor skills. Chief reason many children experience these difficulties is simply that they have not developed the muscular control or judgment needed for the exercise of fine motor skills, in part because the myelination of the necessary parts of the central nervous system is not complete. Many educators consider the development of fine motor skills to be an important goal of the preschool curriculum. The fine motor skill that seems most directly linked to later development is the skill of making marks on paper

CHILDREN'S ART Children use art as a form of mastery play. One longitudinal study showed a link between fine motor skills such as drawing a rectangle and later reading writing and spelling abilities.

Kellogg's age related stages of drawing: 1. Placement (up to age 3) marks on paper covering all or part of paper. 2. Shapes (age 3) tries to make basic shapes, circle, X,square 3. Design(3.5) uses basic shapes and scribbles- circle within circle. 4. Pictorial(4-5) tries to form pictures of people, animals, buildings. First drawings are not intended to be representational. Children are mystified when adults ask "What is it?"

ACTIVITY LEVEL Age2-3 higher activity level than any other time in life. Slows down between 3 and 6 and continues to decrease between 6 and 9. Likelihood of a child being seriously injured in an accident decrease with each year after 3(decrease in activity level. development of motor skills, cognitive maturity). Fatal poisoning most likely to occur at age 1, drowning age 2, struck by motor vehicle age 3. Child's chances of having an accident depend on three factors: amount of adult supervision, safety of play space, child's activity level. Boys are more active than girls, take more risks, have more accidents (about one-third more at age one and twice as many at age 5).

SEX DIFFERENCES AND SIMILARITIES Boys and girls follow almost identical paths of physical development during early childhood. Boys are slightly taller and more muscular, forearm strength is greater, lose "baby fat" sooner and have somewhat less body fat throughout childhood. Girls mature faster in some areas.(bone age, lose teeth earlier) A 6 yr. old who cannot print legibly is more likely to be a boy. Psychologists (Gilligan,1982) speculate that play activities prepare boys for the largely male business world, where self-assertion and competition lead to success and girls play activities teach them to be patient, cooperative and relatively passive and gain skills that might help raise a family but handicap them in the work world.