Chapter 8 Physical and Cognitive Development in Early Childhood

Comprehension and Application Essay Questions

 

We recommend that you follow either our guidelines for "Answering Essay and Critical Thinking Questions," or those provided by your instructor, when preparing your response to these questions. Your answers to these kinds of questions demonstrate an ability to comprehend and apply ideas discussed in this chapter.

1. Explain reciprocal socialization. Provide at least two examples of how parents socialize their children and two examples of how children socialize their parents in your response.

2. Define attachment, and compare and contrast the psychoanalytic, social learning, cognitive, and ethological explanations for its development.

3. Indicate and explain the individual differences in attachment, and the relationship of early attachment to later social interactions.

4. Compare and contrast fathers' and mothers' ability to care for infants, and each parent's typical caregiving practices.

5. If you were a parent who could stay home with your children or place them in day care, what factors would you consider in making this decision?

6. Analyze your own temperament. Indicate whether your temperament is better explained by the Chess and Thomas or the Buss and Plomin approach. Also indicate how stable your temperament has been over the course of your development and what factors may have contributed to this stability or lack of stability.

7. Explain how developmentalists have studied emotions in infants.

8. Summarize their findings about infant emotions.

9. Explain Erikson's concept of trust versus mistrust.

10. Compare and contrast Mahler's and Erikson's explanations for the development of independence and the self during infancy.

11. Define and distinguish between child abuse and child maltreatment.

12. Evaluate the severity of child abuse, and explain why it is too simple to view child abuse as a result of the hostility of bad, sadistic parents.

 

Section IV

Chapter 8 Physical and Cognitive Development in Early Childhood

Summary

 

1.0 Images of Life-Span Development: Tony's Physical Development

 

Toddlers pose more problems and offer more rewards than infants to parents.

 

2.0 Physical Development in Early Childhood

 

Height and Weight. Growth slows down during early childhood. The average child grows 2.5 inches in height and gains 5-7 pounds during this period. Heredity and environment both influence growth patterns, which vary individually. Some children are unusually short as a result of congenital problems. The deprivation of affection may also alter the release of hormones by the pituitary gland, and lead to deprivation dwarfism.

 

The Brain. The brain and nervous system continue to develop during early childhood, although at a slower rate than during infancy. The brain reaches 75% of its adult size by the time a child is 3 years old, and 90% of its adult size by age five. Changes in the brain are due to increased connections between neurons and myelination, which speeds up the transmission of impulses in the brain. Increasing brain maturation contributes to improved cognitive abilities.

 

Motor Development. Motor development is important during early childhood. Gross motor skills include such actions as running, jumping, and climbing. These newly developed skills allow toddlers to become more active and mobile. Fine motor skills, such as drawing and building with blocks, improve substantially during early childhood.

 

Handedness. The tendency to use one hand more than another, develops during this time even though some evidence exists that hand preference may be seen in infants reaching for objects. Left-handed children are as competent in motor skills and intellect as right-handed children. There are both environmental and genetic explanations for handedness.

 

Nutrition. Energy needs increase as children pass through childhood. Adequate nutrition is necessary for growth, and an average preschool child should receive 1,700 calories per day in a diet that includes protein, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins, and minerals. Energy needs vary according to basal metabolism rate (BMR), rate of growth, and activity levels. Three-, four-, and five-year-olds have defined daily routines of eating. One important concern in our culture today is the excessive amount of fat and sugar in the diet. Eating problems often carryover from the toddler years. Parents should maintain a separation between the child's eating and discipline.

 

The State of Illness and Health in the World's Children. One of every three deaths in the world is that of a child under 5. Causes of children's death throughout the world include diarrhea, infection, acute respiratory infections, undernutrition, and poor hygiene. Oral hydration therapy has been successful in Bangladesh in reducing deaths from diarrhea. Most child malnutrition and death could be prevented by parental actions that are affordable and based on knowledge available today. Immunizations protect children from serious illnesses such as diphtheria and polio. The disorders most likely to be fatal during early childhood are birth defects, cancer, and heart disease.

 

3. 0 Cognitive Development

 

Piaget's Stage of Preoperational Thought. The preoperational period is the second stage in Piaget's theory of cognitive development. During the ages of 2 to 7 years, stable concepts are formed, mental reasoning emerges, magical belief systems are constructed, and egocentrism is perceptually based.

The first substage of this period is the symbolic function substage. During the ages of 2 to 4 years, the child gains the ability to develop mental representations of objects and events. Drawing, language, and symbolic play appear. Thinking is egocentric during the preoperational period, in that the child is unable to distinguish between his or her own perspective and the perspective of another. Animism also characterizes thought during this period. Children incorrectly attribute human qualities to inanimate objects.

The second substage is called the intuitive thought substage. During the ages of 4 to 7 years, children begin to reason about matters and have opinions, but they cannot explain how they know what they know. The child at this age can neither correctly classify objects into groups that belong together nor correctly reason about an object belonging simultaneously to two different classes. Thought is characterized by centration, in which attention focuses on one dimension only. In addition, children fail to understand conservation problems.

Several individuals have challenged Piaget's view of the child between 2 and 7 years of age. For example, Gelman's research has shown that improving a child's attention to relevant aspects of a task can improve the likelihood of a child offering correct responses on conservation tasks even though they are less than seven years old. Preoperational children ask many questions.

 

Information Processing. Information processing capacities related to attention and memory develop dramatically during early childhood. Attention span increases with age, and children become increasingly able to attend to relevant dimensions of a task rather than just attend to the most salient dimension. The latter ability may result from the cognitive control of attention.

Short-term memory retains information for about 20 to 30 seconds. With rehearsal, material can be maintained longer in short-term memory. Memory span increases from two digits in 2- to 3-year-old children to about five digits in 7-year-old children. Increased use of rehearsal and increased speed of processing may contribute to young children's memory improvement.

The information processing approach led to the analysis of the kinds of activities involved in the analysis of children's cognition. By making tasks simpler and more interesting, developmentalists have discovered that children may possess greater cognitive maturity than previously thought possible.

 

Language Development. Issues in the language development during early childhood concern Brown's stages, rule systems, and literacy. Roger Brown's model of young children's language development encompasses mean length of utterance (MLU), age ranges, characteristics of language, and sentence variations. Brown has described five stages of language development in which different syntactic structures appear at each stage.

Rule systems involve changes in phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics during the early childhood years. Evidence for morphological rules comes from the errors children make by generalizing the rule to irregular forms, such as using "foots" for "feet." There is evidence that children learn and apply syntactic rules. An example is that children apply rules for forming "wh-" questions by correct placement of the "wh-" word without, the inversion of the auxiliary verb. Semantic knowledge is also expanding during the time after the two-word stage. Vocabulary grows rapidly. Understanding of rules of conversation and pragmatics is also growing. Preschool children develop a command of displacement and begin to be sensitive to the conversational needs of others.

 

Vygotsky's Theory of Development. Vygotsky's theory has received more attention in recent years because cognition and language develop within a social context. The zone of proximal development is a measure of learning potential. The lower limit of the zone of proximal development is the problem solving ability that a child displays when working alone. The upper level encompasses the problem solving ability of a child when aided by an instructor. Vygotsky believes that language and thought first develop independently; however, later on they merge between the age of 3 and 7 as children develop internal speech, or talking to oneself. Vygotsky's view emphasizes the sociocultural context of development in contrast to Piaget who views young children as solitary scientists.

 

Early Childhood Education. Child-centered kindergarten programs involve the whole child, do not place a major emphasis on success, emphasize individual variation, and believe play contributes to development.

Developmentally appropriate practice entails both age appropriate and individually appropriate considerations and activities. Inappropriate practices ignore concrete, hands-on approaches to learning. The National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) advocates developmentally appropriate practice and has provided extensive recommendations for its implementation.

Although parents can effectively educate their children, many lack the commitment, time, and resources to provide children with all the ingredients in a competent early childhood education program. Viewing education as a race may be stressful to children and contribute to rather than eliminate illiteracy. Public preschools are appearing in many states and confront some issues that overlap with those of upper levels of schooling; however, the agenda is and should be different than ones for traditional elementary schools.

In general, children who attend preschool or kindergarten interact more with peers and appear both more and less socially competent. For example, they are more confident and extroverted;

however, they are also less polite, louder, and more aggressive. Although difficult to evaluate, overall effects seem to be positive.

Project Head Start was a program in compensatory education targeted at children from low-income families. It offered preschool experiences with the hope that these early experiences might counteract the disadvantages these children normally experienced and allow them to profit from regular schooling later. Project Follow Through assessed the effectiveness of different kinds of educational programs in helping children from low-income families to progress. Children in academically oriented approaches performed better on achievement tests and were more persistent on tasks. Children in affective education approaches were absent from school less often and were more independent. Thus, different approaches had different outcomes in the kinds of behavior that they fostered. Long-term studies show that model preschool programs have positive effects on development measured in terms of school competence, abilities, attitudes and values, and impact on the family.

 

4.0 Contemporary Concerns

 

Sociocultural Worlds of Development 8.1: Early Childhood Education in Japan. The reasons given by American and Japanese parents for sending their children to preschool differ. American parents want to give their children a good start academically whereas Japanese parents want to give their children a group experience. These differences reflect national tendencies toward individualism versus collectivism. The superior academic performance of Asian children in elementary and secondary schools does not result from their being pushed to achieve during their preschool years.

 

Perspectives on Parenting and Education 8.1: The Role of Parenting in Young Children's Learning and Education. Both mothers and fathers play important roles in their young children's learning and education. An important aspect of preschool and early childhood education is the relationship between young children's parents and schools.

 

Life-Span Health and Well-Being: Young Children's Health and Well-Being. Society has a stake in improving services to young children because early interventions influence later outcomes such as welfare dependence, crime, adolescent pregnancy, and dropping out of school. The four reasons early intervention programs work is because: (a) they are comprehensive and intensive, (b) they build trust and respect with children and families, (c) they deal with children as part of the family and families as part of the community, and (d) they cross long-standing professional and bureaucratic boundaries.

 

Life-Span Practical Knowledge 8.1: Reaching Potentials. Sue Bredekamp and Teresa Rosegrant's book closely follows the guidelines for appropriate curriculum and content developed by the National Association for the Education of Young Children. The book aims to help young children achieve their full potential.

 

Life-Span Practical Knowledge 8.2: Alike and Different. This collection of essays edited by Bonnie Neugebauer examines the complex issues entailed in educating young children from diverse ethnic backgrounds and those with special needs.

 

Key Terms

 

1.0 Images of Life-Span Development: Tony's Physical Development

             autonomy 

 

2.0 Physical Development in Early Childhood

congenital

deprivation dwarfism

myelination

gross motor skills                                                        

fine motor skills

handedness

basal metabolism rate (BMR)
malnutrition   

oral rehydration therapy (ORT)

 

3.0 Cognitive Development

operations

symbolic function substage

egocentrism

animism

intuitive thought substage

centration

conservation

attentional training

attention

salient dimension

relevant dimension

short-term memory

task analysis

syllogism

MLU                                                                             _:

language rule systems

overgeneralization

zone of proximal development (ZPD)

child-centered kindergarten

developmentally appropriate practice

Project Head Start

Project Follow Through

direct instruction

affective education

educational outcomes

teacher-caregiver

 

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