Child Development: A Guide to Infant & Early Childhood
HDF 211 Study Guide: Chapters 3 & 4
Chapter 3: Physical & Cognitive Development in Infancy
Physical Growth and Development
Patterns of Growth
Cephalocaudal Pattern: Growth occurs from top to bottom (head to toe).
Proximodistal Pattern: Growth starts at the center of the body and moves towards the extremities.
The Brain
Shaken Baby Syndrome: Brain swelling and hemorrhaging caused by shaking a baby’s head. Perpetrators are often fathers, followed by childcare providers and the mother’s boyfriends.
EEG (Electroencephalogram): Measures brain activity. Studies show that high-quality mother-infant interaction early in infancy leads to better frontal lobe functioning later.
Cerebral Cortex: The outer layer of the brain. Lateralization is the specialization of function in one hemisphere or the other (e.g., language is often localized in the left hemisphere).
Synaptic Pruning: Unused synaptic connections are replaced or disappear.
Neurotransmitters and Synapses: Neurotransmitters are chemicals that transmit information across synapses (gaps between neurons).
Myelination: The process of encasing axons with fat cells, which speeds up neural transmission.
Neuroconstructivist View: Brain development is influenced by both genes and environment. Early experiences play a crucial role in shaping brain architecture.
Sleep
Infants sleep an average of 12.8 hours a day. Most sleep through the night by 6 months. REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep accounts for about half of their sleep time.
SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome): An infant suddenly stops breathing and dies without apparent cause. Risk factors include maternal smoking and bed-sharing.
Adequate sleep is crucial for brain maturation, memory consolidation, and cognitive development.
Nutrition
Breastfeeding Benefits: Promotes healthy weight gain, reduces the risk of SIDS, gastrointestinal infections, and lower respiratory tract infections.
When Not to Breastfeed: If the mother has HIV, active tuberculosis, or is taking certain medications.
Studies show that U.S. parents often feed their babies too little fruits and vegetables and too much junk food.
Motor Development
Dynamic Systems Theory: Infants develop motor skills by perceiving and acting. They are motivated by their environment and use their perceptions to refine their movements.
Reflexes: Automatic reactions to stimuli (e.g., rooting, sucking, moro).
Gross Motor Skills: Involve large muscle activities (e.g., walking). Infants first learn to control their heads, then progress to crawling and walking.
Experienced Walkers: Infants become experienced walkers around 12 months. Walking allows them to explore their environment and interact with others, promoting language development.
Milestones
- Sitting without support: 4.5-8 months
- Pulling to stand: 6-10 months
- Walking alone easily: 11-14 months
Experts believe that unrestricted motor activity (within safety limits) is vital for development in the second year.
Sensory and Perceptual Development
Sensation: Occurs when information interacts with sensory receptors.
Perception: The interpretation of what is sensed.
Gibson’s Ecological View: We directly perceive information from our environment.
Methods for Studying Infant Perception: Visual preference method, habituation and dishabituation, eye-tracking equipment.
Visual Acuity: Sharpness of vision. Newborns have poor visual acuity (20/600).
Faces: The most important visual stimuli for infants.
Depth Perception: Develops around 3-4 months.
Hearing: Newborns are sensitive to human speech sounds. By age 2, they can distinguish sounds with different pitches.
Touch: Gentle touch has positive developmental outcomes.
Smell and Taste: Newborns can differentiate between pleasant and unpleasant odors and tastes.
Intermodal Perception: Integrating information from multiple senses (e.g., vision and hearing).
Gibson vs. Piaget: Gibson’s view is more nativist (innate abilities), while Piaget’s view is more empiricist (learning through experience).
Cognitive Development
Piaget’s Concepts:
- Schemes: Mental representations that organize knowledge.
- Assimilation: Using existing schemes to understand new information.
- Accommodation: Adjusting schemes to fit new information.
- Organization: Grouping behaviors and thoughts into higher-order systems.
- Equilibration: Shifting from one stage of thought to the next.
- Object Permanence: Understanding that objects exist even when they can’t be seen.
- A-not-B Error: Infants reach for an object where it was previously hidden, even if they saw it moved.
Core Knowledge: The idea that infants are born with innate knowledge systems. Studies with puppets suggest that infants may have an innate sense of morality.
Attention: Newborns can detect contours and fixate on them. Older infants scan patterns more thoroughly and can selectively attend to objects.
Joint Attention: Focusing on the same object or event with another person. Emerges around 7-8 months and is crucial for learning, language development, and self-regulation.
Imitation: Meltzoff believes that infants’ imitative abilities are biologically based.
Memory: Infants as young as 6 months can remember information for 24 hours. By 20 months, they can remember information for up to 12 months.
Infantile Amnesia: The inability to remember events from early childhood, likely due to the immaturity of the prefrontal lobes.
Language Development
Sequence of Sounds and Gestures: Crying, cooing, babbling, gestures.
Phonemes: Infants can distinguish between different speech sounds before they learn words.
Word Segmentation: Infants begin to segment speech into words in the second half of their first year.
Receptive vs. Spoken Vocabulary: Infants understand more words than they can say. By 13 months, they understand about 50 words but can’t say that many until 18 months.
Vocabulary Spurt: A rapid increase in vocabulary that begins around 18 months.
Telegraphic Speech: Using short, precise words without grammatical markers.
Biological Influences: Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas in the brain are involved in language.
Behavioral View: Cannot fully explain language acquisition, as it doesn’t account for novel sentences and the learning of syntax without reinforcement.
Environmental Influences: Child-directed speech, shared reading, and joint attention promote language development.
Chapter 4: Socioemotional Development in Infancy
Emotional Development
Emotions: Feelings or affects that occur in important states or interactions. They play a crucial role in communication and behavioral organization.
Cultural and Relationship Influences: Emotions are shaped by cultural norms and relationships (e.g., infants react to parental conflict with distress).
Display Rules: Cultural rules governing when, where, and how emotions should be expressed.
Early Emotions: Infants can express surprise, interest, joy, anger, sadness, fear, and disgust in the first six months.
Crying: A primary form of communication. Types of cries include basic, anger, and pain cries. Parents should respond to crying, especially in the first year, to build secure attachment.
Smiling: Reflexive smiles appear in the first month, while social smiles emerge later.
Fear: Appears around 6 months and peaks around 18 months.
Stranger Anxiety: Fear of strangers, which is less pronounced in familiar settings.
Separation Protest: Crying when the caregiver leaves.
Social Referencing: Reading social cues to determine how to act in a situation.
Temperament
Definition: Individual differences in behavioral styles, emotions, and characteristic ways of responding.
Chess & Thomas’ Classification: Easy, difficult, and slow-to-warm-up children.
Kagan’s Classification: Focuses on inhibition to the unfamiliar (shyness vs. boldness).
Rothbart & Bates’ Classification: Emphasizes effortful control (regulating arousal and emotions).
Biological Influences: Physiological characteristics are linked to temperament (e.g., inhibited temperament is associated with a higher heart rate and cortisol levels).
Gender: Mothers may respond differently to irritable boys and girls.
Culture: Different cultures may value certain temperament traits more than others (e.g., behavioral inhibition is valued more in China than in North America).
Goodness-of-Fit: The match between a child’s temperament and environmental demands. Parents can be sensitive to their children’s temperaments by respecting individuality, structuring the environment, and avoiding negative labels.
Personality
Erikson’s Stages:
- Trust vs. Mistrust: Infants learn to trust or mistrust their caregivers based on the consistency of their care.
- Autonomy vs. Shame and Doubt: Toddlers develop a sense of independence or shame and doubt depending on their ability to explore and assert themselves.
Self-Recognition: A rudimentary form of self-awareness. Tested using the mirror test (e.g., placing a dot on the infant’s nose and observing their reaction to their reflection).
Social Orientation: Factors that contribute to social exploration include locomotion, intention and goal-directed behavior, and social referencing.
Attachment
Bowlby’s Theory: Infants and caregivers are biologically predisposed to form attachments. Attachment provides a secure base for exploration.
Internal Working Model: A mental representation of the caregiver, the relationship, and the self. It influences future relationships.
Schaffer’s Phases of Attachment:
- Phase 1 (Birth-2 months): Indiscriminate attachment.
- Phase 2 (2-7 months): Attachment focused on one figure.
- Phase 3 (7-24 months): Specific attachments develop.
- Phase 4 (24 months and on): Awareness of others’ feelings and goals.
Ainsworth’s Strange Situation: An observational measure of infant attachment. Four attachment styles: secure, insecure avoidant, insecure resistant, and insecure disorganized.
Early Secure Attachment: Linked to positive outcomes later in life, including better social skills, emotional regulation, and academic achievement.
Stability of Attachment: Attachment can be stable over time, but changes can occur due to life stressors or changes in the caregiving environment.
Developmental Cascade: Connections across domains over time that influence development. Attachment can be part of a developmental cascade.
Resilience: Infants are resilient and adaptive, and can thrive even with variations in parenting.
Criticisms of Attachment Theory: Some argue that it ignores cultural variations and the influence of multiple socializing agents.
Caregiving
Caregivers of Securely Attached Infants: Sensitive to their signals, consistently available, and responsive to their needs.
The Family
Marital Conflict and Parenting: Can negatively affect infant behavior and development.
Reciprocal Socialization: Bidirectional socialization between parents and children. Scaffolding is an important form of reciprocal socialization.
Fathers’ Experiences: Fathers can be as sensitive and responsive as mothers. Factors like marital intimacy and partner support are linked to father-infant attachment.
Parental Leave
U.S. vs. Nordic Countries: The U.S. offers up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave, while Nordic countries have more extensive, job-protected leave policies with benefits.
Child Care
National Longitudinal Study of Child Care:
- Quality of child care in the U.S. is often low, especially for low-income families.
- High-quality care is linked to better cognitive and social outcomes.
- Extensive time in child care can be associated with fewer sensitive interactions with mothers and more behavior problems.
- Parenting remains an important influence, even with extensive child care.
Chapter 5: Physical and Cognitive Development in Early Childhood
Physical Development
Body Growth
Children grow about 2 ½ inches and gain 5-7 pounds per year.
Height differences are influenced by heredity and environment.
Brain
Rapid growth occurs in the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in planning, organizing, and attention.
Myelination increases the speed and efficiency of neural transmission.
Poverty and maternal sensitivity are linked to brain development.
Motor Development
Gross motor skills improve significantly (e.g., hopping, jumping, running).
Fine motor skills become more precise.
Nutrition and Exercise
Overweight and Obesity: A serious health problem. Many children’s meals exceed recommendations for saturated and trans fats.
Fast Food: Often exceeds recommended calorie intake.
Caregiver Influence: Caregivers’ eating habits and feeding practices strongly influence children’s diets.
Obesity Rates: 8% of 2-5 year olds in the U.S. are obese.
Long-Term Consequences: Childhood obesity increases the risk of obesity and related health problems later in life.
Food’s Role: Food should be used to satisfy hunger and meet nutritional needs, not as a reward or a sign of love.
WIC (Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children): Addresses malnutrition and promotes school readiness.
Exercise: Effective for reducing body fat in overweight and obese children.
Enhancing Physical Activity: Family involvement in sports and safe outdoor play areas can promote physical activity.
Smoking: Exposure to secondhand smoke increases the risk of respiratory problems, sleep problems, and early smoking initiation.
Poverty: In developing countries, poverty is linked to malnutrition, illness, and inadequate access to healthcare.
Cognitive Development
Piaget’s Preoperational Stage (Ages 2-7)
Children begin to represent the world with words, images, and drawings. They develop stable concepts and begin to reason, but their thinking is still limited by egocentrism and magical beliefs.
Operations: Mental actions that obey logical rules. Preoperational children cannot yet perform operations mentally.
Symbolic Function Substage (Ages 2-4)
Children gain the ability to mentally represent objects that are not present, but they struggle with egocentrism (the inability to take another’s perspective).
Animism: The belief that inanimate objects have lifelike qualities.
Intuitive Thought Substage (Ages 4-7)
Children begin to ask”wh” questions and develop a strong interest in reasoning. However, their understanding is often based on intuition rather than logic.
Centration: Focusing on one characteristic to the exclusion of others.
Conservation: Understanding that certain properties of an object remain the same even when its appearance changes (e.g., the amount of liquid in a glass). Failing conservation tasks is a hallmark of the preoperational stage.