P1: Physical and Cognitive

Development in Early Childhood

PHYSICAL DEVELOPMENT
a. Bodily Growth And Chang
- Both boys and girls typically grow about 2 to 3 inches a year during early childhood and
gain approximately 4 to 6 pounds annually.
b. Sleep
- Sleep patterns change throughout the growing-up years.
- Most US children average about 11 hours of sleep at night by age 5 and give up daytime
naps
● Sleep disturbances
- may be caused by accidental activation of the brain’s motor control system or by
disordered breathing or restless leg movements
- These disturbances are heritable and tend to run in families and they are associated with
anxiety, nasal abnormalities, and being overweight.
Types of Sleep Disturbances:
1. night terror - abrupt awakening from a deep sleep in a state of agitation, generally occurs
in young children.
2. sleepwalking - walking around and sometimes performing other functions while asleep.
3. sleeptalking - talking while asleep.
4. nightmare - a bad dream, sometimes brought on by staying up too late, eating a heavy
meal close to bedtime, or overexcitement.
5. enuresis - Repeated urination in clothing or in bed.
c. Brain development
- From ages 3 to 6, the most rapid brain growth occurs in the frontal areas that regulate
planning and goal setting, and the density of synapses in the prefrontal cortex peaks at
age 4.
- This “exuberant connectivity” will gradually be pruned over time as a result of
experience, a process that underlies the great plasticity of the human brain.
- myelin (a fatty substance that coats the axons of nerve fibers and accelerates neural
conduction) continues to form
- By age 6, the brain has attained about 90 percent of its peak volume.
- from ages 6 to 11, rapid brain growth occurs in areas that support associative thinking,
language, and spatial relations.
- The corpus callosum is a thick band of nerve fibers that connects both hemispheres of
the brain and allows them to communicate more rapidly and effectively with each other.
d. Motor skills
● gross motor skills
- Physical skills that involve the large muscles. (e.g., running and jumping)
● fine motor skills
- Physical skills that involve the small muscles and eye–hand coordinations. (e.g.s
drawing and Bottuning)
● systems of action
 - Increasingly complex combinations of motor skills, which permit a wider or more
precise range of movement and more control of the environment.
● Handedness
- the preference for using one hand over the other, is usually evident by
age.Because the left hemisphere of the brain, which controls the right side of the
body, is usually dominant, 90 percent of people favor their right side.
- Boys are more likely to be left-handed than are girls

HEALTHY AND SAFETY

a. Obesity And Overweight
- Worldwide, an estimated 9 million children under age 5 were obese in 2020.
- Once primarily a problem of high-income countries, obesity is also on the rise in
middle- and low-income countries.
b. Undernutrition
- Malnutrition can take various forms. Some children appear to be of normal weight
but are shorter than they should be for their age and may have cognitive and
physical deficiencies. We call these children stunted.
c. Food Allergies
- s an abnormal immune system response to a specific food.
- Reactions can range from tingling in the mouth and hives to more serious, life-
threatening reactions such as shortness of breath and even death.
- 90% of food allergies can be attributed to eight foods: milk, eggs, peanuts, tree
nuts, fish, soy, wheat, and shellfish.
d. Oral health
- By age , all the primary (baby) teeth are in place, and the permanent teeth, which
will begin to appear at about age 6, are developing. Thus, parents usually can
safely ignore the common habit of thumbsucking in children under age 4. If
children stop sucking thumbs or fingers by that age, their permanent teeth are
not likely to be affected
- Fluoride can be administered topically, via toothpaste, mouthwashes, or gels; or
systemically, via supplements or the water supply to prevent from dental caries
or tooth decay, cavities
e. Deaths and Accidental Injuries
- After 5 years of age, the risk of home injuries decreases as the risk of fatal car
accidents increases. Other common causes for death in children are drowning,
fires, falls, poisoning, and homicide
- Other common causes of death in early childhood include cancer, congenital
abnormalities and chromosomal disorders, assault and homicide, heart disease,
respiratory diseases (including both chronic respiratory disease as well as
influenza and pneumonia), and septicemia (a bacterial infection that poisons the
blood, leading to organ failure)
f. Environmental Influences
● Socioeconomic Status
 - The lower a family’s socioeconomic status, the greater a child’s risks of illness,
injury, and death
- Poor children are more likely than other children to have chronic conditions and
activity limitations, to lack health insurance, and to have unmet medical and
dental needs.
● Race/Ethnicity
- “chilling effect” has occurred for families in which the child is a citizen but the
parent.
- children from racial and ethnic minorities may experience stress-related health
issues at higher rates due to cumulative effects of discrimination, stigma, and
prejudice
● Homeless
- Homelessness results from circumstances that force people to choose between
food, shelter, and other basic needs.
● Environmental Pollutants
- smoking is bad for everyone; however, children, with their still-developing lungs
and faster rate of respiration, are particularly sensitive to the damaging effects of
exposure.
- Children exposed to parental smoke are at increased risk of respiratory infections
such as bronchitis and pneumonia, ear problems, worsened asthma, and slowed
lung growth.

COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
Piaget Approach
● preoperational stage
- In Piaget’s theory, the second major stage of cognitive development, in which symbolic
thought expands but children cannot yet use logic effectively.

Advances of Preoperational Thought

1. The Symbolic Function
● Symbolic function
- Piaget’s term for ability to use mental representations (words, numbers, or
images) to which a child has attached meaning.
- Being able to think about something in the absence of sensory or motor cues
characterizes
● pretend play
- play involving imaginary people and situations; also called fantasy play, dramatic
play, or imaginary play, children use an object to represent something else.
- For example, a child may hold up a remote control to their ear while pretending to
talk on a telephone. The remote control is a symbol for the telephone they have
seen their mother use.
2. Object Space
- also begin to be able to understand the symbols that describe physical spaces,
although this process is slow.
 - Older preschoolers can use simple maps, and they can transfer the spatial
understanding gained from working with models to maps and vice versa.
- for example, as they approach 5 years of age, most preschoolers can view a
scale model of a room, be shown on that model where
a toy is hidden, and then find the toy in the actual room
3. Causality
- Piaget maintained that preoperational children cannot yet reason logically about
cause and effect. Instead, he said, they reason by transduction
● transduction
- Piaget’s term for a preoperational child’s tendency to mentally link particular
phenomena, whether or not there is logically a causal relationship.
- For example, Luis may think that his “bad” thoughts or behavior caused his own
or his sister’s illness or his parents’ divorce.
- In contrast, some other researchers suggested that young children do grasp
cause and effect.
- For example, naturalistic observations of 2½- to 5-year-olds’ everyday language
showed flexible causal reasoning. Children listed both physical (“The scissors
have to be clean so I can cut better”) and social-conventional (“I have to stop
now because you said to”) causes for their actions.
4. Identities and Categorization
- Categorization, or classification, requires a child to identify similarities and
differences. By age 4, many children can classify by two criteria, such as color
and shape. Children use this ability to order many aspects of their lives,
categorizing people as “good” or “bad,” “nice,” or “mean,” and so forth.
- One type of categorization is the ability to distinguish living from nonliving things
called animism.
● animism - tendency to attribute life to objects that are not alive
5. Number
- Research suggests that infants as young as 4½ months indicate, with longer
looking times and increased staring, that if one doll is added to another doll, there
should be 2 dolls not one.
- By 6 months of age, they can “count” higher and know that 8 dots are different
from 16 dots.
- Other research has found that ordinality—the concept of comparing quantities
(more or less, bigger or smaller)—seems to begin around 9 to 11 months.

Immature Aspects Of Preoperational Thought:

● centration
- In Piaget’s theory, the tendency of preoperational children to focus on one aspect of a
situation and neglect others.
● decenter
- In Piaget’s terminology, to think simultaneously about several aspects of a situation.
a. egocentrism
 - Piaget’s term for inability to consider another person’s point of view; a characteristic of
young children’s thought.
- When Luis believes that his “bad thoughts” have made his sister sick or that he caused
his parents’ marital troubles, he is thinking egocentrically
b. Conservation
- Piaget’s term for awareness that two objects that are equal according to a certain
measure remain equal in the face of perceptual alteration so long as nothing has been
added to or taken
away from either object.
c. irreversibility
- Piaget’s term for a preoperational
child’s failure to understand that an operation can go in two or more
directions.

THEORY OF MIND
- Awareness and understanding of
mental processes.
- is the understanding that others have their own thoughts, beliefs, desires, and
intentions. Having a theory of mind allows us to understand and predict others’ behavior
and makes the social world understandable. Theory of mind includes knowledge of
thinking about mental states, false beliefs, and distinguishing between fantasy and
reality.
a. Knowledge about Thinking and Mental States
- Between ages 3 and 5, children come to understand that thinking goes on inside
the mind; that it can deal with either real or imaginary things; and that it is
different from seeing, talking, touching, and knowing
- The recognition that others have mental states accompanies the decline of
egocentrism and the development of empath
b. False Beliefs and Deception
- The understanding that people can hold false beliefs flows from the realization
that people can hold incorrect mental representations of reality.
- For example, if you see your mother searching for an umbrella, but you know it’s
not raining outside, you can understand that she thinks it’s raining, even if it is
not. This ability is generally tested with what is called a false belief task
- Deception is an effort to plant a false belief in someone else’s mind.
- Not surprisingly, performance on the false belief task has been repeatedly shown
to predict the ability to lie and preschoolers who are more advanced in their
understanding of others’ mental states are better liar
c. Distinguishing between Appearance and Reality
- According to Piaget, not until about age 5 or 6 do children begin to understand
the distinction between what seems to be and what is.
- More recent studies have found this ability emerging between 3 and 4 years of
age.
 - Similarly, 3-year-old children were able to understand that an adult looking
through a yellow screen at a blue object saw it as green, as evidenced by
correctly selecting the blue toy after being asked, “Can you put the green one in
the bag for me?”.
- It may be that children do understand the difference between appearance and
reality but have difficulty displaying their knowledge in traditional tasks that
require verbal responses. When you ask them to display their knowledge via their
actions, they are better able to do so.
d. Distinguishing between Fantasy and Reality
- By the age of 3 or 4, children differentiate between fictional cartoon worlds. So, if
Barney were to show up on Sesame Street, they would be extremely surprised.
e. Individual Differences in Theory of Mind Development
- TOM predicts later social competence possibly because those children who are
better at TOM are better at understanding others' emotions and are more likely to
engage in prosocial behaviors
- Having siblings is also associated positively with TOM development
- Bilingual children also recognize the need to match their language to that of their
partner, making them more aware of others’ mental states
f. Cultural Influences on Theory of Mind Development
- Parents across different cultures may also shape their children's emerging TOM
understanding by how they interact with them.
- For instance, parents in the United Kingdom are more likely to view their child as
an individual with a mind rather than as an organism with needs that must be
satisfied than parents in Hong Kong. And children from the United Kingdom are
more advanced in TOM than those of Hong Kong, presumably because of their
parents’ “mind-mindedness”.
- An authoritarian parenting style has also been associated with lower TOM
performance in young children.
- Another candidate influence is cultural values, such as the emphasis on group
harmony found in collectivistic cultures and the individual orientation found in
individualistic cultures

MEMORY
BASIC PROCESSES AND CAPACITIES:
Three steps of filling System:
1. encoding
- Process by which information is prepared for long-term storage and later
retrieval.
2. storage
- Retention of information in memory for future use.
3. retrieval
- Process by which information is accessed or recalled from memory storage.
Three kinds of Storage:
1. sensory memory
 - initial, brief, temporary storage of sensory information.
2. working memory
- Short-term storage of information being actively processed
3. long-term memory
- Storage of virtually unlimited capacity that holds information for long periods.
● central executive
- In Baddeley’s model, an element of working memory that controls the processing
of information.
- has two subsystems: the phonological loop, which aids in the processing of
verbal information,
- found in left hemisphere in the inferior parietal areas and anterior temporal frontal
areas, including Broca’s area, the premotor cortex, and the sensorimotor
association cortex
- and the visuospatial sketchpad, which maintains and manipulates visual
information
- found in the right hemisphere in the occipital and inferior frontal areas
Two types of retrieval:
1. recognition
- Ability to identify a previously encountered stimulus.
- for example, picking out a missing mitten from a lost-and found box.
2. Recall
- Ability to reproduce material from memory
- for example, describing the mitten to someone.

METAMEMORY
● metamemory
- Understanding of processes of memory.
● metacognition
- Thinking about thinking, or awareness of one’s own mental processes.
- Metamemory may allow learners to calibrate whether or not the subjective
assessment of the accuracy of responses (does it “feel right”) aligns with reality
by monitoring failures.
EXECUTIVE FUNCTIONING
- Conscious control of thoughts, emotions, and actions to accomplish goals or solve
problems.
- explain why working memory is positively associated with academic performance, in
fact, to a greater degree than is IQ.
- These findings have held for both literacy and numeracy skills, and for children from low-
income families, ethnic minority children, children born preterm, and children with
attentional problems.
CHILDHOOD MEMORIES
● generic memory
- Memory that produces scripts of familiar routines to guide behavior.
 - such as riding the bus to preschool or having lunch at Grandma’s house. It helps
a child know what to expect and how to act
- which begins at about age 2, produces a script
● script
- General remembered outline of a familiar, repeated event, used to guide
behavior.
● episodic memory
- Long-term memory of specific experiences or events, linked to time and place.
- refers to awareness of having experienced a particular event at a specific time
and place.
- Given a young child’s limited memory capacity, episodic memories are
temporary. Unless they recur several times (in which case they are transferred to
generic memory), they last for a few weeks or months and then fade.
- For example, getting vaccinated at the pediatrician’s office might originally be an
episodic memory—a child might remember the particular event. Over time and
repeated visits, a child might form a generic memory of the doctor’s office being a
place where shots are administered.
● autobiographical memory
- Memory of specific events in one’s life.
- type of episodic memory, refers to memories of distinctive experiences that form
a person’s life history.
- Not everything in episodic memory becomes part of autobiographical memory—
only those memories that have a special, personal meaning to the child.
- generally emerges between ages 3 and 4
a. Influences on Memory Retention
- When events are rare or unusual, children seem to remember them better
- evidence suggests attention is focused on central aspects of the situation rather
than on peripheral details.
- qSo, for example, if you were frightened by a scary film, you might show
enhanced memory for events in the film but forget if you bought candy or who
you saw the film with. Still another factor is children’s active participation.
Preschoolers tend to remember things they did better than things they merely
saw.
● social interaction model
- Model, based on Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory, that proposes children
construct autobiographical memories through conversation with adults about
shared events.
- Theorists argue that children collaboratively construct autobiographical memories
with parents or other adults as they talk about events, such as might occur when
a mother and child leaf through a photo album and talk about past events.
- Indeed, parents who spend more time reminiscing about and discussing past
events have children who form more coherent autobiographical memories.
INTELLIGENCE
 - ability to learn from situations, adapt to new experiences, and manipulate abstract
concepts,
Psychometric Measures Of Intelligence
a. Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales
- individual intelligence tests for ages 2 and up used to measure fluid reasoning,
knowledge, quantitative reasoning, visual-spatial processing, and working
memory.
b. Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence, Revised (WPPSI-IV)
- Individual intelligence test for children, which yields verbal and performance
scores as well as a combined score.
- such as children with intellectual disabilities, developmental delays, language
disorders, and autistic disorders
Testing And Teaching Based On Vygotsky’s Theory
● zone of proximal development (ZPD)
- Vygotsky’s term for the difference between what a child can do alone and what
the child can do with help.
● scaffolding
- Temporary support to help a child master a task.

LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT
Vocabulary
- At age 3, the average child knows and can use 900 to 1,000 words.
- By age 6, a child typically has an expressive (speaking) vocabulary of 2,600 words and
understands more than 20,000.
- With the help of formal schooling, a child’s passive, or receptive, vocabulary (words they
can understand) will quadruple to 80,000 words by the time they enter high school
- The rapid expansion of vocabulary occurs through fast mapping, which allows a child to
pick up the approximate meaning of a new word after hearing it only once or twice
icoconversation.
Grammar And Syntax
- grammar, they are referring to the deep underlying structure of a language that enables
us to both produce and understand utterances.
- Syntax is a related concept and involves the rules for putting together sentences in a
particular language.
Pragmatics And Social Speech
- Pragmatics involves the practical knowledge of how to use language to communicate.
- When Amalia was
she would ask for a cookie by demanding, “Cookie now!” However, as she got older, she
realized that asking “Momma, can I have a cookie please?” was far more effective.
Private speech
- talking aloud to oneself with no intent to communicate with others—is normal and
common in childhood.
 - Clara, age 4, was alone in her room, building a house from a set she had received for
her birthday. Puzzling over the box, she was overheard saying aloud, “Now the blue
blocks have to go on the sides. There are four of them on each side.
SPeech and Language Delays
- About 11 percent of - to 6-year-old children have a communication disorder, most
frequently a problem with speech or language.
- Primary language delays include problems with speech, expressive language disorder
(difficulties in producing speech), and receptive language disorder (problems with
understanding language).
- Secondary language delays are the result of another cause, such as hearing problems,
cognitive impairment, autism, head and facial abnormalities, or selective mutism.
Emergent Literacy
- Preschoolers’ development of skills, knowledge, and attitudes that underlie reading and
writing

EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION

a. Cultural variation in early education
- The limited early childhood educational opportunities for many of these children
perpetuate a cycle of poverty and inequality

b. Preschool
- The Montessori method is based on the belief that children’s natural intelligence
involves rational, spiritual, and empirical aspects.
- The Reggio Emilia approach is a less formal model than Montessori. Teachers
follow children’s interests and support them in exploring and investigating ideas
and feelings through words, movement, dramatic play, and music.
- esearch has shown that children who are enrolled in compensatory pre
- school programs show academic and social gains in multiple, but not all, target
areas immediately following their participation. Head Start children make gains in
vocabulary, letter recognition, early writing, early mathematics, and social skills.
Some research suggests these gains are not maintained over time.
c. Kindergarten
- Emotional and social adjustment affects readiness for kindergarten and strongly
predict school success. It is important that children have the ability to sit still,
follow directions, wait their turn, and regulate their own learning.