Chapter 5 - Early Childhood Flashcards
Growth in early childhood
Children between the ages of 2 and 6 years tend to grow about 3 inches in height each year and gain about 4 to 5 pounds in weight each year.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), ___ in 5 American children between the ages of 2 and 5 are overweight or obese.
1
7 principles of feeding your toddler
- Don’t try to force your child to eat or fight over food.
- Recognize that appetite varies.
- Keep it pleasant. This tip is designed to help caregivers create a positive atmosphere during mealtime.
- No short-order chefs.
- Limit choices.
- Serve balanced meals.
- Don’t bribe.
Children and brains
By age 6, [the brain] is at 95 percent of its adult weight. The development of myelin (myelination) and the development of new synapses (through the process of synaptic pruning) continues to occur in the cortex and as it does we see a corresponding change in what the child is capable of doing. Remember that myelin is the coating around the axon that facilitates neural transmission. Synaptic pruning refers to the loss of synapses which are unused. As myelination and pruning increase during this stage of development, neural processes become quicker and more complex.
Early childhood and motor development
Early childhood is a time when children are especially attracted to motion and song. Days are filled with moving, jumping, running, swinging and clapping, and every place becomes a playground.
Sexual development in early childhod
Historically, children have been thought of as innocent or incapable of sexual arousal (Aries, 1962). A more modern approach to sexuality suggests that the physical dimension of sexual arousal is present from birth. That said, it seems to be the case that the elements of seduction, power, love, or lust that are part of the adult meanings of sexuality are not present in sexual arousal at this stage. In contrast, sexuality begins in childhood as a response to physical states and sensation and cannot be interpreted as similar to that of adults in any way (Carroll, 2007).
Early childhood and sexual exploration
Children will explore themselves sexually. They are also likely to touch each other. Parents should not be alarmed by this and should facilitate healthy conversations with their children and help them understand appropriate touch boundaries. . .instead of talking about good or bad touching, talk about safe and unsafe touching. This way children will not feel guilty later on when that sort of touching is appropriate in a relationship.
Preoperational stage characteristics:
-Pretend Play
-Egocentrism
-Precausal thinking
-Cognition Errors
Precausal thinking:
Piaget coined the term “precausal thinking” to describe the way in which preoperational children use their own existing ideas or views, like in egocentrism, to explain cause-and-effect relationships. Three main concepts of causality, as displayed by children in the preoperational stage, include animism, artificialism, and transductive reasoning.
What is Animism?
Animism is the belief that inanimate objects are capable of actions and have lifelike qualities.
What is Artificialism?
Artificialism refers to the belief that environmental characteristics can be attributed to human actions or interventions.
What is Transductive Reasoning?
Transductive reasoning is when a child fails to understand the true relationships between cause and effect. Unlike deductive or inductive reasoning (general to specific, or specific to general), transductive reasoning refers to when a child reasons from specific to specific, drawing a relationship between two separate events that are otherwise unrelated
What is Syncretism?
syncretism. . .refers to a tendency to think that if two events occur simultaneously, one caused the other.
Centration and Conservation:
Centration and conservation are characteristic of preoperative thought. Centration is the act of focusing all attention on one characteristic or dimension of a situation while disregarding all others. An example of centration is a child focusing on the number of pieces of cake that each person has, regardless of the size of the pieces. Centration is one of the reasons that young children have difficulty understanding the concept of conservation. Conservation is the awareness that altering a substance’s appearance does not change its basic properties.
Centration, conservation ___, and irreversibility are indications that young children are ___ on visual ____.
errors, reliant, representations
Transitive Inference:
Transitive inference is using previous knowledge to determine the missing piece, using basic logic. Children in the preoperational stage lack this logic. An example of transitive inference would be when a child is presented with the information “A” is greater than “B” and “B” is greater than “C.” The young child may have difficulty understanding that “A” is also greater than “C.”
Nuancing and/or countering Piaget
It certainly seems that children in the preoperational stage make the mistakes in logic that Piaget suggests that they will make. That said, it is important to remember that there is variability in terms of the ages at which children reach and exit each stage. Further, there is some evidence that children can be taught to think in more logical ways far before the end of the preoperational period. For example, as soon as a child can reliably count they may be able to learn conservation of number. For many children, this is around age five. More complex conservation tasks, however, may not be mastered until closer to the end of the stage around age seven.
Theory of Mind
The theory of mind is the understanding that the mind holds people’s beliefs, desires, emotions, and intentions. One component of this is understanding that the mind can be tricked or that the mind is not always accurate.