Ages 3 to 6 Flashcards
• Bodily growth and change from ages 3-6
o Around age 3, children lose “baby roundness”
• Limbs lengthen, height increases
• Cartilage turns to bone faster
• Physical growth ages 3 to 6 for males and females
• Boys are going to look heavier and be taller
• Preventing Obesity
o 10% of 2 to 5 year olds are overweight
o Low income children of all ethnicities at greatest risk
o Eating habits are formed by caregivers
• Sleep Patterns
o By about age 5 most U.S. children
• Average about 11 hours a sleep a nights
• Give up naps
o Bedtime varies among cultures:
• Zuni no regular bedtime, sleep when sleepy
• Canadian Hare Indians: Bedtime after dinner, but no naps
o All children this age need this amount of time to sleep but obtained in different ways depending on culture
• Sleep Disturbances
o Night Terrors: Abrupt awakening; extremely frightened
o Nightmare: Common
o Walking and Talking: fairly common, accidental activation of brain’s motor control
• Enuresis:
o (Bed wetting), about 10-15% of 5 year olds more common for boys then girls
o Because it disrupts their sleep pattern
• Brain Development:
o By 6 brain is at 95% peak volume
o Corpus callosum, linking left and right hemispheres, improves functioning
o Most rapid growth in areas that support thinking, language and spatial relations
• Motor Skills
o Gross • Involves large muscle groups • Jumping and running o Fine • Using eye-hand and small-muscle coordination • Buttoning a shirt, drawing pictures
• Handedness
o Usually evident by age 3 o Heritability o Single-gene theory • Dominant allele for right handedness • 82% of population is right handed
• Malnutrition:
o Almost 30% of children worldwide are underweight, some severely
o 19% of U.S. children under 18 live in food insecure households
o Malnutrition can harm long term cognitive development
o Early education and improved diet moderate the effects
• Deaths and Accidental Injuries
o 73% of deaths of children under 5 occur in poor, rural regions of sub Saharan Africa and south Asia (Vaccines protect children in developed countries from this)
o In U.S. most child deaths are caused by injury rather than illness
• Low SES and Health
o Lower SES increases risk of injury, illness, and death
o Poor children are more likely to
• Be of a minority
• Have chronic health problems and or lack health insurance
• Suffer vision and hearing loss
• Exposure to Pollutants
o Parental smoking: increases child’s risk of asthma and bronchitis
o Air Pollution: Increases risk of chronic respiratory diseases
o Pesticide poisonings: most occur in young children
o Exposure to Lead
• Cognitive Development: symbolic function
o The ability to use symbols that have meaning (Pre operational stage Piaget ages 2-7)
• Words
• Numbers
• Images
• Examples: deferred imitation, pretend play
• Causality
o Transduction: Mentally linking phenomena, whether logical or not
• “My parents got a divorce because I was bad”
o Familiar settings help advance causality
• “I am quiet so I won’t wake the baby”
• Animism
o The tendency to attribute life to inanimate objects
• “The cloud is smiling at me!”
o Familiarity increases accuracy
• “I know that a person is different from my doll”
• Immature Aspects of Preoperational Thought
o Centration
• Tendency to focus on one aspect of a situation and neglect others
• Different in children because they do not have the capacity to understand egocentrism
o Decentering
• Thinking simultaneously about several aspects of a situation
• Inability to decenter leads to illogical conclusions
• Conservation
o Something remains the same even if its appearance is altered • Mass • Liquid • Length • Number • Area • Volume
• Irreversibility
o Failure to see that an action can go two or more ways
o A belief that pouring juice from glass to glass changes the amount of juice
o Focusing on the end state rather than the transfer from one to another
• Theory of Mind
o Understanding and awareness of your own mental processes
o Children’s awareness of their own mental processes and those of other people
o Preschoolers generally believe that mental activity starts and stops
o By middle childhood, understand that activity is continuous
• False beliefs and Deception
o Drawing false conclusions
• Appearance vs. reality
o Requires child to simultaneously refer to two conflicting mental representations
• Fantasy vs. Reality
o Distinguishing between real and imagined events
o Ability to understand what is not real
• Influences on Theory of mind development
o Heredity and environmental effects
o Child’s social skills
o Talking with children about mental states
o Cultural attitudes
o Bilingual children do somewhat better, stimulating the brain to realize that one object can have more than one word
• Three Steps of memory
o Encoding o Storage (retention) o Retrieval (how we recall information)
