P 123

MASTERY IN THEORIES OF PERSONALITY/DEVELOPMENTAL

PSYCHOLOGY Module 05: Part 1
Physical and Cognitive Development in Early Childhood
Learning Outcomes:
At the end of the lesson, you should be able to:

 Identify physical changes in early childhood

 Discuss the cognitive changes in early childhood

Aspects of Physical Development

In early childhood, children slim down and shoot up. They need less sleep than before and are more
likely to develop sleep problems. They improve in running, hopping, skipping, jumping, and throwing balls.
Bodily Growth and Change
 Age 3- children lose their babyish roundness and take on slender, athletic appearance of childhood
o Average weight is 34 lbs.
 Boys and girls typically grow about 2-3 in. a year and gain about 4-6 lbs. annually
 Maturing brain and nervous system promote the development of several motor skills
o Increased capacities of respiratory and circulatory systems build physical stamina and
keep children healthier
Sleep Patterns and Problems
 Patterns change throughout the growing-up years
o Early childhood has its own distinct rhythms
 Sleep disturbances may be caused by accidental activation of the brain’s motor control system or
by incomplete arousal from a deep sleep.
o These disturbances tend to run in the families
o Most cases- occasional and usually outgrown
o Persistent problems indicate emotional physiological, or neurological conditions
 Sleep terrors: child awakens abruptly early in the night from a deep sleep in a state of agitation
o Occur between ages 3 and 13
o Affect boys more often than girls
 Walking and talking during sleep are common in early childhood
o Parents who have a history of sleepwalking or sleeptalking tend to have children who have night
terrors.
 Nightmares can be brought on by staying up too late, eating a heavy meal before bedtime, or
frightening movies/stories
  Enuresis: repeated involuntary wetting of the bed by children old enough to have bladder control,
is not unusual
o Enuresis beyond 8-10 may be a sign of poor self-concept or other psychological
problems

Brain Development
 Majority of brain growth occurs between 3 and 6 years of age
 From 6 to 11 growth occurs in areas that support associative thinking, language, and spatial relations
 Corpus callosum - thick band of nerve fibers that connects both hemispheres of the brain and allows
them to communicate with each other
Motor Skills
o Advances in gross motor skills involving the large muscles occurs during preschool
years
o Physical development flourishes best in active, unstructured free play
o Fine motor skills - involve eye-hand and small-muscle coordination
Ex: Buttoning shirts and drawing pictures
Handedness
o Handedness - the preference for using one hand over the other, is usually evident by about age 3.
o Because the left hemisphere of the brain, which controls the right side of the body, is usually
dominant, 90% of people favor their right side.
o Boys are more likely to be left-handed than are girls.
Health and Safety
o Vaccines are more available and prevent deaths in Western countries but not as much in
developing countries
 Preventing Obesity
o Prevention of obesity is helped by
o Regularly eating an evening meal together as a family
o Getting adequate amounts of sleep
o Watching less than 2 hours of television a day
 Undernutrition is an underlying cause in about a third of worldwide deaths for children
under 5
o Malnutrition affects not only physical development but cognitive and psychological
development
o Early education helps to combat the effects of undernutrition
 Food Allergies: 90% of food allergies can be attributed to eight foods: milk, eggs, peanuts, fish,
soy, wheat and shellfish. Food allergies are more prevalent in children than adults
o Food allergies - an abnormal immune system response to a specific food
 Deaths and Accidental Injuries
 o Accidents are the leading cause of death after infancy through childhood and adolescence
o Car accidents are the most commonly reported cause of accidental death for children over
the age of 4
 Health in Context: Environmental Influences
o Some children seem genetically predisposed toward certain medical conditions
 Socioeconomic Status and Race/Ethnicity
o The lower a family’s socioeconomic status, the greater a child’s risk of illness, injury, and
death
o Medicaid has been a safety net for low-income persons
 Homelessness
o Results from the complex circumstances that force people to choose between food,
shelter, and other basic needs
 Exposure to Smoking, Air Pollution, Pesticides, and Lead
o Parental smoking is a preventable cause of childhood illness and death
o Children exposed to smoke have an increased risk of respiratory infections
o Lead poisoning can interfere with cognitive development and lead to irreversible
neurological and behavior problems
Cognitive Development
Piagetian Approach: The Preoperational Child
o From ages 2-7; characterized by an expansion in the use of symbolic thought
Advances of Preoperational Thought: Advances in symbolic thought are accompanied by a growing
understanding of space, causality, identities, categorization, and number

 The symbolic function: children who have attained symbolic function can use symbols, or mental
representations, such as words, numbers, or images to which a person has attached meaning
o Deferred imitation - children imitate an action at some point after having observed it
o Pretend play/fantasy play/dramatic play - children use an object to represent
something else
Ex: A child may hold up a remote control to her ear while pretending to talk on a
telephone.
 Understanding of Objects in Space
o Children begin to understand the symbols that describe physical spaces
 Understanding of Causality: Piaget maintained that preoperational children cannot yet reason
logically about cause and effect. Instead, they reason by transduction
o Transduction - mental linking of two events, especially events close in time,
whether or not there is locally a causal relationship.
Ex: Luis may think that his “bad thoughts” or behaviors caused his sister’s illness.
  Understanding of Identities and Categorization
o Identities - the concept that people and many things are basically the same even if they
change in outward form, size, or appearance.
Ex: Antonio knows that his teacher is dressed up as a pirate but is still his teacher
underneath the costume.
o Animism - the tendency to attribute life to objects that are not alive
Ex: Amanda says the car is hungry and wants some gas to eat
 Understanding of Number: children can count and deal with quantities
o Ordinality - the concept of comparing quantities
o Number sense - counting, number knowledge, number transformation
Ex: Lindsay shares some candy with her friends, counting to make sure that each gets the
same amount.
Immature Aspects of Preoperational Thought: One of the main characteristics of preoperational thought is
centration - the tendency to focus on one aspect of a situation and neglect others. According to Piaget,
preschoolers come to illogical conclusions because they cannot decenter - think about several aspects of a
situation at one time.
 Egocentrism: Piaget’s term for inability to consider another person’s point of view; a characteristic
of young children’s thought.
o Many children can only see things from their perspective, and not imagine anything
outside of their point of view.
Ex: Luis believes that his “bad thoughts” have caused his parents’ marital problems.
 Conservation
o The fact that two things are equal remain so if their appearance is altered, as long as nothing
is added or taken away
o Irreversibility - failure to understand that an action can go in two or more directions
Ex: Jacob does not understand that transforming the shape of a liquid
(pouring it from one container into another) does not change the amount.
 Do Young Children Have Theories of Mind?
o Theory of mind - awareness of the broad range of human mental states, beliefs, intents,
desires, dreams, and so forth and the understanding that others have their own
distinctive beliefs, desires, and intentions
o Knowledge about thinking and mental states
Children 3-5 come to understand that thinking goes on inside the mind, that it can
deal with either real or imaginary things; that someone can be thinking of one thing
while doing or looking at something else; that a person whose eyes and ears are
covered can think about objects; that someone who looks pensive is probably
thinking; and that thinking is different from seeing, talking, touching, and knowing
Distinguishing Between Fantasy and Reality
 Magical thinking - a way to explain events that do not seem to have obvious realistic explanations or
simply to indulge in the pleasures of pretending - as with a belief in imaginary companions
Information-Processing Approach: Memory
Basic Processes and Capacities
 Encoding - putting information in a folder to be filed in memory
 Storage – putting the folder away in the filling cabinet. It is where the information is kept
 When the information is needed, you access storage, and through the process of
retrieval, you search for the file and take it out.
Forming and Retaining Childhood Memories
 Three types of childhood memory that serve different functions: generic, episodic, and autobiographical.
 Generic memory: begins at about age 2, produces a script, or general outline of a familiar, repeated
event, such as riding the bus, or having lunch at grandma’s house. It
helps a child know what to expect and how to act.
 Episodic memory: long-term memory of specific experiences or events, linked to time and place.
 Autobiographical memory: memory of specific events in one’s life.
Influences on Memory Retention
 Highly emotional memories are better remembered
Intelligence: psychometric and Vygotskian Approaches
 Intelligence affects the strength of early cognitive skill

Traditional psychometric measures

 The two most commonly used individual tests for preschoolers are the Stanford-Binet
Intelligence Scales and the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence.
 Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales are used for ages 2 and up and take 45 to 60 minutes.
The child is asked build blocks, trace mazes.
 Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence, revised (WPPSI-IV) is an individual test taking
30-60 minutes. It measures both verbal and nonverbal fluid reasoning
Influences on measured intelligence
● IQ score is simply a measure of how well a child can do certain tasks at a certain time in comparison with
other children of the same age
Testing and teaching based on Vygotsky’s Theory
● Zone of proximal development - the imaginary psychological space between what children can do or know by
themselves and what they could do or know with help. The ZPD, in combination with scaffolding can help
parents and teachers more efficiently guide children’s cognitive progress.
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.
● Young children’s growing facility with language helps them express their unique view of the world
 Fast mapping - allows a child to pick up the approximate meaning of a new word after hearing it only
once or twice in a conversation
Grammar and Syntax
 Between ages 4 and 5, sentences average four to five words such as “I’m not hungry”,
“catch the ball”
 Age 5-7- children’s speech has become adult like Pragmatics and Social speech
 Pragmatics - the practical knowledge of how to use language to communicate
 Social speech - speech intended to be understood by a listener
Private Speech
 Talking aloud to oneself with no intent to communicate with others
Delayed Language Development
 Hearing problems and head and facial abnormalities may be associated with speech and language
delays, as are premature birth, family history, socioeconomic factors.
 Many children who speak late-especially those whose comprehension is normal –
eventually catch up.

Preparation for Literacy

 Emergent literacy - the development of fundamental skills that eventually lead to being able to read

Media and cognition

 Preschool age children comprehend the symbolic nature of television and imitate behaviors they
see
Early Childhood Education
 Preschool widens a child's physical, cognitive, and social environment
Types of Preschools
 Montessori Method: is based on the belief that children’s natural intelligence involves rational,
spiritual, and empirical aspects.
o Teachers serves as guides
 Reggio Emilia Approach: less formal model than Montessori. Teachers follow children’s interests and
support them in exploring and investigating ideas and create flexible plans to explore these ideas with
children.

References:

Papalia, D., & Matorell, G. (2021) Experience human development. USA: McGraw-Hill