Toddlerhood (Ages 2 and 4)

– To describe the expansion of motor skills during

toddlerhood, indicating their importance for the child’s
expanding capacity to explore the environment and
experience opportunities for mastery
– To document accomplishments in language
development and describe the influences of
interactive experiences and the language
environment for gaining communicative competence
– To describe the development of fantasy play and its
importance for cognitive and social development
– To examine the development of self-control,
especially impulse management and goal attainment,
highlighting strategies young children use to help
them regulate their actions
– To analyze the psychosocial crisis of
autonomy versus shame and doubt, to clarify
the central process of imitation, and to
describe the prime adaptive ego strength of
will and the core pathology of compulsion
– To apply a psychosocial analysis to the topic
of day care, emphasizing the impact of the
social environment on patterns of
development during toddlerhood
 Elaboration of Locomotion

– Plays a central role in the toddler’s

psychosocial development, facilitating the
transformation of ideas into action, and
prompting new types of interactions with the
social and physical environment
– Caregivers must limit locomotion to protect
child’s safety
– Advances occur in walking and running;
jumping; hopping; throwing and catching;
pedaling and steering
 Language Development
– Piaget describes the years from about 2 to 5 or 6 as
the stage of preoperational thought or a transitional
period during which the schemes that were developed
during infancy are represented internally
– The most significant achievement of this new stage of
cognitive development is the capacity for semiotic or
representational thinking - understanding one thing
can stand for another through signs and symbols
– Symbols are usually related in some way to the object
for which they stand
– Children become adept at using all the aspects of
language that permit effective participation in the
language environment of their culture
 Language Development
– Language Perception: capacity to recognize language
sounds, including phonetic combinations of letters
and words and the intonation of sentences
– Babbling: characterized by sounds of connecting
consonants and vowels and repeating these
combinations occurs around 6 to 10 months
– Communication with Gestures: by 8 months infants
use gestures to achieve a goal
– Early Grammar: refers to rules that guide combination
of words and phrases in order to preserve meaning
and is apparent by 7 or 8 months
 Language Development

First Words
– Receptive language: around 8 months of age infants
understand the meanings of some individual words
and phrases
– A significant event in the development of language
production is the naming of objects
– Holophrases are single-word utterances accompanied
by a gesture, action, vocal intonation, or emotion
– Vocabulary: during the period form 12 to 16 months,
infants make significant progress in learning the
names of objects and applying them to pictures or
real examples
 Language Development
– The average toddler of 30 months has a spoken
vocabulary of 570 words. In order to accomplish this
feat, children seem to fast-map new meanings as
they experience words in conversation
– Two-word sentences, or telegraphic speech, occurs
from 16 to 30 months of age
 Language Development

– Grammatical Transformations: by the age of

4, children appear to be able to structure their
sentences using most grammatical rules
without instruction
• Once children learn the rule for expressing the
past tense by adding ‘ed’, they occasionally
overregularize this rule and begin to make errors
(e.g., runned)
• Grammatical errors children make alert us to the
fact that they are working to figure out a system of
rules with which to communicate meaning
 Language Development
– Although fundamentals of language are well
established by age 4, there are still some things that
toddlers cannot achieve with language
– Important language functions develop more fully
during early and middle childhood
– Language becomes a vehicle for creative expression
– Language plays a critical role in the resolution of
subsequent psychosocial crises, especially the
establishment of group identity, intimacy, and
generativity
 Language Development
– When speaking to toddlers, adults and older
children adjust their spoken language in the
following ways:
• They simplify utterances to correspond with the
toddler’s interests and comprehension level
• They emphasize the here and now
• They use a more restricted vocabulary
• They do a lot of paraphrasing
• They use simple, well-formed sentences
• They use frequent repetitions
• They use a slow rate of speech with pauses
between utterances and after the major content
words
 Language Development

– Scaffolding occurs in which children try to

match the verbal expressions used by adults
– Adults use expansion to help clarify a child’s
meaning of speech
– Adults also use prompting, often in the form of
a question, to help with the child’s language
development and communication skills
– Reading and language games also enhance
language development
 Fantasy Play
– The worlds of make-believe, poetry, fairy tales, and
folklore, the domains we often associate with
childhood, open up to the toddler as the ability for
symbolization expands
– Sensorimotor play consists of the repetition of motor
activity
– Symbolic play, or pretend play, appears around 2
years of age. A vivid mental image of an action
permits them to copy what they recall rather than
what they see
– Pretense, whether through symbolic play, symbolic
drawing, or telling make-believe stories, requires that
children understand the difference between pretend
and reality
 Fantasy Play
• Fantasy Play: Changes in Fantasy Play During
Toddlerhood
– Children engaged in solitary pretense are involved in
their own fantasy activities
– Children engaged in social play join with other
children in some activity
– In social pretend play, children have to coordinate
their pretense
– Play changes in 4 ways during toddlerhood
• The action component becomes more complex as
children integrate a sequence of actions
• Children’s focus shifts from the self to fantasies
that involve others and the creation of multiple
roles
 Fantasy Play
• The play involves the use of substitute objects,
including objects children only pretend to have,
and eventually the invention of complex characters
and situations
• The play becomes more organized and planned,
and play leaders emerge
• Fantasy Play: The Contributions of Fantasy Play
to Development
– Children use fantasy play to experiment with and
understand their social and physical environments
and to expand their thinking
– Vygotsky viewed fantasy play as a zone of proximal
development of the child in which a range of potential
could be reached
 Fantasy Play

• Fantasy Play: The Contributions of Fantasy Play

to Development
– Adults and more advanced peers promote
development by enabling children in activities and
problem-solving tasks that draw children into their
zone of proximal development, the new directions
along which their capacities are moving
• Fantasy Play: The Role of Play Companions
– Play companions can elaborate a child’s capacity for
fantasy, legitimize fantasy play, and help the child to
explore new domains of fantasy
 Self-Control

Language and Fantasy as Strategies for

Controlling Impulse:
– talking about and acting out feelings and needs
enables adults to help children understand more
about their emotions and to help them devise
strategies for self-regulation
– Parents articulate the family or cultural rules of
emotional expression
– Adults help modify the intensity of emotions through
reassuring or distracting talk
– Adults give children ideas for ways to manage their
impulses
– Children listen to and imitate adults who talk about
their own strong emotions and impulses
 Self-Control

• Self-Control: Control of Impulses

– Increasing sensitivity to the distress of others
– Disciple strategies
• Power assertion
• Love withdrawal
• Inductions
– Parental modeling and reinforcement of acceptable
behaviors are also associated with the development
of impulse control
– Discipline that is immediate or as close in time to the
situation as possible, and is appropriately firm, but not
overreactive helps develop self-control
– Individual differences in the ability to control impulses
– Toddlers differ in their capacity to emphasize with the
distress of others
 Self-Control

• Self-Control: Control of Impulses

– Differences in temperament affect self-control
• Effortful control: a child’s ability to suppress a
dominant response and perform a subdominant
response instead
– Capacity for self-regulation may depend on the quality
of the mother-infant attachment
• Delay gratification: a child must exert willpower in
order to resist a strong immediate pull or
temptation
• Self-regulated goal attainment, or a toddlers
feelings that they can direct their behavior and the
behavior of others to achieve intended outcomes,
is also associated with the development of self-
control
 Self-Control

• Self-Control: Control of Impulses

– Agency - view of themselves as the originators of
action—expands to include a broad array of
behaviors
– Speech plays a central role in self-directed goal
attainment and practical problem solving
The Psychosocial Crisis: Autonomy versus
Shame and Doubt
– Autonomy: the ability to behave
independently, to perform actions on one’s
own
– Shame and Doubt: some children fail to
emerge from toddlerhood with a sense of
mastery
• Shame: an intense emotion that can result from
social ridicule or criticism and internal conflict
• Doubt: a lack of self-confidence and worth and
have a constant sense of failure