PHYSICAL AND MENTAL DEVELOPMENT OF INFANTS

Introduction

Apart from some basic reflexes and the ability to cry, the newborn is unable to perform
many actions. Over the next 12 months, however, the infant becomes capable of sitting,
standing stooping, climbing, and usually walking.

During the second year, while growth slows, rapid icreases in such activities as running
and climbing take place.

It is important for educators and teachers to know about the physical and mental
develoment of children at all stages because they spend maximum time with children
during the day.

It is important for them to know the normal physical and mental development of children
during infancy, because any small change or accident at this stage can have very
serious consequences for the child’s future.

We will be looking at patterns of growth, physical growth and motor development,

sensory and perceptual development, cognitive development, language development in
today’s lesson.

Patterns of growth

During prenatal development and early infancy, the head occupies a big part of the total
body.

The earliest growth always occurs at the top-the head- with physical growth and
differentiation of features gradually working their way down from top to bottom.This
same pattern occurs in the head area, as the top parts of the head-the eyes and brain-
grow faster than the lower parts, such as the jaw.

Sensory and motor development generally proceeds according to the same top-doen
pattern.
For example, infants see objects before they can control their body and they can use
their hands long before they can crawl or walk.

However, development does not follow a rigid order. One recent study found that infants
reached for toys with their feet four weeks earlier, on average, than they reached for
them with their hands.

Growth also follows the proximodistal pattern, the sequence in which growth starts at
the centre of the body and moves toward the extremities.

For example, infants control the muscles of their trunk and arms before they control
their hands, and they use their whole hands before they can control several fingers.

In the first few days of life, most newborns lose 5 to 7 percent of their body weight
before they adjust to feeding by sucking, swallowing, and digesting.They double their
birth weight by the age of 4 months and nearly triple it by their first birthday.

Infants grow about 1 inch per month during the first year, reaching approximately 112
times their birth length by their first birthday! Growth slows considerably in the second
year of life.

At birth, the infant that began as a single cell has a brain that contains eighty six billion
of nerve cells, or neurons.

Extensive brain development continues after birth, through infancy, and later.

Because the brain is still developing so rapidly in infancy, the infant’s head should be
protected from falls or other injuries.

At birth, the newborn’s brain is about 25 percent of its adult weight. By the second
birthday, the brain is about 75 percent of its adult weight.

However, the brain’s areas do not mature uniformly.

The infant’s brain is literally waiting for experiences to determine how connections are
made.

Before birth, it appears that genes mainly directed how the brain establishes basic
wiring paterns; after birth, environmental experiences guide the brain’s
development.The inflowing stream of sights, sounds, smells, touches, language, and
eye contact help shape the brain’s neural connections.

It may not surprise us, then, that depressed brain activity has been found in children
who grow up in a deprived environment.
Infants whose parents expose them to a variety of stimulation by talking, touching,
playing-are most likely to develop to their full potential.

Physical Growth and Motor Development

According to dynamic systems theory, infants assembles motor skills for perceiving and
acting; perception an daction are joined together.

In order to develop motor skills, infants must perceive something in the environment that
motivates them to act, and then use their perceptions to develop their movements.Motor
skills represent solutions to the infant’s goals.

When infant are motivated to do something, they might create a new motor behavior.

The new behavior is the result of many factors: the development of the nervous
system, the body’s physical properties and its possibilities for movement, the goal the
child is motivated to reach, and the environmental support for the skill.

For example, babies learn to walk only when maturation of the nervous system allows
them to control certain leg muscles, when their legs have grown enough to support their
weight, and when they want to move.

Mastering a motor skill requires the infant’s active efforts to coordinate several
components of the skill.

Thus, according to dynamic systems theory, motor development is not a passive

process in which genes dictate the unfolding of a sequence of skills.

The infant actively puts together a skill in order to achieve a goal within the constraints
set by the infant’s body and environment.

Nature and nurture, the infant and the environment, are all working together as part of
an ever-changing system.

Gross motor skills are that involve large-muscle activities, such as moving one’s arms
and walking.
Newborn infants cannot voluntarily control their posture. Within a few weeks, though,
they can hold their heads erect, and soon they can lift their heads.

By 2 months of age, babies can sit while supported on a lap or an infant seat, but they
cannot sit independently until they are 6 or 7 months of age.

Standing also develops gradually during the first year of life.

By about 8 months of age, infants usually learn to pull themselves up and hold on to a
chair, and by about 10 to 12 months of age they can often stand alone.

Locomotion and postural control are closely linked, especially in walking upright.

To walk upright, the baby must be able both to balance on one leg as the other is swung
forward and to shift the weight from one leg to the other.

Infants must also learn what kinds of places and surfaces are safe for crawling or
walking.

Whereas gross motor skills involve large muscle activity, fine motor skills involve finely
tuned movements.

Grasping a toy, using a spoon, buttoning a shirt, or anything that requires fingers to
show more skill demonstrates fine motor skills.

Sensory and Perceptual development

Studying the infant’s perception is not an easy task. Unlike most research participants,
infants cannot write, type on a computer keyboard, or speak well enough to explain to
an experimenter what their responses are to a given stimulus or condition.

Yet scientists have developed several ingenious research methods to examine infants’
sensory and perceptual development.

Visual Preference Method Robert Fantz (1963), made an important discovery: Infants
look at different things for different lengths of time.

Fantz placed infants in a “looking chamber,” which had two visual displays on the ceiling
above the infant’s head.

An experimenter viewed the infant’s eyes by looking through a peephole. If the infant
was gazing a one of the displays, the experimenter could see the display’s reflection in
the infant’s eyes.

This allowed the experimenter to determine how long the infant looked at each display.
Fantz found that infants only 2 days old would gaze longer at patterned discs than at
red, white, odr yellow discs. Similar results were found with infants 2 to 3 weeks old.

Habituation and Dishabituation: Another way that researchers have studied infant
perception is to present a stimulus (such as a sight or a sound) a number of times.

If the infant decreases its response to the stimulus after several presentations, it
indicates that the infant is no longer interested in the stimulus.

If the researcher now presents a new stimulus, the infant’s response will recover-
indicating the infant could discriminate between the old and new stimulus.

New born infants can habituate to repeated sights, sounds, smells, or touches.

Among the measures researchers use in habituation studies are sucking behavior, heart
and respiration rates, and the length of time the infant looks at an object.

How well can infants see?

The infant’s colour vision also improves. At birth, babies can distinguish between green
and red. All of the eye’s colour-sensitive receptors function by 2 months of age.

Newborns are especially sensitive to human speech sounds. Just a few days after birth,
newborns will turn to the sound of a familiar voice.

By 2 years of age, infants have considerably improved their ability to distinguish sounds
with different pitches.

Newborns respond to touch. A touch to the cheek produces a turning of the head; a
touch to the lips produces sucking movements.

Newborns can also feel pain.Newborns can differentiate odors.The expressions on their
faces indicate that they like the scents of vanilla and strawberry but do not like the scent
of rotten eggs or fish.

Sensitivity to taste might be present even before birth. At about 4 months of age, infants
begin to prefer salty tastes, which as newborns they had not liked.

Cognitive development

Piaget’s theory is a story of how biology and experience help in cognitive development.
Piaget thought that, just as our physical bodies have structures that enable us to adapt
to the world, we build mental structures that help us to adapt to the world.

Adaptation involves adjusting to new environmental demands. Piaget stressed that

children actively construct their own cognitive worlds; information is not just poured into
their minds from the environment.
What processes do children use as they construct their knowledge of the world? Piaget
developed several concepts to answer this question.

Schemes As the infant or child seeks to construct an understanding of the world the
developing brain creates schemes. These are actions of mental representations that
organize knowledge.

In Piaget’s theory, infants create behavioral schemes (physical activities) whereas

toddlers and older children create mental schemes (cognitive activities).

A baby’s schemes are structured by simple actions that can be performed on objects
such as sucking, looking, and grasping.

Older children’s schemes include strategies and plans for solving problems.

Assimilation and Accommodation to explain how children use and adapt their schemes,
Piaget offered two concepts: assimilation and accommodation.

Assimilation occurs when children use their existing schemes to deal with new
information or experiences. Accommodation occurs when children adjust their schemes
to take new information and experiences into account.

Organization in Piaget’s theory is the grouping of isolated behaviors and thoughts into a
higher-order system. Continual refinement of this organization is an inherent part of
development.

A child who has only a vague idea about how to use a hammer may also have a vague
idea about how to use other tools.

Equilibration and Stages of Development Assimilation and accommodation always take

the child to a higher ground, according to Piaget.

In trying to understand the world, the child inevitably experiences cognitive conflict, or
disequilibrium.

That is, the child is constantly faced with inconsistencies to his or her existing schemes.
For example, if a child believes that pouring water from a short and wide container into
a tall and narrow container changes the amount of water, then the child might be
puzzled by where the “extra” water came from and whether there is actually more water
to drink.

The puzzle crates disequilibrium; for Piaget, an internal search for equilibrium creates
motivation for change.

The child assimilates and accommodates, adjusting old schemes, developing new
schemes, and organizing and reorganizing the old and new schemes.

Eventually, the organization is fundamentally different from the old organization; it

becomes a new way of thinking.

Equilibration is the name Piaget gave to this mechanism by which children shifts from
one stage of thought to the next. Equilibration does not happen all at once. There is
considerable movement between states of cognitive equilibrium and disequilibrium and
assimilation and accommodation work in concert to produce cognitive change.

A result of these processes, according to Piaget, is that individuals go through four

statges of development. A different way of understanding the world makes one stage
more advanced than another.

Cognition is qualitatively different in one stage compared with another. In other words,
the way children reason at one stage is different from the way they reason at another
stage.

Language Development

Babies actively produce sounds from birth onward. The effect of these early
communications is to attract attention. Babies’ sounds and gestures go through this
order during the first year:
1. Crying. Babies cry even at birth. Crying can signal distress, but there are different
types of cries that signal different things.
2. Cooing. Babies first coo at about 1 to 2 months. These are gurgling sounds that
are made in the back of the throat and usually express pleasure during
interaction with the caregiver.
3. Babbling,. In the middle of the first year babies babble-that is, they produce
strings of consonant-vowel combinations, such as “ba, ba, ba, and ba.”
4. Gestures. Infants start using gestures, such as showing and pointing, at about 8
to 12 months of age.

They may wave bye-bye, nod to mean “yes,” and show an empty cup to want more milk.
Long before they begin to learn words, infants can make fine distinctions among the
sounds of the language.
Between about 8 and 12 months of age, infants often show their first understanding of
words.

The infant’s first spoken word is a milestone eagerly anticipated by every parent.
This event usually occurs between 10 to 15 months of age and at an average of about
13 months.

However, long before babies say their first words, they have been communicating with
their parents, often by gesturing and using their own special sounds.

The appearance of first words is a continuation of this communication process.

A child’s first words include those that name important people (dada), familiar animals
( kitty ), vehicles ( car ), toys ( ball ), food milk ), body parts ( eye ), clothes ( hat ),
household items ( clock ), and greeting terms ( bye).

On the average, infants understand about 50 words at about 13 months, but they can’t
say this many words until about 18 months.

Thus, in infancy receptive vocabulary (words the child understands)

Exceeds spoken vocabulary (words the child uses).

The infant’s spoken vocabulary rapidly increases once the first word is spoken.

Whereas the average 18-month-old can speak about 50 words, a 2-year-old can speak
about 200 words.

This rapid increase in vocabulary that begins at approximately 18 months is called the
vocabulary spurt.

In Growing Up with Language, linguist Naomi Baron provided ideas to help parents
facilitate their child’s language development.
• Be an active conversational partner.
• Talk as if the infant understands what you are saying.
• Use a language style with which you feel comfortable.
 • Don’t worry about how you sound to other adults when you talk with your child.

Conclusion

So far we have seen that it is important for infants to get off to a healthy start in their
journey through life.

Unfortunately this doesn’t happen for some children, whose circumstances place them
at risk for developmental problems.

The first problem in the development of infants in a developing country like India is that
of nutrition.

Many children born in poor families in India do have access to the right kind of food and
develop physical and developmental problems due to malnutrition.

The other problem in the development of infants is the mental atmosphere or climate
around the child is not healthy or even abusive.

Off late we are hearing about many social problems in Indian families, like alcoholism,
wife beating and dowry related problems etc.

Such problems also affect the mental development of the child because the child makes
mental structures out of the behaviour of the adults around him or her and carries these
mental structures well into adulthood and old age.

So it is really important that the correct mental and physical conditions should be given
to the infant at the beginning of his or her life, in order that they may have the correct
physical and mental development.