Early Childhood

PHYSICAL DEVELOPMENT
Aspects of Physical Development

In early childhood, children slim down and shoot up. They need less sleep than before and are
more likely to develop sleep problems. They improve in running, hopping, skipping, jumping,
and throwing balls. They also become better at tying shoelaces, drawing with crayons, and
pouring cereal; and they begin to show a preference for using either the right or left hand.
Bodily Growth and Change

Children grow rapidly between ages 3 and 6, but less quickly than before. At about 3, children
normally begin to lose their babyish roundness and take on the slender, athletic appearance of
childhood. As abdominal muscles develop, the toddler potbelly tightens. The trunk, arms, and
legs grow longer.
A 3 years old girl’s height is 37 inches and weighs about 30 pounds whereas most boys this age
are little taller and heavier and has more muscle per pound of body weight. Muscular and
skeletal growth progresses, making children stronger. Cartilage turns to bone and bones become
harder, giving the child a firmer shape and protecting the internal organs.
Sleep Patterns and Problems

Sleep patterns change throughout the growing-up years and early childhood has its own distinct
rhythms. Most U.S. children average about 11 hours of sleep at night by age 5 and give up
daytime naps. In some other cultures the timing of sleep may vary. Canadian 3-year-olds don’t
take naps but are put to sleep right after dinner and sleep as long as they wish in the morning.
Causes of sleep problems

About 1 in 10 U.S. parents or caregivers of pre-schooler child say their child has a sleep
problems. Sleep disturbances may be caused by accidental activation of the brain’s motor control
system or by incomplete arousal from deep sleep or may be disordered breathing or restless leg
movements. These disturbances tend to run in family and are often associated with separation
anxiety.
 A child who experiences a sleep (or night) terror appears to awaken abruptly early in the
night from a deep sleep in a state of agitation. The child may scream and sit up in bed and
breathing rapidly.
 Walking and, especially, talking during sleep are fairly typical in early childhood.
Although sleepwalking itself is harmless, sleepwalkers may be in danger of hurting
themselves.
  Nightmares are also common. They are often brought on by staying up too late, eating a
heavy meal close to bedtime, or overexcitement, perhaps from watching an over
stimulating television program, seeing a terrifying movie, or hearing a frightening
bedtime story. An occasional bad dream is no cause for alarm, but frequent or persistent
nightmares may signal excessive stress.
 Most children stay dry, day and night, by ages 3 to 5; enuresis —repeated, involuntary
urination at night by children
Brain Development

Brain growth continues until at least age 3, when the brain is approximately 90 percent of adult
weight. By age 6, the brain has attained about 95 percent of its peak volume. However, wide
individual differences exist. A gradual change occurs in the corpus callosum, which links the left
and right hemispheres. Progressive myelination of fibres in the corpus callosum permits more
rapid transmission of information and better integration between them. Brain development affect
other aspects of development. One of them is growth in motor skills.
Motor Skills

Development of the sensory and motor areas of the cerebral cortex permits better coordination
between what children want to do and what they can do. Preschool children make great advances
in gross motor skills, involve the large muscles such as arms and legs. At this stage their bones
and muscles are stronger and their lung capacity is greater, they can run, jump, and climb farther
and faster.
Fine motor skills, involve eye-hand and small-muscle coordination such as buttoning and
drawing. Gains in these skills allow young children to take more responsibility for their personal
care.
Handedness

Handedness is the preference for using one hand over the other, and is usually evident by about
age 3. Because the left hemisphere of the brain, which controls the right side of the body, is
usually dominant, most people favour their right side. In people whose brains are more
functionally symmetrical, the right hemisphere tends to dominate, making them left-handed.
Boys are more likely to be left-handed than are girls.
Health and Safety

Because of widespread immunization, the major diseases of childhood are much less common in
Western industrialized countries. In the developing world, however, such vaccine-preventable
diseases as measles, pertussis (whooping cough), and tetanus still take a large toll.
Preventing Obesity
Obesity (sometimes called overweight) is a serious problem among U.S. pre-schoolers. In 2003–
2006, more than 12 percent of 2- to 5-year-olds had a body mass index (BMI) at or above the
95th percentile for their age, and about 12 percent more were at or above the 85th percentile. The
greatest increase in prevalence of overweight is among children in low-income families.
Worldwide, an estimated 22 million children under age 5 are obese. Overweight children tend to
become obese adults and excess body mass is a threat to health. Early childhood is a good time
to treat overweight, when a child’s diet is still subject to parental influence or control.
Under nutrition

Under nutrition is an underlying cause in more than half of all deaths before age 5. Even in the
United States, 17 percent of children under 18 lived in food-insecure households. Moreover,
effects of under nutrition may be long lasting, as children who undernourished at age 3 has
poorer verbal and spatial abilities, reading skills, scholastic ability, and neuropsychological
performance than their peers at age 11. Effects of under nutrition on growth can be largely
reversed with improved diet.
Health in Context: Environmental Influences
Some children seem genetically predisposed toward certain medical conditions. In addition,
environmental factors also play major roles.
Socioeconomic Status and Race/Ethnicity

The lower a family’s SES, the greater a child’s risks of illness, injury, and death. Minority
children are more likely to have chronic conditions and activity limitations, to lack health
insurance, and to have unmet medical and dental needs.
Exposure to Smoking, Air Pollution, Pesticides, and Lead

Parental smoking, both at home and in the family car, is a preventable cause of childhood illness
and death. The potential damage caused by exposure to tobacco is greatest during the early years
of life, when children’s bodies are still developing. Children exposed to parental smoke are at
increased risk of respiratory infections such as bronchitis and pneumonia, ear problems,
worsened asthma, and slowed lung growth.

COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT:

Piagetian Approach:
The Preoperational Child: Jean Piaget called early childhood the preoperational stage of
cognitive development because children this age are not yet ready to engage in logical mental
operations, as they will be in the stage of concrete operations in middle childhood. However, the
preoperational stage, which lasts from approximately ages 2 to 7, is characterized by a great
expansion in the use of symbolic thought, or representational ability, which first emerged during
the sensorimotor stage.
Advances of Preoperational stage: Advances in symbolic thought are accompanied by a
growing understanding of space, causality, identities, categorization, and number. Some of these
understandings have roots in infancy and toddlerhood; others begin to develop in early childhood
but are not fully achieved until middle childhood.
SENSORY MOTOR: sensory or motor cues characterizes the symbolic function: the ability to
use symbols, or mental representations words, numbers, or images to which a person has
attached meaning. Preschool children show the symbolic function through the growth of deferred
imitation, pretend play, and language.
PRETEND PLAY: also called fantasy play, dramatic play, or imaginative play, children may
make an object, such as a doll, represent, or symbolize, something else, such as a person.
"Language uses a system of symbols (words) to communicate."
TRANSDUCTION: mentally link two events, especially events close in time, whether or not
there is logically a causal relationship.
IDENTITIES: the concept that people and many things are basically the same even if they
change in form, size, or appearance. This understanding underlies the emerging self-concept.
Animism: One type of categorization is the ability to distinguish living from non-living things.

IMMATURE ASPECTS of PREOPERATIONAL THOUGHT

One of the main characteristics of preoperational thought is centration.
CENTRATION: the tendency to focus on one aspect of a situation and neglect others.
EGOCENTRISM: Egocentrism is a form of centration. According to Piaget, young children
centre so much on their own point of view that they cannot take in another’s.
CONSERVATION
Another classic example of centration is the failure to understand conservation, the fact that two
things that are equal remain so if their appearance is altered, as long as nothing is added or taken
away.
Distinguishing between Fantasy and Reality: Sometime between 18 months and 3 years,
children learn to distinguish between real and imagined events. Three-year-olds know the
difference between a real dog and a dog in a dream, and between something invisible (such as
air) and something imaginary. Still, the line between fantasy and reality may seem to blur at
times.
Information-Processing Approach: Memory Development: During early childhood, children
improve in attention and in the speed and efficiency with which they process information; and
they begin to form long-lasting memories.
Basic Processes and Capacities: Information-processing theorists think of memory as a filing
system that has three steps, or processes 1: encoding 2: storage3:retrieval.
Encoding: Encoding is like putting information in a folder to be filed in memory; it attaches a
code, or label, to the information so that it will be easier to find when needed.
Storage: is putting the folder away in the filing cabinet. Retrieval occurs when the information is
needed; the child then searches for the file and takes it out. Difficulties in any of these processes
can interfere with efficiency.
Information-processing models depict the brain as containing three “storehouses”: sensory
memory, working memory, and long-term memory.
Sensory memory: Sensory memory is a temporary holding tank for incoming sensory
information. However, without processing (encoding), sensory memories fade quickly.
Short term memory: Information being encoded or retrieved is kept in Working memory,
sometimes called short-term memory—a short-term storehouse for information a person is
actively working on trying to understand, remember, or think about.
Long-term Memory, a storehouse of virtually unlimited capacity that holds information for long
periods of time. The central executive also retrieves information from long-term memory for
further processing. The central executive can temporarily expand the capacity of working
memory by moving information into two separate subsidiary systems while the central executive
is occupied with other tasks.
Recognition and Recall: Recognition and recall are types of retrieval.
Recognition: the ability to identify something encountered before.
Recall : the ability to reproduce knowledge from memory. Preschool children, like all age
groups, do better on recognition than on recall, but both abilities improve with age. The more
familiar children are with an item, the better they can recall it. Forming and Retaining
Childhood Memories: Memory of experiences in early childhood is rarely deliberate: young
children simply remember events that made a strong impression. Most of these early conscious
memories seem to be short-lived. One investigator has distinguished three types of childhood
memory that serve different functions:
1:Generic
2: Episodic
3: Autobiographical
Generic memory: It begins at about age 2. Memory that produces scripts of familiar routines to
guide behaviour.
Episodic memory: it refers to awareness of having experienced a particular event or episode at a
specific time and place. Young children remember more clearly events that are new to them.
Given a young child’s limited memory capacity, episodic memories are temporary.
Autobiographical memory: A type of episodic memory, refers to memories of distinctive
experiences that form a person’s life history. Not everything in episodic memory becomes part of
autobiographical memory only those memories that have a special, personal meaning to the
child. Autobiographical memory generally emerges between ages 3 and 4.
Psychosocial Development in Early Childhood
The Self-Concept and Cognitive Development
The self-concept is our total picture of our abilities and traits. It is “a cognitive construction, a
system of descriptive and evaluative representations about the self,” that determines how we feel
about ourselves and guides our actions (Harter, 1996, p. 207).
Children incorporate into their self-image their growing understanding of how others see them.
Self-Definition cluster of characteristics used to describe oneself.
A neo-Piagetian analysis (Case, 1985, 1992; Fischer, 1980) describes the 5 to 7 shift as occurring
in three steps.
At 4, child is at the first step, single representations. His statements about himself are one-
dimensional (“I like pizza. . . . I’m really strong”). At this stage he cannot imagine having two
emotions at once (“You can’t be happy and scared”) because he cannot consider different aspects
of himself at the same time. His thinking about himself is all-or-nothing. He cannot acknowledge
that is real self, the person he actually is, is not the same as his ideal self, the person he would
like to be. He describes himself as a paragon of virtue and ability.
At about age 5 or 6, child moves up to the second step, representational mappings. He begins
to make logical connections between one aspect of himself and another. However, his image of
himself is still expressed in completely positive, all-or-nothing terms.
The third step, representational systems, takes place in middle childhood.
Cultural Differences in Self-Definition
Chinese parents tend to encourage interdependent aspects of the self: compliance with authority,
appropriate conduct, humility, and a sense of belonging to the community.
European American parents are more apt to encourage independent aspects of the self:
individuality, self-expression, and self-esteem.

Erikson: Initiative versus childhood

The need to deal with conflicting feelings about the self is at the heart of the third stage of
personality development identified by Erik Erikson (1950): initiative versus guilt. The conflict
arises from the growing desire to plan and carry out activities and the growing pangs of
conscience the child may have about such plans.

This conflict marks a split between two parts of the personality: the part that remains a child,
full of exuberance and a desire to try new things and test new powers, and the part that is
becoming an adult, constantly examining the propriety of motives and actions.

Gender

Gender identity, awareness of one’s femaleness or maleness and all it implies in one’s society
of origin, is an important aspect of the developing self-concept.

Perspectives on Gender Development

The experiences and expectations concern three related aspects of gender identity: gender roles,
gender-typing, and gender stereotypes.

Gender roles are the behaviours, interests, attitudes, skills, and personality traits that a culture
considers appropriate for males or females.

Gender-typing Socialization process whereby children, at an early age, learn appropriate

gender roles.

Gender Stereotypes Preconceived generalizations about male and female role behaviour.

Gender identity (awareness of one’s own gender and that of others) typically occurs between
ages 2 and 3.

Gender stability comes when a girl realizes that she will grow up to be a woman, and a boy that
he will grow up to be a man—in other words, that gender does not change.

Finally—sometime between ages 3 and 7, or even later—comes gender consistency: the

realization that a girl remains a girl even if she has a short haircut and plays with trucks, and a
boy remains a boy even if he has long hair and earrings.

Parenting:
Children gradually become their own persons, their upbringing can be a complex challenge.
Parents must deal with small people who have independent minds And wills, but who still have a
lot to learn about what kinds of behaviour work well. Forms of Discipline The word discipline
means “instruction” or “training.” In the field of human development, discipline refers to
methods of melding character and of teaching self-control and acceptable behaviour.

Reinforcement and Punishment: Parents sometimes punish children to stop undesirable

behaviour, but children usually learn more from being reinforced for good behaviour.

Parenting Styles: Diana Baumrind and the Effectiveness of Authoritative Parenting In

pioneering research, Diana Baumrind’s studied 103 Preschool children from 95 families.
Through interviews, testing, and home studies, she measured how the children were functioning,
identified three parenting styles, And described typical behavior patterns of children raised
according to each. Authoritarian parenting, according to Baumrind’s, emphasizes control
and Unquestioning obedience:

Authoritarian parents try to make children conform to a set standard of conduct and punish them
arbitrarily and forcefully for violating It. They are more detached and less warm than other
parents. Their children tend to be more discontented, withdrawn, and distrustful

Permissive parenting:

Emphasizes self-expression and self-regulation. Permissive parents make few demands and
allow children to monitor their own activities as much as possible. When they do have to make
rules, they explain the reasons for them. They consult with children about policy decisions and
rarely punish. They Are warm, no controlling, and undemanding.

Authoritative parenting:

Emphasizes a child‘s individuality but also stresses social constraints. Authoritative parents have
confidence in their ability to guide children, but they also respect children’s independent
decisions, interests, opinions, and personalities. They are loving and accepting but also demand
good behavior and are firm in maintaining standards. They impose limited, judicious punishment
when necessary, within the context of a warm, supportive relationship.
Cultural differences in parenting style: Another concern is that Baumrind’s‘Categories reflect
the dominant North American view of child development and may not apply to some cultures or
socioeconomic groups. Among Asian Americans, obedience and strictness are not associated
with harshness and domination but Instead with caring, concern, and involvement and with
maintaining family harmony. Indeed, a dichotomy between the individualistic values of Western
parenting and the collectivist values of Asian parenting may be overly simplistic.