EARLY CHILDHOOD: Physical and cognitive development

Physical Development and Health Concerns

Physical Growth and Motor- Skill Development  Gross Motor Skills  Fine Motor Skills

Sensory Development  Visual, Tactile, and Kinesthetic Senses  Hearing and Language Development  Olfactory and Gustatory Sensations

The Brain and the Nervous System  Rapid development

Children at Risk of Cognitive Delays n Congenital Birth Defects n Autism n Young Children with Behavior Problems n Chemical Exposure in Young Children n Further Resources for Young Children with Mental Retardation and Other Developmental Delays

Nutrition and Health Issues  Variability in Eating Behaviors  When a child refuses certain foods  Eating frequency  Dental health affects nutritional intake  Food allergies  A vegetarian diet  Good Health Also Means Sufficient Calories  Poverty Effects on Nutrition and Health  Safety Practices in a Young Child’s Environment  Children with HIV or AIDS

Self-Care Behaviors  Toilet Training  Sleep  Illness and Immunization

Demographic Trends and Implications for Child Health  Implications for health of minority children  Infant Mortality Rates

Child Mortality Rates and Causes n Causes of Death for Young Children –child mortality in minority communities n Future Directions

Cognitive Development

Intelligence and Its Assessment  Intelligence: A global capacity to understand the world, think rationally, and cope resourcefully with the challenges of life.

Intelligence: Single or Multiple Factors?  Multiple Intelligences  Intelligence as Process  Intelligence as Information Processing

Intelligence as a Process  Its not “what” we know, but “how” we know

Intelligence as Information Processing  Conclusions from gifted children studies:  Gifted children ignore irrelevant information.  Insights increase performance of non-gifted children.  Insight skills can be developed by training.

Intelligence and the Nature- Nurture Controversy  Hereditarian Position:  Intelligence tests prove importance of heredity.  Environmentalist Rebuttal:  Intellect is affected by environment.  Contemporary Scientific Consensus

Piaget’s Theory of Preoperational Thought  Years between 2 and 7  Children develop a capacity to represent the external world internally through use of symbols.  Symbols are things that stand for something else.

Difficulties in Solving Conservation Problems  Conservation: The concept that the quantity or amount of something stays the same regardless of changes in its shape or position

Centration  Preoperational children concentrate on one feature of a situation and neglect other aspects

States and Transformations  Preoperational children pay attention to states rather than transformations

Nonreversibility  Preoperational children fail to recognize that operations can be gone through in reverse order to get back to the starting point.  Egocentrism: Lack of awareness that there are viewpoints other than one’s own.

Critiques of Piaget’s Egocentric Child  Talking and Communicating  Altruism and Prosocial Behavior

The Child’s Theory of Mind  Implicit Understanding and Knowledge: Piaget underestimates cognitive capabilities of preschoolers:  Causality: Our attribution of a cause-and- effect relationship to two paired events that recur in succession.  Numbers Concepts

Language Acquisition  Mastery of phonology (different sounds within the language) and morphology (how a word can change forms)  Developmental Phonological Disorders  Stuttering

Chomsky’s Linguistic Theory n Language acquisition device (LAD) takes what the child hears and produces consistent grammar

Late Talkers  Quiet baby  Premature  Twin  Male  bilingual  Siblings communicating child’s wishes

Vygotsky’s Perspective  Children learn in a social setting.  Zone of proximal development (ZPD):  Children master tasks when they are helped by a more skilled partner

Language and Emotion n Talking and Communicating n Disabilities in Cognitive Development

Information Processing and Memory

Early Memory  Memory refers to the retention of what has been experienced.  Childhood amnesia  Freud: Repressed memories  Piaget: Adults no longer think as children

Information Processing  Sensory Information Storage  Short-Term Memory  Long Term Memory

Metacognition and Metamemory  Individual’s awareness of their own mental processes: metacognition.  Individual’s awareness of their own memory processes: metamemory.

Memory Strategies  Rehearsal as a Memory Strategy  Categorization as a Memory Strategy

Moral Development  Ability to recall feelings allows for moral development  Reciprocity: leads to each child’s valuing each other in a way that allows him to remember the values brought forth by the interaction.

Piaget’s Theory n Evolution of Moral Reasoning –Reciprocity of Attitudes and Values –Playing by the Rules –Intentionality vs. accident

Kohlberg’s Theory n Moral reasoning develops in progressive stages through social experiences n Preschool children in preconventional stage