Psych 208 Early Childhood Notes PDF

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The notes from the powerpoints for Exam #2 are provided and highlighted...

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Early Childhood Development Biosocial Development: ● Nutrition influences: - skeletal growth, body shape, and susceptibility. ● Children eating behavior improves when: - Eat on predictable schedules - Model eating healthy food - Make mealtimes pleasant ● Forceful/Restrictive behavior is not helpful

Brain Development: ● Prefrontal Cortex development allows for: - Plan actions - Attend to stimuli - Strides in language development ● Brain matter can develop significantly and be pruned significantly during this time.

Brain Development: (continued) ● Two changes in brain development 1. Number/size of dendrite increases 2. Myelination continues ● Contextual Factors can influence brain development: - Parenting - Poverty - Resources Myelination: The process by which axons become coated with myelin, a fatty substance that speeds-the transmission of nerve impulses from neuron to neuron.

Gross Motor Skills: ● Age 3: - Enjoys simple movements: hopping, jumping, running around - Take great enjoyment in the movement they can do. ● Age 4: - Become more adventurous - Starting to be able to go down stairs ● Age 5: - Hair-raising stunts - Enjoy racing

Fine Motor Skills: ● Age Three - Children can pick up tiny objects - Still Clumsy Rough in placing small pieces ● Age Four - Much more precise - Have problems placing blocks ● Age Five - Body coordination correlates more strongly with sight. - Build more complex structures Academic/Artistic Expression: ● Academics - Slow maturation of fine motor skills (writing) and gross motor skills (PE) can cause frustration - Girls typically mature faster and boys take time to catch up ● Artistic - All forms of artistic expression blossom during early childhood - Children artwork is not meant to be realistic just communicate thoughts and self-expression Age-Related Dangers:

Injury control/harm reduction: Practices that are aimed at anticipating, controlling, and preventing dangerous activities; these practices reflect the beliefs that accidents are not random and that injuries can be made less harmful if proper controls are in place

Prevention:

Maltreatment and Neglect: ● Child Maltreatment - Intentional harm to or avoidable endangerment of anyone under 18 years of age. ● Child Neglect - Failure to meet a child’s basic physical, educational, or emotional needs ● Child Abuse - Deliberate action that is harmful to a child’s physical, emotional, or sexual wellbeing Child Maltreatment: Physical Abuse ● Infliction of physical injury as a result of punching, beating, kicking, biting, burning, or otherwise harming a child. Child Maltreatment: Child Neglect ● Characterized by failure to provide for a child’s basic needs. ● Neglect can be: - Physical, Educational, Emotional - Neglect is by far the most common form of child maltreatment Child Maltreatment: Sexual Abuse ● Includes fondling of genitals, intercourse, incest, sodomy, exhibitionism, commercial exploitation - 1 in 5 girls, 1 in 20 boys (this is grossly underreported) - Often perpetrated by a familiar individual Child Maltreatment: Emotional Abuse ● Includes acts or omissions by parents or other caregivers causing serious behavioral, cognitive, or emotional problems

Mandated Reporting: ● People/individuals who are required by law to report any suspected child maltreatment - Discuss with your administrative team the process of making official reports - When not associated with work, call the toll-free state number to make a report - Try to have as much detail as possible: perpetrators name/address, survivor’s name/address, type of abuse, evidence of abuse. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD): ● An anxiety disorder that develops as delayed reaction to having experienced or witnessed a profoundly shocking or frightening event ● Symptoms include: - Flashbacks and Hyperactivity, - Hypervigilance and Displaced Anger, - Sleeplessness and Nightmares - Confusion

After Proven Neglect/Abuse: ● Permanency Planning - An effort by child-welfare authorities to find a long-term living situation that will provide stability and support for a maltreated child - A goal is to avoid repeated changes of caregiver or school, which can be particularly harmful ● Foster Care - Legal, publicly supported system in which a maltreated child is removed from the parents’ custody - Entrusted to another adult or family - Reimbursed for expenses incurred in child’s needs ● Kinship care - Same as foster care but with family members

Early Childhood: Cognitive Development Piaget: Preoperational Stage: ● Approximately age 2 to 7 - Begin to represent the world with words, images, and drawings. - Stable concepts are formed - Reasoning forms Preoperational Intelligence: Piaget’s term for cognitive development that includes language and imagination but does not include logical, operational thought. Operations: ● Reversible mental actions that allow children to do mentally what before they could do only physically ● Preoperational thought is the beginning of the ability to reconstruct in thought what has been established in behavior - Symbolic function substage - Intuitive Thought Substage Symbolic Thought: A major accomplishment of preoperational intelligence that allows a child to think symbolically, including understanding that words can refer to things not seen and that an item, such as a flag, can symbolize something else. Symbolic Function Substage: ● Roughly 2 and 4 - Mentally represent an object ● Two important limitations - Egocentrism - Animism

Egocentrism/Animism: ● Egocentrism - The inability to distinguish between one’s own perspective and someone else’s perspective ● Animism - Inanimate objects have lifelike qualities and are capable of action. - The sidewalk made me fall Intuitive Thought Substage: ● Between ages 4 and 7 - Begin to use primitive reasoning and want to know the answers to all sorts of questions

Centration and Conservation: ● Centration - The focusing of attention on one characteristic to the exclusion of all others ● A component of centration is - Irreversibility - Conservation Centration and Conservation: (continued) ● Irreversibility - Characteristic of preoperational thought in which a young child thinks that nothing can be undone ● Conservation - They lack the awareness that altering an object or substance’s appearance does not change its basic properties - Cookies Vygotsky’s Social Constructivist Approach: ● Children’s cognitive development depends on the tools provided by society and their minds are shaped by the cultural context in which they live - Low SES and marshmallow experiment Zone of proximal development (ZPD): ● ZPD - The range of tasks that are too difficult for the child to master alone. ● Scaffolding - Changing the level of support to fit the child’s current performance Vygotsky and Language: ● Language is used to plan, guide monitor behaviors ● Observed private language as necessary for self-regulation - Piaget saw it as egocentric and immature - Modern researchers have determined that private language is: positive, used when tasks are difficult, more attentive, and improve on task. Theory of Mind: ● Refers to the awareness of one’s own and other’s mental processes of others. ● Children age 2 to 3 - Recognize the difference between what they see and what others see - Positive or negative emotions - Desires ● Age 5 children can develop a false belief task - Can be influenced by parental involvement, executive functioning, language. - Good indicator of Autism if individual fails this task later in age.

Attention: ● Attention is a focusing of mental resources on select information ● Executive Function - Higher-level cognitive processes like planning or managing thoughts ● Sustained Attention - Focused and extended engagement with an object, task, or event. Attention with Kids: ● Salient Vs. Relevant - Children (...