Infancy and Childhood

Objectives 5-16 Click to edit Master subtitle style

3/2/12

Thesis
During infancy, a baby grows

from newborn to toddler, and during childhood from toddler to teenager. We all traveled this path, develop physically, cognitively, and socially. From infancy on, brain and mind, neural hardware and cognitive software, develop together.

Objective 5 Brain Development

-Describe some developmental changes in a childs brain, and explain why maturation accounts for many of our similarities. When in the placenta, our body makes

1/4 quarter million nerve cells per minute then it becomes a stable 23 billion at birth. At birth your system is immature. Then from 3 to 6 years old your frontal lobe develops the fastest. Our association areas are the last to develop. Maturation is the biological growth processes that enable orderly changes in behavior, relatively uninfluenced by experience. Maturation sets the basic course of development; experience adjusts it.

Objective 6 Motor Development

- Explain why we have few memories of experiences during The four major events in the motor development sequence are our first three years of life.
rolling over, sitting unsupported, crawling, then walking. Maturation comes at different times, for example 25% of all babies walk by 11 month, 50% usually a week after turning one, and 90% by age 15 months. Genes play a major role in maturation. Biological maturation creates our readiness to walk by age 1. Experience doesn't have a big effect before maturation. Example: potty training

Objective 7 Maturation and Infant Memory

- Explain why we have few memories of experiences during our first three years of life.
Studies confirm that the average earliest age of recalling memories is 3.5

years. By 4 to 5 years, childhood amnesia is giving way to remembered experiences. As the brain cortex matures, toddlers develop a sense of self and their longterm storage increases and moreover, young childrens preverbal memories dont easily translate into their later language. What the conscious mind does not know and cannot express in words, the nervous system somehow remembers. Infantile amnesia- an inability to consciously recall events that happened before age 3 and is a result of the change in the way the brain categorizes memories at that age.

Objective 8 Cognitive Development

- State Piagets understanding of hoe the mind develops, and discuss the importance of assimilation and Jean Piaget suggested that children DID NOT know less than adults, but accommodation in this process. simply knew differently than adults. Children reason in wildly illogical ways
about problems whose solutions are self-evident to adults. Piaget also believed that a childs mind develops through a series of stages from their simple born reflexes to an adults advanced reasoning power. We assimilate new experiences, which means we convert them into familiar and current understandings (schemas). We also adjust, or accommodate our schemas to fit the particulars of new experiences. As children grow older and interact with the world, they develop and modify their schemas. Schemas- mental molds into which we pour our experiences (also known as concepts) Assimilate- interpreting ones new experience in terms of ones existing schemas Accommodate- adapting ones current understandings (schemas) to incorporate new information.

Objective 9 Piaget's Theory and Current Thinking

-Outline Piagets four main stages of knowing , development, and Mental activities associated with thinking , cognitive remembering , and comment on how childrens thinking cognition .during these four stages. communicating is the best referred as changes Birth to age 2, children experience the world through their senses and actions in the sensorimotor stage. Age 2 to about 6 or 7, children learn to use language and can reason logically in the pre-operational stage. Age 7 to 11, children can think logically about concrete events , grasp analogies , and perform arithmetical operational in the concrete operational stage. 12 through adulthood, they gain the ability to reason abstractly in the formal operational stage. The awareness that things continue to exist even when not perceived is object permanence. People's ideas about their own and others' mental states is theory of mind about their feelings , perceptions , and thoughts and the behavior these might predict.

Objective 10 Reflecting on Piagets Theory

- Discuss psychologists current views on Piagets theory of Recent research shows that young children are more capable and their cognitive development.
development more continuous than Piaget believed. He identified significant cognitive milestones and stimulated worldwide interest in how the mind develops. He believed that the cognitive abilities that emerge at each stage have begun developing at earlier ages. Piaget contended that children construct their understandings from their interactions with the world. Children are incapable of adult logic until they are getting three years old. Today's researchers also see formal logic as a smaller part of cognition than Piaget did. Nonetheless, studies support his idea that human cognition unfolds basically in the sequence he proposed.

Objective 11 Social Development

-Define stranger the fear Stranger anxiety is anxiety.of unfamiliar faces that infants commonly display, beginning by about eight months of age, and then soon after object permanence emerges. They greet strangers by crying and reaching for their familiar caregivers such their parents. At this age children have schemas for familiar faces and become distressed when they cannot assimilate new faces into these remembered schemas.

Objective 12 Origins of attachments

survival impulse that keeps infants close to their caregivers. - Infants become attached to those who satisfy their need. - Body contact gave secure base to venture into the environment. Example of how Harlow's monkeys preferred nonnourishment. - Critical period is a time period shortly after birth where the organism feels certain stimuli and experience. Imprinting is the process an animal for attachment during the critical period. - Children do not imprint.

-Discuss the effects of

- Attachmentbody contact, and familiarity on infant social attachment. nourishment, bond is a powerful

Objective 13 Attachment Differences

-Contrast secure and insecure attachment, and discuss the roles of parents and infants in the development of put in a strange an infants feelings of basic about When infants are attachment andsituation (laboratory playroom) trust. 60% of

them demonstrate secure attachment (with their mothers present, they play happily and normally until she leaves. Then the child becomes distressed and looks for contact with her as soon as she returns) Others, may demonstrate insecure attachment (less likely to explore and cling to their mother). Mary Ainsworth (1979) studied the attachment differences. She observed mother-infant pairs at home during their first 6 months and 1 year old in a strange situation without their mothers. Van Den Bloom randomly assigned 6- to 9-month-old temperamentally difficult infants to either an experimental condition, or to an untreated control condition. Erik Erikson and his wife Joan Erickson discovered that securely attached children They approach life with a sense of basic trust (a sense that the world is predictable and

Objective 14 Attachment Differences

-Contrast secure and insecure attachment, and discuss the roles of parents and infants in the development of attachment Deprivation of Attachment: of basic trust. and an infants feelings
caregiver, or locked away at home under conditions of abuse or extreme neglect, are often withdrawn, frightened, even speechless. Though most abusers were indeed abused, most abused children do not later become violent criminals or abusive parents. Although children are able to recover quickly from difficult conditions, extreme childhood trauma can leave footprints on the brain. Serotonin response has been found in abused children who become aggressive teens and adults. "Stress can set off a ripple of hormonal changes tha permanently wire a child's brain to cope with an evil world." abuse researcher Martin Teicher
Babies reared in institutions without the stimulation and attention of a regular

Objective 14 (Continued)
Disruption of Attachment: Separated from their families, both monkeys and human infants become upset and, before long, withdrawn and even despairing. Courts are usually reluctant to remove children from their homes because they fear stress of separation might cause lasting damage. If placed in a more positive and stable environment, most infants recover from the separation distress. In adoption studies when children between 6 and 16 months were removed from their foster mothers they initially had difficulties eating, sleeping, and relating to their new mothers. But when these were studied at age 10, little visible affect was shown. Adults also suffer when attachment bonds are severed. Whether it occurs through death or separation, the break produces a predictable sequence of agitated preoccupation with the lost partner followed by deep sadness and eventually the beginnings of emotional detachment and a return to normal living.

Objective 14 (Continued)
Does Day Care affect attachment? High quality day care programs usually studied showed day are is not bad for children, and does not disrupt children's attachments to their parents. High quality child care consists of warm, supportive interactions with adults in a safe, healthy, and stimulating environment. Poor care is boring unresponsive to children's needs. Researchers found that at ages 4 1/2 to 6 those children who had spent the most time in day care had slightly advanced thinking and language skills. They also had increased rate of aggressiveness and defiance. Toddlers stress hormone levels tend to rise during days spent in day care and to diminish during days spent at home. When mothers transition from welfare to work, their preschool children do not suffer negative outcomes. Although working mothers spend less total time with their infants they tend to partially make up for that time by giving up other activities such as socializing during their off days, they spend their off hours playing with talking to and holding their infants. What all children need is a consistent warm relationship with people who they can learn to trust.

Objective 15 Selfconcept

-Trace the onset and development of children's self-concept.

- self concept is a sense of one's own identity and personal worth. - children, by the age of 12, have developed a self-concept.

Behavior provides clues to a baby's beginning of self-awareness. - a child's self-concept gradually strengthens from self-recognition, to gender, group memberships, and psychological traits.

Objective 16 Childrearing Practices

-Describe three parenting styles, and offer three potential parenting styles the link between authoritative parenting and social explanations for vary from spanking, to reasoning, to hugs and competence. kisses. - authoritarian parents enforce rules and teach their children obedience. - permissive parents submit to their children's desires, rarely make demands, and use little punishment. - authoritative parents are both demanding and responsive; rules are enforced with explanations, open discussions, and exceptions. *the association between certain parenting styles and certain childhood outcomes is correlational.