HLC 4.

Dec 2, 2011
Dr. Malinit

Pre School Development

OUTLINE
I. Principles of Neural Development
A. Biological Development
B. Motor Development
C. Physical Development
D. Cognitive Development
E. Language Development
II. Emotional Development
III. Play
IV. Moral Development
Objectives:
Upon completion of this period of instruction, the student can identify & discuss the
normal preschool development
Discuss the biological, cognitive, emotional, socio-cultural & moral development of
preschool children.
Correlate the developmental theories applicable to this period of child development

I. PRINCIPLES OF NEURAL DEVELOPMENT

Adolescence
12 to 20 Years
School-age
6 to 11
Years
Pre-school
3 to 5 Years
Toddlerhood
1 to 2 Years
Infancy
Birth to 1
Year

Fig 1. Developmental Stages

While brain maturation influences childrens behavior,

environmental
experience
influences
neurobiological
development.
Synaptic connections strengthen in response to experience.
o Activation of individual neurons & neural networks in response
to stimulation increases their likelihood of surviving.

B. Motor Development
Gross Motor Skills
o 2 yrs: runs well, walks up and down stairs, one step at a time;
climbs on furniture, jumps
o 3 yrs: rides tricycle
o 4 yrs: hops on one foot; throws ball overhead; uses scissors to
cut pictures
o 5 yrs: skips
Fine Motor Skills
o 2 yrs: makes tower of 7 cubes; circular scribbling; imitates
horizontal stroke
o 3 yrs: tower of 10 cubes, copies a circle; imitates a cross
o 4 yrs: copies cross and square; draws man with 2 to 4 parts
besides heads
o 5 yrs: draws triangle
Table 1. Different Stages of Development from Birth to 7 years old (See
Appendix A)
C. Physical Development

Height & Weight

o Growth patterns vary individually
2 in height
5 to 7 lbs/year
The Brain
o size due to growth of neurons and their connections and inc.
in myelination
exposure of the child increases the size of the brain
o Increasing brain maturation contributes to improved cognitive
abilities
o Synaptic connections strengthen in response to experience
D. Cognitive Development

A. Biological Development

Fig. 3 Cognitive Development

Fig. 2 Biological Development

Synaptic density in the frontal cortex peaks at 1 year

Loss of synapses is under way by 1 year
Pruning of synapses begins by 7 years
o Process occurs earlier in human visual cortex where synaptic
density peaks at 6 months
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Piagets Stage of Preoperational Thought

Symbolic Function Substage 2-4 yrs
o Children gain the ability to mentally represent an object that is
not present
o Characterized by symbolic thought, egocentrism, animism
Intuitive Thought Substage 4-7 yrs
o Intuitive children seem so sure of their knowledge, yet so
unaware of how they know what they know
o Children begin to use primitive reasoning and want to know
answers to all sorts of questions

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Typical Age
Range

Description of Stage

Birth to nearly 2 Sensorimotor

years
Experiencing the world through
senses and actions

Developmental
Phenomena
Object
permanence
Strangeranxiety

(looking, hearing, touching,

mouthing, and grasping
2 to about 6 or 7 Preoperational
years
Representing things with words
and images; using intuitive
rather than logical reasoning

Pretend play
Egocentrism

Preoperational Thought 2 to 7 years

o Animism: endowing inanimate objects with the qualities of
living things
EX: That tree pushed the leaf off, and it fell down
o Artificialism: belief that all things are made for our use
EX: The sun comes out because I will play.
o Centration: focusing, or centering, of attention on one
characteristic to the exclusion of all others; clearly seen in
childrens lack of conservation
o Conservation: the awareness that a quantity remains the same
despite a change in its apperance
o Egocentrism:
difficulty taking others perspectives; see
themselves as the center of the universe
EX: Telephone conversation
Father: Mary, is Mommy there?
Mary: (Silently nods.)
Father: Mary, may I speak to Mommy?
Mary: (Nods again silently)
Egocentrism
o Would see difficulty taking others perspective
o The Mountains Study
Test used by Piaget to investigate egocentrism
Experiment: Placed children in front of a simple plaster
mountain range and then asked them to pick from the four
pictures the view that he (Piaget) would see.
Result: Children picked the picture of the view they
themselves saw.
Egocentric children would have difficulty taking others
perspective.
Criticisms of Piagetian Theory
The Piagetian Theory claims that all thinking in one age period is
characterized by certain principles which can be elucidated by
observing childrens performance on specific tasks.
However, young childrens performance is sensitive to even small
contextual influences.
o When more familiar materials are used to assess children, they
perform better.

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Cognitive Development: Information Processing

Attention
o Childs attention dramatically improves during early childhood.
o Deficit in attention concerns those dimensions that stand out
compared to those that are relevant to solving a problem
Memory
o Significant improvement in short term memory occurs.
o Memory span increases
o Increased use of rehearsal and increased speed of processing
are related to young childrens memory improvement
Task Analysis
o Information processing advocates believe that a tasks
components should be analyzed.
o By making tasks more interesting and simple, some aspects of
childrens cognitive development occur earlier than had been
thought possible.
Memory: Use of Scripts
Children have a good capacity to form generalized event
memories, or scripts of common occurrences.
These knowledge structures are general templates that represent
expected events in a familiar routine.
These structures organize young childrens memories:
o Enables them to anticipate future events
o Supports growing ability to establish goals, to outline a plan to
reach those goals, and to sustain the efforts to accomplish
goals
Development of scripts support development of transference
expectations
Transference Expectations
Reflects the childs experience or fantasy of how adults act toward
them.
o Ex: Neglected children may come to believe that adults in
general will behave this way toward them.
It is formed in response to childrens normative needs to
understand their world and to anticipate future events.
Scripts and Transference expectations:
o Permit children to explore possible worlds
o Develop imaginary friends, play dress up and create stories with
doll figures
This forms the basis for play therapy
o Support the ability to tell stories and to engage in imaginative
play.
o The ability to tell narratives helps the child make sense of
emotions and relationships.
Cognitive Development - Theory of Mind
Understanding of beliefs, desires, motivations and emotions as
mental states that are ascribed to ones self and others.
Childrens knowledge of mental activity and their appreciation
that people can have different perceptions, thoughts and feelings.
It is important as they seek to make sense of social environment,
predict how others will behave and develop richer and complex
relationships
Used Traditional Experiment: Theory of Mind

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E. Language Development

o Made up of short sentences with high-pitched, exaggerated

intonation, clear pronunciation & distinct pauses between
speech segments
o Occurs across languages & social classes
Theories of Language Development
o Vygotsky: all higher cognitive processes develop out of social
interaction
Emotional Development
o Begins to appraise meaning of stimuli within the context of
individual goals
o Begins to adopt culturally defined rules of emotional expression
o Begins to inhibit and delay behavioral plans
Development of object constancy (See picture)

Fig. 4 Stages of Language Development

Phonology - Pronunciation improves greatly

Grammar
o Sentences reflect appreciation of adult grammatical categories
o Syntax
Rules by which words are arranged in a sentence
o Morphology
Grammatical markers to indicate number, tense, person,
gender & other meanings
Semantics
o Word coinage forms expand
o Speaking vocabulary of a 6 year-old child ranges from 8,000 to
14,000 words.
o Overextension vocabulary (ex. Daddy to all men)
Pragmatics
o Learn how to engage in effective and appropriate
communication with others.
o Figure out how gestures and tone of voice clarify spoken
meaning.
Theories of Language Development
o Chomsky
o Language development is genetically driven by the formation of
specific mental capacities
o Language Acquisition Device (LAD)
A biologically based innate system for picking up language
that permits children, as soon as they have acquired
sufficient vocabulary, to combine words into grammatically
consistent utterances and the meaning of sentences they
hear.
Bruner
o Process of language learning language is a shared not individual
development
o Adults scaffold language input for children.
o Language Acquisition Support Structure (LASS)
Social environment that supports the childs growing abilities
Required for language development
Concept of Motherese in Language Development
Motherese
o Form of language adopted by adults when speaking to infants &
toddlers

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Figure 5. Object Constancy

Development of internal working models of relationships

o Begins to modulate behavioral expression of emotion
o Can communicate past, current & future emotions
Emotional Development
Emotions: act as adaptive organizers of behavior
Social referencing looking to an adult when they are uncertain
and modifying their behavior depending on the adults emotional
response
Regulation of emotion: principal developmental task of the
preschool years
Components of Emotional Regulation
Appraisal: children evaluate the meaning of the stimulus within
the context of their values and goals ; central to this is a growing
ability to think about emotions & relationships
Modulation: children adjust the behavioral expression of the
emotion; young children learn to abide by culturally defined rules
of emotional expression; central to this is the ability to use
symbolization, language, and narrative to express emotions
II. CENTRAL PRINCIPLES OF EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Occurs within the context of relationships
Primary caregivers are always critical in childrens emotional
development
Emotional Development
Winnicott
o Ability to be alone: increasingly able to tolerate being at
physical & psychological distance from parents for longer
periods of time

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 Mahler
o Object Constancy: ability to calm oneself, self-soothe & reduce
& tolerate anxiety in response to separation from mother
children gradually comprehend and are reassured by the
permanence of mother and other important people, even
when not in their presence
believed to be facilitated by achieving a sense of basic trust
that infant develops from emotionally sensitive & competent
caregivers
Bowlby
o Development of secure attachment
Fairburn
o Children construct mental model of how their caregivers act
toward them
Freud
o Oedipal complex: young children
Attachment & Internal Working Models
Children construct a mental model involving emotions, memories,
and sets of expectations of how their caregivers act toward them
These expectations become a frame, or internal context, within
which children appraise the meaning of events. These appraisals
then elicit the childrens emotional reactions, organizing their
behavior.
The Oedipal Complex
Young children emotionally & sexually desire the parent of the
opposite sex
Brought into position of rivalry or conflict with parent of the same
sex but also fear retribution from this parent
Oedipus Complex
Considered as central to moral development by psychoanalysts
Successful resolution of this complex leads to:
internalization of the same sex parents standards and ideals
resulting in the formation of the super ego
Internal working models vs. Oedipus complex
Both acknowledge preschoolers ability to form expectations
about others actions, which organize their emotions & behavior
Both claim to be critical in the life of preschoolers and are
involved in personality formation
Internal working models are thought to be constructed from
actual experiences
Oedipal thoughts develop from childs internal fantasies and
involves hypothesis about the specific content of those fantasies (
envy, hatred, fear of the parent of the opposite sex)
Sociocultural Development
Much of childrens socialization occurs within the context of
parent-child relationship
Parents scaffold childrens development in the zone of proximal
development
Range of tasks that the child cannot handle yet alone but can do
with the help of more skilled partners
Ex: parent helping child with puzzle by orienting piece so child can
see where it fits in
Siblings & peers become increasingly important to young children
during the preschool years
Children develop within a culture, acquiring many of its
expectations and patterns outside their awareness

Group Awesome | Borlaza,Bonifacio,Bongga,Bries,Buenavente,The Brioneses

III. PLAY
Functions of Play
Childrens natural medium of communication
Medium of exchange, exploring relationships & self-fulfillment
Expression of what child wants to do
Provides means through which conflicts can be revealed &
feelings can be communicated.
Stages of Play
Solitary Parallel Associative Cooperative

Fig. 5 Social (Play Modality) Development

IV. MORAL DEVELOPMENT

Fig. 6 Stages of Moral Development

Moral development, like emotional development, occurs within

the context of relationships
Factors affecting moral development:
o Emotions play a central role in organizing moral behavior & in
the early development of moral motives & behavior
o Shared experience with others in internalizing moral emotions
and values
o Role of nonconscious information processing
in moral
behavior

1st year

2nd year

Preschool

Basic emotions: anger, happiness, sadness, fear, surprise, disgust

Neurobiologically hard-wired, tied to characteristic facial expressions of
emotion, appear across cultures

Moral emotions: empathy, pride, shame and guilt develop

Do not all have the characteristic facial expressions
Are more internal yet develops from shared experience
Arise in situations of conflict or in response to internalized standards

Able to distinguish between social conventions and moral rules

Develops strategies to cope with temptations

Fig. 7 Stages of Moral Development from 1st yr to Preschool

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Empathy
Like pride, is important in the acquistion of the dos of moral
development
Early games of turn taking & reciprocity set stage for prosocial
behavior
Moral Emotions
Pride
o Involves pleasure over meeting the standard of a significant
other
o Excited & proud when they experience themselves as agents
who have important effect on people & events in their world
Shame and Embarassment
o visual emotions that appears to arise when it is the self that is
evaluated negatively
Guilt
o Auditory emotion that appears to be invoked when a child feels
that an act is bad
Moral emotions come from a sense of shared experience with
others that is central to the process of moral internalization
The acquisition of moral and social rules also develops from
shared experience BUT often occurs outside conscious awareness
Acquisition of a theory of mind is important in mediating
development in the moral sphere
Mentally Healthy Children
Satisfied with themselves
Have the ability to cope even with serious difficulties in life
Possess inner lives that are rich and rewarding
Will grow up capable of forming lasting, satisfying, meaningful,
intimate relations

SPOTTED!
Guy has/had a gf, girl has/had a bf but are frequently seen together.
Oh medschool, why you such a temptation? (Not sure about the
correct tense! single na ba talaga kayo??) Peace! :D
Guy seen preparing a surprise for the apple of his eyes. I hope girl
likes you surprise sir! (Clue: Well have a first lady soon <3)

Please see attached file for the tables :D

Group Awesome | Borlaza,Bonifacio,Bongga,Bries,Buenavente,The Brioneses

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