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Lecture 5
Early childhood
Height and Weight
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Growth deceleration.
Girls are only slightly smaller and lighter than boys.
Body fat shows a steady decline during this time.
Boys and girls slim down as their trunks lengthen.
Gross Motor Skills
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Developmental timetables. Example: Denver Developmental
Screening Test (Denver II):
Age norms at which 25, 50, 75, and 90 percent of children are
expected to demonstrate a given capability.
Four different areas are examined by the test: language, personalsocial, fine motor, and gross motor.
Developmentally delayed when incapable of performing a task of
which 90% of children of the same age are capable.
Example
Gross Motor Task
50%
90%
Kicks ball forward
18.3 months
23.2 months
Throws ball
overhand
20.3 months
2.9 years
Balance on 1 foot 1 2.5 years
second
3.4 years
Balance on 1 foot 5 4.3 years
seconds
5.4 years
Characteristics of Piaget’s Preoperational Stage
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The preoperational stage lasts from 2-7 years old.
Symbolic Function
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The ability to think symbolically and to represent the world mentally.
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Egocentrism
Egocentrism is the inability to distinguish between one’s own
perspective and someone else’s perspective.
Three-moutain problem
Confusion of appearance and reality
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Difficult to distinguish between the way things seem to be and the
way they are.
Precausal reasoning
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Animism is the belief that inanimate objects have “lifelike” qualities and
are capable of action.
A child may believe that a tree pushes its leaves off in the Fall, or that
the
sidewalk made him trip and fall down.
Children begin to use primitive reasoning and want to know the
answers to all sorts of questions.
Ask preschoolers the following questions:
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How did you learn to talk?
Where does the sun go at night?
Why is the sky blue?
Why do dogs bark?
Why does it rain?
Where do babies come from?
Why do you eat breakfast in the morning instead of at night?
Why do you have toes?
How do birds fly?
Limited social cognition
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Piaget’s heteronomous morality (versus autonomous morality).
Occurs from approximately 4-7 years of age.
Justice and rules are conceived of as unchangeable properties of the
world, removed from the control of people.
Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development
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Range of tasks too difficult for children to master alone, but which can
be learned with the guidance and assistance of adults or more skilled
children.
Scaffolding in Cognitive Development
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Scaffolding refers to changing the level of support.
Over the course of a teaching session, a more skilled person adjusts
the amount of guidance to fit the student’s current performance level.
Language and Thought
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For Piaget, private speech is egocentric and immature, but for
Vygotsky it is an important tool of thought during early
childhood.
Children must use language to communicate with others before
they can focus on their own thoughts.
Researchers have found support for Vygotsky’s view of the
positive role of private speech in development.
Teaching Strategies Based on Vygotsky’s Theory
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Use the child’s zone of proximal
development in teaching.
Use scaffolding.
Use more skilled peers as teachers.
Monitor and encourage children’s use
of private speech.
Assess the child’s ZPD, not IQ.
Memory
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By age 2, infants will occasionally recall interesting events that
happened months ago.
2-year-olds show some signs of their emerging prospective
memory.
Preschoolers - > Scripts: mental representations of a series of
an event that occur in a certain order in everyday life.
Incidental mnemonics: Remembering - > not the result of a
deliberate and systematic attempt to elaborate or to rehearse
but involuntary.
Strategies
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Strategies consist of using deliberate mental activities to improve
the processing of information:
 Rehearsal
 Organizing information
Preschoolers' memory strategies: "Primitive". Wellman (1988).
Preschoolers seldom involve deliberate reorganization or even
rehearsal.
Why do young children recall so little about new information?
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Why does recall memory improve so dramatically between
preschool years and early adolescence?
Four Explanations.
1. Changes in basic strategies
2. Changes in knowledge
3. Changes in metamemory
4. Changes in capacity
Changes in Strategies:
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To remember something you have to transfer information from STM to
LTM. Younger children fail to use strategies that could help them to
store new information and retrieve input.
Changes in Knowledge
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Older children or adolescents outperform younger children because
they are more familiar with the information they are asked to retain.
Changes in Metamemory
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Knowledge about memory and memory processes allows older children
to select the most appropriate strategies for a task and to carefully
monitor progress.
Changes in Capacity
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Some researchers argue that older children do better than younger
ones because they have a better information-processing capacity
("computer").
Young children as witnesses
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When young children are asked about events that have
personal significance, they are likely to provide correct answers.
They have trouble locating events in time.
Adults' probes may lead to problems.
The questioning may affect the child's memory of what
happened without the child's awareness.
Continued
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It is also possible that the child remembers both what the adult
suggested and what really happened but can no longer tell
which memory is authentic.
Young children are likely to believe that adults know more.
When questioned in a legal proceeding, they may incorporate
the adult's suggestions in their answers because they want to
please the adult.
Language Development: Syntax
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Between the ages of two and five: Child's speech includes
increasingly sophisticated grammatical structures. Inflections
(plurals or verb tense), more articles, and conjunctions.
Also the child comes to use negatives, questions and passives
correctly.
Difficulty in understanding the passive voice (comprehending
the meaning of a passive construction: later preschool years).
Overregularization
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Application of grammatical rules to words that require
exceptions to those rules.
Berko WUG study (1958).
Berko presented children (ages 4-6) with a series of line
drawings that corresponded to a set of statements. For example:
Here is a wug. Now there are two. There are two ____.
Here is a bix. Now there are two. There are two ____.
Here is a man who knows how to rick. He ricks every day. Today
he ricks. Yesterday he ____.
Semantics
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As children move beyond the two-word stage, their knowledge
of meanings rapidly advances.
The speaking vocabulary of a 6-year-old ranges from 8,000 to
14,000 words.
According to some estimates, the average child of this age is
learning about 22 words a day!
Pragmatics
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Dramatic difference between a 2-year-old’s language and a 6-year-old’s
language in terms of pragmatics—the rules of conversation.
What Is Play?
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Play is a pleasurable activity that is engaged in for its own sake.
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Play’s Functions
Increases affiliation with peers and increases the opportunity for
interaction
Advances cognitive development
Provides an opportunity to practice roles children will assume later in
life
Types of Play
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Practice Play
Pretense/Symbolic Play
Social Play
Constructive Play
Games
Practice Play
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Practice play - the repetition of behavior when new skills are being
learned or when physical or mental mastery and coordination of skills
are required for games or sports.
Pretense/Symbolic Play.
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In the early elementary school years, children’s interest often shift to
games.
Social Play
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Social play - involves social interaction with peers.
Social play with peers increases dramatically during the preschool
years.
Constructive Play.
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Occurs when children engage in self-regulated creation or construction
of a product or a problem solution.
Games
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They include rules and often competition with one or more individuals.
Games play a big part in the lives of elementary school children.
Parten’s Classic Study of Play
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Solitary play - the child plays alone and independently of others.
More frequent in 2- to 3-year-olds than older children.
Primitive social play
Onlooker play - the child watches other children play, but may still
talk and ask questions.
Parallel play - the child plays separately from others, but with similar
toys or in a manner that mimics their play.
Associative play - involves social interaction with little or no
organization.
Cooperative play - involves social interaction in a group with a sense
of group identity and organized activity.
What Is Gender?
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Sex - the biological dimension of being male or female.
Gender - the social dimensions of being male or female.
Gender identity - the sense of being male or female.
Gender role - a set of expectations that prescribe how males or
females should think, act, and feel.
Psychoanalytic and Social Cognitive Theories
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Psychoanalytic theory maintains a preschool attraction to the
opposite-sex parent ultimately results in identification with the
same-sex parent.
Social cognitive theory emphasizes gender development occurs
through observation and imitation of gender behavior, and
through the rewards and punishments for gender appropriate
and inappropriate behavior.
Critics of this approach argue that gender development is not as
passive as it indicates.
Parental Influences
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By action and example, mother and fathers influence their children’s
gender development.
Fathers are more likely to ensure that boys and girls conform to existing
cultural norms.
Fathers are more involved in socializing their sons than their daughters.
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Peer Influences
Boys teach one another the required masculine behavior and enforce it
strictly.
Girls pass on female culture and congregate with one another.
Peer demands for conformity to gender roles become especially
intense during adolescence.
Cognitive Developmental Theory
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(a) Basic gender understanding: There are two different
genders.
Children use physical and behavioral clues to differentiate
gender roles and to gender-type themselves in early
development.
(b) Gender constancy: Understanding that gender remains the
same even though activities, clothing, and hair style might
change.
Once they consistently conceive of themselves as male or
female, children often organize their world on the basis of
gender.
Gender Schema Theory
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States that an individual’s attention and behavior are guided by
an internal motivation to conform to gender-based sociocultural
standards and stereotypes.
“Gender typing” occurs when individuals are ready to encode
and organize information along the lines of what is considered
appropriate for males and females in society.
A general readiness to respond to and categorize information on
the basis of culturally defined gender roles fuels children’s
gender-typing activities.
“Racial" identity
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By the time children are 4 years old they can sort dolls and pictures into
racial categories.
Kenneth and Mamie Clark (1939, 1958): Asked American children of
African and of European ancestry to choose between pairs of dolls (3
years old and older).
African American children seemed to prefer the white dolls - > Brown
vs. Board of Education.
Attitudes toward ethnicity depend on both the attitudes of adult
caregivers and perception of the power of own group in relation to
others.
Harriette McAdoo (1985) reports that African American preschoolers'
preference for white dolls has declined since the 1950s.
Parenting Styles
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Authoritarian Parenting
Authoritative Parenting
Neglectful Parenting
Indulgent Parenting
Authoritarian Parenting
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A restrictive, punitive style in which parents exhort the child to
follow their directions and to respect work and effort.
These parents place firm limits and controls on the child and
allow little verbal exchange.
Children of authoritarian parents often are unhappy, fearful,
anxious, fail to initiate activity, and have weak communication
skills.
Authoritative Parenting
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This style encourages children to be independent but still places
limits and controls on their actions.
Extensive verbal give-and-take is allowed, and parents are warm
and nurturant toward the child.
Children of authoritative parents are often cheerful, self-controlled
and self-reliant, achievement-oriented, maintain friendships with
peers, cooperate with adults, and cope well with stress
Indulgent Parenting
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A style of parenting in which parents are highly involved with their
children, but place few demands or controls on them.
Indulgent parenting is associated with children’s social
incompetence, especially a lack of self-control.
The result is that children never learn to control their own behavior
and always expect to get their way.
Children of indulgent parents may be aggressive, domineering, and
noncompliant.
Neglectful Parenting
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A style in which the parent is very uninvolved in the child’s life.
It is associated with children’s social incompetence, especially a
lack of self-control.
Children whose parents are neglectful frequently have low selfesteem, are immature, and may be alienated from the family.
In adolescence, they may show patterns of truancy and
delinquency.
The Multifaceted Nature
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of Abuse
Developmentalists are increasingly using the term child maltreatment
rather than child abuse.
The term does not have the same emotional impact of abuse, and
acknowledges that maltreatment involves a number of different
conditions.
Severity of Abuse
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Less than 1% of maltreated children die.
Eleven percent suffer life-threatening, disabling injuries.
Almost 90% of cases suffer temporary physical injuries,
although they tend to be experienced repeatedly.
Neglected children, who suffer no physical injuries, often
experience extensive, long-term psychological harm.
Forms of abuse and neglect
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Physical abuse
Physical neglect (and medical and nutritional neglect)
Educational neglect
Emotional neglect
Sexual abuse
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Child Abuse
Experts believe that the view that parents who abuse their children are
bad, sick, monstrous, sadistic individuals, who cause their children to
suffer is too simple.
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The Cultural Context of Abuse
The extensive violence that takes place in American culture is reflected in
the occurrence of violence in the family.
Many abusive parents report not having sufficient resources or help from
others.
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Family Influences
To understand abuse in the family, the interactions of all family
members need to be considered.
Poverty
About one-third of parents who were abused when they were young
abuse their own children.
+ “Child characteristics”
Developmental Consequences of Abuse
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Maltreated children show poor emotion regulation.
They show attachment problems, as they are typically
categorized as disorganized.
They have problems in peer relations due to their
aggressiveness, avoidance, and aberrant responses to distress
and positive approaches from peers.
They have difficulty in adapting to school due to problematic
interactions with teachers.
Other psychological problems: anxiety, depression, conduct
disorder, and delinquency.