Chapter 6: physical and cognitive development in early childhood Flashcards
Bodily Growth and Change 3-5 year olds
- 3-5-year-olds grow from 95 to 109cm
- 3-5-year-olds grow from 14 to 18kg
Growth is cephalocaudal
• Limbs lengthen
- Proportion of body fat decreases
- Brain develops
- Skeleto-muscular system strengthens
• Permanent teeth emerge
Impact of size variation
Larger than average child
Smaller than average child
Larger than average children may:
- Be excluded for ‘roughness’
- Lack challenges
- Have more expected of them
Smaller than average children may:
- Be injured by larger children
- Lack mastery in normative tasks of strength and endurance
- Be ‘babied’ — low self-confidence
Health and illness
• Pre-schoolers more likely than adults to get acute infectious diseases such as ear infections and stomach upsets
- Immune system not yet fully developed
- Many infectious diseases eliminated by vaccination in industrialised nations
- Significant differences in developing countries
- UNICEF goal (MDG4) – to reduce child mortality by two thirds by 2015
Child mortality rates
Child injuries
- ‘Unintentional’ injuries more accurate term than ‘accidental’ injuries
- Child factors influencing injury include sex and temperament
- Parental factors: poverty, maternal employment, beliefs about preventability
- Societal conditions play a role (international differences)
- Intentional injury or physical abuse also a serious problem
Deaths and unintentional injuries in Australia
- Overall, a low rate of death
- In 2003, child deaths accounted for 1.3% of all deaths registered
- Most child deaths are of infants aged < 1 year (68% of deaths of 0-14-year-olds in 2003) and are related to perinatal and congenital factors
- However, after infancy period, injury deaths (e.g., transport accidents, drownings, assaults) emerge as leading cause of death for children
- From 1999-2003, 41% of all deaths of children aged 1-14 years were injury deaths (1,260 children)
Motor development
Gross
Fine
Gross Motor Development
- Large muscle groups
- Centre of gravity moves downward, allowing for new motor skills to develop
- Ball throwing, jumping, running
Fine Motor Development
- Using eye-hand and small muscle coordination
- Buttoning a shirt, drawing
Gross and fine motor skills by age
Artistic development
- Scribbles: during 2nd year
- Shapes: circles, squares, triangles (3-4yrs)
- Designs: combine shapes into more complex designs (4yrs)
- Pictorial: draw actual depictions of objects, such as houses and trees (4- 5yrs)
Variations in motor development
sex differences
cultural differences
Sex differences
- Boys slightly stronger than girls
- Girls marginally better at balance and coordination tasks
- May be related to social factors
Cultural differences
- May be related to child-rearing practices
- Cultural and sex differences smaller than individual differences
Piaget’s Cognitive development
Pre-operational stage (2-7 years)
• Symbolic representations supersede sensorimotor activities
—Pretend play
—Language
- Understand constancies as well as object permanence
- Start to internalise functional relationships
Piaget’s cognitive limitations: Conservation
Something remains the same even if its appearance is altered
- Matter/mass
- Liquid
- Length
- Number
- Area
- Volume
preoperational children are not meant to understand conservation
Why Can’t Preoperational Children Conserve?
• Centration: focus on one aspect and neglect others (e.g., height of liquid not volume)
• Irreversibility: Failure to see that an action can go in two or more ways; cannot mentally reverse a set of steps
• Focus on successive states: tendency for preoperational children to focus on the end states rather than the transformations from one state to another
Other cognitive limitations of preoperational children
- Number skills – questions concerning understanding of numerical concepts
- Classification skills – limited to basic level categories and incapable of taxonomic categorisation
- Animism – tendency to apply attributes of living things to inanimate objects
- Magical thinking – attribute inexplicable events to magic or fantasy figures
Egocentrism
Egocentrism: Confusing one’s own perspective with that of another’s
- Not being able to take another’s view/perspective
- Believing the universe centres around the self
- Piaget believed that children under 8 years lack a theory of mind
-
Wimmer and Perner (1983): False belief task
- Suggests earlier development of theory of mind
Egocentrism: Piaget’s Three Mountain Task
- The pre-operational child is unable to describe the mountains from the doll’s point of view.
- Four-year-olds always point to photos that show their own view.
- At 7 years they point to the picture that corresponds to the doll’s view.
