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Pyc2602 - Notes133
Pyc2602 - Notes133
Pyc2602 - Notes133
Biological perspective
According to biological perspective behaviour is determined by biological factors.
Biological perspective emphasises the role of heredity, the nervous system and the endocrine system in
behaviour.
The maturational theory. According to this theory child development reflects a specific and prearranged
scheme or plan within the body.
In Gesell's view development is simply a natural unfolding of a biological plan, experience matters little
According to Gesell, behaviours as speech, play and reasoning emerge spontaneously according to
predetermined development timetable, without the influence from environment such as parents.
Ethological theory
This theory views development from an evolutionary perspective and contends that many behaviours tend
to be adaptive, they have survival value.
Ethological theorists assume that people inherit many of these adaptive behaviours.
In contrast to maturationists, ethologists believe that all animals are biological programmed so that some
kinds of learning occur only certain stages called critical periods.
A critical period is the stage in development when a specific type of learning take place before or after the
critical period, the same learning is difficult or even impossible.
Psychodynamic perspective
Psychodynamic Perspective
The psychodynamic perspective explores the influence of unconscious psychological motives, such as drives or urges
on behaviour.
Its roots are traced back to the best known of Sigmund Freud.
Sigmund Freud and Erik Erikson are best known in this regard.
Prenatal development
Prenatal development refers to the process in which a baby develops from a single cell after conception into an
embryo and later a foetus.
The process of prenatal development occurs in three main stages.
The first two weeks after conception are known as the germinal stage; the third through eighth week are known as
the embryonic period and the time from the ninth week until birth is known as the fetal period.
Environmental influences
Normal development may be disrupted by early environmental influences; individual that survive have to cope with the
damaging consequences.
Because the prenatal environment is the mother's body, virtually everything that affects her well-being, from her diet to
her moods, may alter her unborn child's and influences its growth.
Malnutrition
- Prenatal malnutrition may have long-range effects.
- Children whose mothers had low vitamin D levels late in pregnancy had low bone mineral content at age 9,
potentially increasing their of osteoporosis in later life.
- Malnourished women who take dietary supplements while pregnant tend to have bigger, healthier, and more active
and more visually alert infants.
PERCEPTION
Vision. The neonatal is equipped with a functional and complete vision system
New-born babies already blink their eyes in bright light and most will follow a moving light, however the visual is not
yet fully developed.
The muscles that control the eye lenses are still underdeveloped, with result that the eye are not able to focus on
objects at differing distances.
The neonate can distinguish between her mother’s face and that of a stranger as early as two weeks and in some
cases even within the first week after birth.
Hearing. During the first two weeks the auditory canal is still filled with amniotic fluid.
Until this fluid has evaporates or been absorbed gradually the sound are relatively faint to the baby.
A major aural adjustment takes place because during the prenatal stage, sound was conducted through water and
after birth it is conducted through air.
Smell. New- born do not only perceive smells often stimulate sucking motions in babies while unpleasant smells
cause babies to distort their faces and turn their heads away.
Neonates can distinguish their mother’s breast from another woman’s breast by smell.
Taste. Neonates’ sense of taste is not very sensitive however they can distinguish various strong flavours.
Neonates and infants can detect tastes from their mother’s milk which might familiarise them with the common foods
in their families.
Pain. Historically it was though that neonates have insufficient neurological development to experience pain
FEEDING
Feeding time vary from neonate to neonate, the frequency can vary from 8 to 4 times a day and the intervals from
1half to 5 hours.
INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES
Every person is unique.
These individual differences ca be observed during the prenatal phase.
Neonates differ in muscle tone, the speed at which they move their limbs, the way in which they approach the nipple
and suck, their sensitivity to light, sound, touch, their irritability, sleeping patterns and manner of crying.
INFANCY
Infancy is a critical and dangerous as well as a challenging stage.
It is critical because the foundation for various behavioural patterns is laid during this period.
It is dangerous because fatal accidents often occur as a result of the baby’s inability to foresee the possible
consequences of his or her behaviour.
It is challenging because of the increasing drive towards independence.
COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
In two years infants progress from reflexive responding such as grasping objects because they are in their reach or
visually or auditory stimulation to actively using objects in a constructive way e.g building a tower.
They increasingly understand objects and start using symbols such as words and gestures.
INFORMATION PROCESSING
- Information processing theorists use the computer as a model to demonstrate how information is processed that is
through input, memory, programmes, calculation and output.
- Babies initially use reflexive reactions to elicit a reaction from their environment but as they grow older, they
become more goal orientated and would reach for a bottle or their mother.
- Information processing theorists are particularly interested in the analysis of complex task.
- Information processing researchers use sensitive technology as well as the infant's habituation and visual and
auditory processing abilities to explore infants' information-processing capacities.
Memory
- Memory refers to the acquisition, storing and retrieval of information.
- Memory is an important aspect of our daily functioning.
- Memory categorised in terms of the time frame in which memories are retained.
- Short-term memory refers to the temporary storage of immediate information and thus includes the working
memory which is involved in aspect such as learning.
- The capacity of the short-term memory as well as the duration of memory retention is limited.
- Long term memory refers to the permanent or semi-permanent storage of episodic, semantic and procedural
memory.
- Memory is generally tested by recognition or recall.
- Memory is clearly a very important aspect of cognition development.
- The researcher used innovative operant conditioning techniques by attaching a ribbon from a mobile to an infant's
leg.
- The infant quickly learned that there is a relation between kicking her leg and making the mobile move.
- This resulted in the baby repeatedly kicking her leg in order to make the mobile move.
- To assess the infant's memory capabilities the mobile was removed and then brought back later.
- The goal was to determine whether the infant was able to recognise the mobile and to remember to kick to make it
move
- Two month-old babies still remember how to make the mobile move after one or two days; three month-old
remember for about a week; and six months old for about two weeks.
- Older babies could remember better 18 months old infants could still remember the train task after almost thirteen
weeks.
- Some researchers found that three day old infants could remember stimuli presented two minutes earlier.
- By the age of three to six months they could recognise stimuli after days or even weeks.
- The amount of information that babies can retain in their visual recognition memory also increases in the first year.
- Older babies prefer more complex stimuli such as those with more lines, part or patterns than younger babies do.
- Infants' visual recognition memory seems to be related to various cognitive measures, including IQ scores in the later
childhood.
- Babies as young as nine months exhibit recall memory.
-During the second year of life, recall memory becomes more stable and longer in duration.
LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT
- The acquisition of language is one of the most fascinating and significant development task a child has to master.
- The use of sounds to create words and the arrangement of words into grammatically correct sentences is seemingly
done effortlessly.
- As far as vocabulary is concerned, babies as young as nine months of age already possess an elementary receptive
vocabulary.
- The learning of words during the first six months of productive language is relatively slow.
Early child development
COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
Cognitive development is a field of study in neuroscience and psychology focusing on a child’s development in terms
of information processing, conceptual resources, perceptual skill, language learning and other aspects of brain
development.
It refers to the development of the ability to think and reason.
Neo-Piagetians
Neo-Piagetians have challenged Piaget’s claim that clearly defined cognitive structures associated with distinct stages
play a major role in determining children’s problem-solving abilities.
Fischer agrees that cognitive development is an action –based, self-regulating and constructive process, he disagrees
that there is a generalised competence or cognitive structure.
Fischer also emphasises environmental support, such as a helpful parent in cognitive development.
Social development
. Social development in the pre-school years involves changes in pre-school interaction and relationships with others.
. Family relationship continues to play a crucial role but from age two peers become increasingly influential.
Family relationships
. Family relationship constitute the most influential factors in early childhood.
Siblings relationship
. Sibling’s relationship play an important role from parents and peers in socialisation.
. The correlation between the quality of sibling relationship and peer relationship also seem to exist.
Peer relationships
. The development of friendship with peers is one of the important aspect of pre-schooler's social development.
Vygotsky' sociocultural theory
Mechanism of redevelopment.
For Vygotsky development follows a dialectical process of thesis, antithesis and synthesis.
The dialectical process often occurs when children interact with adults or peers that are more advance.
Evaluation of Vygotsky's theory
He is probably the most important development theories to address the broader socio-historical context of
development.
His main theoretical contribution is the account of the relation between development and learning.
Middle childhood
Emotional development
- In middle childhood, children's growing cognitive understanding of events and emotions increasingly influences their
emotional reaction.
- Children's developing emotional skills contribute to their ability to use emotions more intelligently.
- Emotional intelligence is a form of social intelligence that involves the ability to monitor one's own and others'
feelings and emotions, to discriminate between them and to use this information to guide one's thinking and actions.
- Parents are the primary educators in emotional intelligence but they often lack the ability to cope with the intense
negative feelings of their children.
- Children's feelings are frequently ignored because parents often see children as less rational and experienced.
- As children enter school teachers become increasingly important agents in emotion regulation.
- It is therefore important that both parents and teachers should be emotionally intelligent themselves in order to raise
emotionally intelligent children.
- They have to be aware and in control of their own feelings and nonverbal communication.
- Parents and teachers should be good role models regarding the recognition and expression of emotions at all times.
- Listening, paying attention and respecting a child's emotions are valuable skill in emotional training.
Theories of cognitive development
A Constructive perspective:
The constructive perspective assumes that individuals must continually interpret or make sense of all experience.
- Piaget assumed that people not only actively construct what they know of the world, but they also organise this
understanding in qualitatively different ways with age which results in distinctly different stages of thought.
A Componential approach
- The componential approach refers to the breaking down of the thinking process into various components.
- Information -processing approach is an example of componential approach.
- Adolescents' attentional abilities are better adapted to the changing of a task.
- This include selective attention a well as divided attention.
- Selective attention is especially important in the problem solving process, since one of the first steps in the solving of
a problem is to decide on which aspect to focus.
- Adolescents exhibit an increased speed of information processing which combine with greater awareness and
control of an increased knowledge base produces a more efficient form of thinking than during childhood.
- Both short-term and long-term memory improves substantially between childhood and adolescence.
- The effectiveness of long-term memory is largely enhanced due to the greater experience and increased knowledge
base during adolescence.
- Metacognition expands leading to new insight into effective strategies for acquiring information and solving
problems.
- Cognitive self-regulation improves yielding better moment-by-moment monitoring, evaluation and redirection
thinking.
- According to Sternberg people of all ages use the same components in cognitive functioning but spend different
amounts of time on each.
- For example adolescents spend proportionately more time encoding items than doing any of the other steps than
younger children.
- Sternberg also indicates that with age people tend to spend much more time planning how to solve a problem than
actually doing it.
Practical cognition
- Cognitive development in adolescence functions as an organisational core that affects all areas of thinking no matter
what the topic.
- Cognitive development therefore affects a wide range of other aspect of development from family relations and
friendship, to school performance and risky behaviour.
Implications for the classroom
- Adolescents' cognitive development prepare them for new challenges in the classroom.
- Adolescents can gather facts to support or oppose principle, generate a range of possible alternatives for any
situation, think in abstractions and test their thoughts against inner logic.
- These abilities set them apart from younger children and make new forms of learning possible in the classroom.
- For example adolescents' systematic approach to problems lends itself especially well to science.
- Adolescents' advances in cognitive development can also affect their study skills.
- Adolescents who have trouble monitoring their own performance can be taught to do so.
- The effect of schooling is also noticeable in children's language development.
- Schooling can bring about fundamental changes in conceptual structure.
Self-esteem
Self-esteem
- Self-esteem refers to the way a person views and evaluates him or her sel.
- It also refers to the degree in which a person values him or herself.
- During adolescence, the self-esteem has to be modified even further, as several dimensions are added which need
to be evaluated.
- These new dimensions include their changing physical appearance, sexuality, changes in their social relationships,
romantic relationships and in choosing careers.
- During middle childhood, when children start comparing themselves with others their self-esteem declines somewhat
and becomes more realistic as they evaluate their physical, cognitive and social abilities.
- During early adolescence, when the growth spurt, pubertal changes and cognitive and social changes occur and
adolescents most likely have to adjust to a high school environment, they are incline to experience a temporary
decline in their self-esteem.
- As they adjust to their physical, cognitive and social changes, their feelings of self-worth are restored.
- Some scholars have identified different aspect of the self-esteem: The baseline self-esteem and barometric self-
esteem.
- Baseline self-esteem is the stable, enduring sense of worth and well-being a person has.
- Person with high baseline self-esteem evaluate themselves positively on most days, although they may have an
occasional bad day when they feel incompetent and self-critical.
- Person with low baseline self-esteem tend to have a poor opinion of themselves, even though they have days when
things go right.
- Barometric self-esteem is the fluctuating sense of worth and well-being people have as they respond to different
thoughts, experience and interactions in the course of a day.
- Adults and pre-adolescents also experience barometric self-esteem, but not with the same intensity as adolescents.
- Across socio-economic status and ethnic groups, adolescents with mostly favourable self-esteem profiles tend to be
well adjusted, sociable and conscientious.
- In contrast, low self-esteem in all areas is linked to adjusted difficulties.
Personality development
Adaptive functioning
- Baltes and Baltes identify three processes that together make up an effective strategy of maximising adaptive
functioning over the course of development: selection, optimisation and compensation.
- Selection refers to identifying ones' goal, committing to them and limiting oneself to a smaller number of
task from all of the available options.
- Optimisation refers to directing one's effort, energy time and other resources towards one's chosen goals.
- Compensation involves efforts directed at overcoming limitations or lack of resources.
Emotions
- Adolescents are often described as being more emotionally unstable than younger children that they often have
emotional outbursts and that they are inclined towards intense mood swings.
- These changes are often related to the hormonal changes in adolescence.
- The emotional changes could be also be attributed to cognitive and environmental factors.
- Teenager's mood can be influenced by many factors: problems with friend, peer pressure.
- Parents and other adults can promote the emotional growth of teenagers by being sensitive, giving children
opportunities to talk about their emotions and providing an atmosphere of trust in dealing with their emotions.
Adolescence
- Adolescence is a period of human growth that occurs between childhood and adulthood.
- Adolescence begins at around age 10 and ends around age 21, it can be broken int three stages: Early adolescence,
middle adolescence and late adolescence.
Demarcation adolescence
- Adolescence has not always been regarded as a distinct period of the life span.
- Depending on biological and socio-cultural factors, as well as on individual differences, the age at which
adolescence as a separate developmental stage begins, varies from 11 to 13 years while the age at which it ends is
between 17 and 21 years.
A stormy phase
- Adolescence is described as being characterised as specially by conflict with parents and other authority figures,
moodiness and high risk behaviour.
- They experience a stormy period that is biologically based.
- Adolescences are viewed as being no worse than their parents were when they were young.
- They are even seen as better informed and more idealistic, honest and tolerant towards others.
- It refers to a situation where both parents are absent and children are compelled to take over the adults duties.
- Different findings on the prevalence of child-headed households in South Africa have been reported.
- A household could be classified as child-headed while relatives and neighbours may look after the children very well.
- A large number of biological orphaned children are living in better circumstances than many children with living parents.
Street children
- Most of us encounter street children on a daily basis, children who stand begging at street corners.
- There is virtually no country or city in the world where street children are not found.
Poverty
- Poverty is much more than only an insufficient income, lack of money and material needs.
- Children living in poverty are more exposed to parents who use harsh discipline rather than reasoning.
- Poor children are more likely to develop social and emotional problems, which are already evident from an early age.
- In children may result from various events such as abuse, violence, loss of a parent, illness, injuries and natural disasters.
- Traumatised children may also show symptoms that differ significantly from one another.
- Reactions of a traumatic event do not necessarily occur immediately after the event.
Resilience
- Resilience is the ability to cope with or recover from difficult or challenging life experience.
- The factors that have been identified to strengthen resilience in children are divided into three categories:
- The fact that children need special protection and care is understandable.
- Children are among the most vulnerable members of society and dependent on others such as their parents, families and the
Government.
- it is important to realise that knowledge of children's right is more than just being politically correct.