Infancy Flashcards
Infancy (what it is)
is a period of dramatically rapid growth.
During the first year the infant’s weight almost triples. By age 2, the fundamentals of voluntary movement, language and concept formation can be observed.
The outstanding feature of infancy is the integration of simple responses into increasingly coordinated, meaningful patterns of behaviour
Infants are far more competent than people believe, many perceptual, cognitive and social capacities, guided by genetic information, have been noted.
Detail in Infancy
The development of Sensory/ Perceptual and Motor Functions.
Infants are born with an intact Sensory/Perceptual system, including a well formed brain.
Vision, Hearing, Taste, Smell, Touch
Motion Sensitivity, and responsiveness to internal cues (proprioception).
All these develop rapidly and appear to function at a more advanced level than the motor system. Sensations appear to be organised and represented as meaningful perceptions in the infant’s brain. Sensory and perceptual capabilities provide the basis for establishing effective interactive relationships with their caregivers.
Sensory and perceptual development (vision and hearing)
Hearing provides the very earliest link between new born and the mother.
Young infants can distinguish changes in loudness, pitch, duration and location of sounds. Infants use sounds to localize objects in space without the aid of visual cues.
Vision
Infants respond to a variety of visual dimensions e.g. movement, colour, brightness, complexity, light/dark, contrast, contours, distance and depth.
Sensory and perceptual development (taste and smell )
From observation, infants have the ability to differentiate among various tastes – sweet, bitter, sour and salty. Two hours after birth, infants respond differently to those tastes. Sucrose has an especially calming effect on newborns and appear to reduce pain.
Breast-fed infants are particularly sensitive to their mothers’ body odors and the mother’s odor may play an important role in stimulating early mother-infant interactions
Touch
The skin is the largest sensory organ and the earliest to develop in the uterus.
Research has proven that touch plays a central role in development.
Gentle handle, including rocking, stroking and cuddling, all have soothing effects on a baby
Swaddling the practice of wrapping a baby snugly in a soft blanket.
THE INTERCONNECTED NATURE OF SENSORY/PERCEPTUAL CAPACITIES (Touches skin)
Even though the sensory and perceptual capacities evolve independently, they function simultaneously, in an interconnected system to provide a variety of information about the environment. (Breast feeding).
Mother guides baby to breast, baby uses visual, tactile, olfactory and kinesthetic cues to find and grabs breast, closes eyes, opens eyes looks at mother’s face, smells the milk, tastes it, listens to mother’s comforting voice.
Motor Development (reflexes)
At birth an infant’s voluntary muscle responses are poorly coordinated.
Early responses appear to be reflective meaning that a specific stimulus will evoke a particular motor response without any voluntary control or direction.
Inserting something in an infant’s mouth produces a sucking reflex.
Infant reflexes include, sucking, grasping, rooting (turning the head in the direction of the cheek that is stroked)
Motor skills develop as a result and maturation of bones, muscles and the nervous system.
Motor development follow two fundamental directions:
Cephalocaudal from the head, neck and shoulders to the legs and feet.
Proximodistal from the center, including the shoulders and trunk, to the extremities, the hands and fingers.
In addition, motor behaviour shifts from being largely reflexive to being purposeful and voluntary.
What is temperament
This is a theoretical construct that refers to relatively stable characteristics of response to the environment that can be observed during the first months of life (Thomas & Chess, 1980).
In 1968, Escalona focused on individual differences among infants in the permeability of the boundary between the self and the stimulus environment and the differential sensitivity of the infant to various sense modalities
Nine temperamental qualities
1.Activity level,
2.Rhythmicity,
3.Approach/ withdrawal,
4.Adaptability,
5.Intensity of reaction,
6.Threshold of responsiveness,
7. Quality of mood,
8.Distractibility,
9. Attention span and persistence.
How is temperament linked to motor system
These dimensions of temperament are closely linked to the sensory/motor system and to the adaptive mechanisms that infants have for orienting to and withdrawing from stimulation
Three temperamental groupings
1.Easy – positive mood, regular body functions, low or moderate intensity of reaction, adaptability, positive approach rather than withdrawal from new situations
2.Slow to Warm up – Low activity level, tendency to withdraw on first exposure to new stimuli, slow to adapt, somewhat negative in mood, low intensity of reaction to situations
3.Difficult – Irregular body functions, unusually intense reactions, tendency to withdraw from new situations, slow to adapt to change, generally negative mood.
Temperament influences
A child’s temperament influences the tone of interactions,
the frequency with which interactions take place,
the way others react to the child and
the way the child reacts to the reaction of others.
Highly active social children- initiate interactions and respond positively to the attention of others.
More passive inhibited children. Less likely to initiate interactions and withdraws.
What is attachment
The process through which people develop specific, positive, emotional bonds with others.
The attachment behaviour system is an organized patterns of infant signals and adult responses that lead to a protective, trusting relationship during the earliest stage of development.
One of the most significant patterns of caregiver-infant interactions in the early months is synchrony. Parent-infant dyads that show early positive attachment are characterized by interactions that are rhythmic, well-timed and mutually rewarding.
Dyads in which the caregiver is unresponsive to the infant’s signals of distress, overly intrusive when the infant is calm, or under involved, have less positive attachments.
Evidence that an attachment has been formed
Infants try to maintain contact with the object of attachment.
Infants show distress when the object of attachment is absent.
Infants are more relaxed and comfortable with the object of attachment and more fretful with others.
Types of anxiety in infants with attachment
Stranger Anxiety – The baby’s discomfort or tension in the presence of unfamiliar adults
Separation Anxiety – Infants expressing rage and despair when parents leave
Patterns of attachment
Secure attachment- explore their environment and interact with strangers when mother is present.
After separation the babies actively greet their mothers or seek interaction. If distress occurred when mother returned it was reduced
ANXIOUS AVOIDANT ATTACHMENT
Avoids contact with mother after separation or ignore their efforts to interact
Show less distress at being alone than other babies
ANXIOUS RESISTANT ATTACHMENT
Cautious in the presence of strangers
Exploration disrupted by the caregivers departure. Angry and hard to comfort when caregiver returns.
DISORGANISED ATTACHMENT:
No consistent strategy like the other three.
They behave contrary, unpredictable ways that seem to convey feelings of extreme fear or utter confusion.
Attachment Relevance To Later Development
An attachment is more than the expression of behaviour. It is an internal representation of the characteristics of a specific relationship. It provides the infant with a set of rules with which to organise information and to interpret experiences related to the relationship. The representation is a product of the infant’s efforts to maintain contact with the caregiver and the caregiver’s customary responses to those attempts. In a secure attachment the representation is based on the infant’s confidence that his attempts will be accepted.
Positive adaptive capacities
Greater resilience, self-control and curiosity.
Development of more positive friendships.
Reactive Attachment Disorder
In contrast, infants who have a disorganized attachment are very hostile, aggressive preschoolers.
A new clinical diagnosis – Reactive Attachment Disorder – has been linked to serious disturbance in infant attachment.
Two expressions of this disorder have been described: Inhibited Type, in which the person is very withdrawn, hyper-vigilant in social contacts, and resistant to comfort; and Uninhibited Type, in which the person shows a lack of discrimination, being overly friendly and attaching to any new person (DeAngelis,1997)
What does the quality of attachment formed in infancy influence
From a life-span perspective, the quality of attachment formed in infancy influences the formation of later relationships.
The cognitive representation one forms of an attachment relationship influences one’s expectations of an intimate partner.
Adult love relationships characterised
Adult love relationships can be characterised along many of the same dimensions as infant attachments, including the desire to maintain physical contact with the loved one,
increased disclosure and responsiveness to the loved one,
the effectiveness of the loved one in providing comfort and reassurance that reduce distress, and
the element of exclusiveness or preferential response, compared to others.
Do not assume that the quality of adult love relationships or parental behaviour is determined solely by the quality of childhood attachments.
Many experiences and concepts intervene to modify the attachment representation and to expand one’s capacity to love another person after infancy
Attachment going into Adulthood
Parenting relationships can also be understood as an elaboration of the attachment representation.
Adults who have experienced a secure attachment in their own infancy are more likely to be able to comfort and respond to their children.
Adults whose childhood attachments were unpredictable or even hostile are more likely to have difficulty coping successfully with infants’ needs
However, a growing body of work links the quality of early attachments with a person’s orientation to and capacity for social relationships within the context of friendships, intimate relationships and parent-child relations
SENSORIMOTOR INTELLIGENCE AND EARLY CAUSAL SCHEMES (Primitive Causality)
Capacity to anticipate that certain actions will have specific effects on objects in the environment.
The chief mechanism governing the growth of intelligence in infancy is sensorimotor adaptation – infants use their reflexes to explore/ engage their environment, at the same time
They gradually alter their reflexive responses to take account of the unique properties of objects around them.
They form schemes based on perception and direct investigation of the environment.
SENSORYMOTOR INTELIGENCE AND EARLY CAUSAL SCHEMES (Primitive Causality) - Continuation
The notion of sensorimotor intelligence encompasses the emergence and elaboration of simple and complex schemes for the patterns of movement and the sensory experiences that the child comes to recognize in association with specific environmental events.
According to Theory, infants form theories about how their world operates and modify them as new information is gathered.
