Lifespan Development

Module # 5: Early Childhood

Module Learning Outcomes

Describe how children change physically and cognitively and develop socially and
emotionally between ages two and six

5.1: Describe physical changes in early childhood

5.2: Explain cognitive changes in early childhood
5.3: Describe key emotional and social developments of early childhood
Physical Development in Early Childhood
Learning Outcomes: Physical Development in Early
Childhood
5.1: Describe physical changes in early childhood
5.1.1: Summarize overall physical growth and nutrition during early childhood
5.1.2: Understand nutrition concerns during early childhood
5.1.3: Describe changes in the brain during early childhood
5.1.4: Give examples of gross and fine motor skill development in early childhood
Growth and Nutrition in Early Childhood
• Children between ages of 2 and 6 years tend to
grow about 3 inches in height each year and gain
4-5 pounds in weight each year and start to lose
some baby fat
• 1 in 5 American children between ages 2 and 5
are overweight or obese
• Caregivers need to keep in mind that they are
setting up taste preferences in early childhood
• By providing adequate, sound nutrition and
limiting sugary snacks and drinks, the caregiver
can be assured that the child will not starve and
will receive adequate nutrition
Physical Development in Early Childhood, continued
• By age 6, the brain is at 95% of its adult weight and the development of myelin
(myelination) and new synapses continues to occur in the cortex
• Synaptic pruning is the loss of synapses which are unused and will increase as
neural processes become quicker and more complex
• The prefrontal cortex will see greater development with more planning and
complexity in thinking and emotional control
• Language (left hemisphere) increases significantly, spatial skills (right
hemisphere) continue to improves, and the connection between the hemispheres
(corpus callosum) undergoes a growth spurt
• Visual pathways become more mature
• Gross motor skills (large muscle groups) and fine motor skills (more exact
movements) both develop
Sexual Development in Early Childhood
• Sexuality beings in childhood as a response to physical states and sensation and
cannot be interpreted as similar to that of adults
• Boys and girls are capable of erections and vaginal lubrication even before birth
with stimulation used for comfort or tension relief and not to reach orgasm
• Self-stimulation and curiosity about bodies is a natural part of early childhood
• As children grow, they are more likely to show their genitals to siblings or peers
and masturbation is common
• It is important for caregivers to take the time to talk with their children about
when it is appropriate for other people to see or touch them
Practice Question 1
Mandy has been reading a lot of child development books and websites. She is
becoming confused about what she should be looking for with her 3 year old
child’s physical growth. Which of the following is true about a child’s physical
growth during early childhood?’

A. The child will grow about 5 inches in height per year.

B. The child will have all 20 primary teeth.
C. The child will stop napping completely by age 3.
D. By age 3 children have body proportions similar to that of an adult.
Cognitive Development in Early Childhood
Learning Outcomes: Cognitive Development in Early
Childhood
5.2: Explain cognitive changes in early childhood
5.2.1: Describe Piaget’s preoperational stage of development
5.2.2: Illustrate limitations in early childhood thinking, including animism,
egocentrism, and conservation errors
5.2.3: Explain theory of mind
5.2.4: Explain language development and the importance of language in early
childhood
5.2.5: Describe Vygotsky’s model, including the zone of proximal development
Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development
• The preoperational stage (ages 2– 7): children are learning to use language and think about the
world symbolically helping to develop the foundations needed for the next stage
• Egocentrism in early childhood refers to the tendency to think that everyone sees things in the
same way as the child
• Precausal thinking describes the way in which children in this stage use their own existing ideas
or views to explain cause-and-effect relationships and includes:
• Animism: the belief that inanimate objects have lifelike qualities
• Artificialism: the belief that environmental characteristics can be attributed to human actions
or interventions
• Transductive reasoning: when a child fails to understand the true cause and effect
relationships
• Syncretism: the tendency to think that two events occurring simultaneously had a causal
relationship
Cognition Errors
• Centration is the act of focusing all attention on one
characteristic or dimension of a situation and disregarding others
(pieces of cake vs. size of pieces)
• Conservation is the awareness that altering a substance’s
appearance does not change its basic properties (sandwich cut in
half)
• Irreversibility is the young child’s difficulty mentally reversing a
sequence of events
• Centration, conservation errors, and irreversibility reflect the
young child’s reliance on visual representations
• Preoperational children lack the basic logic and the ability to use
previous knowledge to determine the missing piece (transitive
inference)
Theory of Mind
• The theory of mind is the understanding that the mind holds people’s beliefs, desires,
emotions, and intentions
• By age 4, children’s theory of mind allows them to understand that people think
differently, have difference preferences, and may mask their true feelings
• The awareness of the existence of mind is part of social intelligence and helps develop
self-awareness and the ability to anticipate the needs of others
• Those on the autism spectrum typically show an impaired ability to recognize other
people’s minds
• Autism is characterized by persistent deficits in social communication and interaction
across multiple contexts as well as restrictive behaviors and interests
Theory of Mind, continued
• While the majority of parents notice the child’s behaviors between 18 and 24
months, diagnoses comes later
• Typical signs of autism include:
• No babbling by 12 months
• No gesturing by 12 months
• No single words by 16 months
• No tow-word phrases by 24 months
• Loss of any language or social skills, at any age
• The Sally-Anne test is used to determine whether someone lacks the theory of
mind and includes a story about a ball being moved when one child leaves with
children younger than 4 and those with autism generally answering incorrectly
Language Development
• From ages two to six, a child’s vocabulary
expands from about 200 words to over 10,000
through fast-mapping
• Words are easily learned through connections
between new words and existing concepts
• Children learn the rules of grammar as they
learn the language with some rules taught
explicitly and others intuitively
• Children can overregulate grammar rules
because they intuitively discover a rule then
overgeneralize it when they are taught to do
something in school (add “ed” to end of words
for past tense)
Language Development, continued
• Zone of Proximal Development (Vygotsky) is the range of material that a child is
ready to learn if proper support and guidance are given
• Scaffolding (Chomsky) is a process in which the guide provides needed assistance to
the child as a new skill is learned
• Piaget interpreted talking to oneself as egocentric speech or a child’s inability to see
things from other points of view
• Vygotsky believed that this private speech seeks to solve problems or clarify thoughts
• Research by Hart and Risley found that children from less advantaged backgrounds are
exposed to millions fewer words in their first 3 years than those from higher
socioeconomic groups
• While there have been critics of Hart and Risley’s research, a replication of the original
study found a word gap that was closer to 4 million words than the previously proposed
30 million
Practice Question 3
A two-year old overhears a word when her parents are talking about an object
they are pointing at. While the word is unknown, the child begins to use it within
a day or two. This is an example of

A. fast-mapping
B. chance
C. scaffolding
D. overregulation
Emotional and Social Development in Early
Childhood
Learning Outcomes: Emotional and Social Development in
Early Childhood
5.3: Describe key emotional and social developments of early childhood
5.3.1: Describe the development of a self-concept
5.3.2: Explain Freud’s psychodynamic theory as it applies to early childhood
5.3.3: Explain Erikson’s psychosocial theory as it applies to early childhood
5.3.4: Describe gender identity development in early childhood
5.3.5: Describe the impact of different parenting styles on children’s
development
5.3.6: Apply principles of operant conditioning to parenting and behavior
modification
5.3.7: Examine concerns about childhood stress and trauma
Developing a Concept of Self
• Self-concept is the idea of who we are, what we are capable of doing, and how we
think and feel
• Looking-glass self (Cooley) involves looking at how others seem to view us and
interpreting this as we make judgments about ourselves
• Two parts of the self: the “I” that is spontaneous, creative, innate and not concerned
about how others view us and the “me” or social definition of who we are
• The socialized self begins when we are able to consider how one important person
views us
• As the child grows and is exposed to a variety of situations and cultural roles, she
begins to view the self in the eyes of many others (taking the role of the generalized
other), resulting in a sense of self with many dimensions
Developing a Concept of Self, continued
• One way to gain a clearer sense of self is to exaggerate qualities to be
incorporated into the self
• The exaggeration tends to be replaced by a more realistic sense of self in middle
childhood as children learn to compare themselves to others to understand their
capabilities
• Self-control involves both response inhibition and delayed gratification
• The ability to delay gratification has been assessed in young children with the
“marshmallow test”
• Recent research has linked poor delayed gratification in young children to poor
eating self-regulation, particularly eating when not hungry
Psychodynamic and Psychosocial Theories of Early
Childhood
• Children pass through two stages of Freud’s theory during early childhood: stage 2 (anal stage) and
stage 3 (phallic stage)
• The anal stage (18mths – 3 y.o.): the libido source shifts from the mouth to the anus and the child
gains pleasure from defecating, setting up difficulties in potty training
• Parental reactions during potty training may result in a child who stubbornly holds onto feces or
who purposefully makes a mess
• In the phallic stage, the child develops an attraction to the opposite sex parent, called the Oedipus
Complex for boys and the Electra Complex for girls
• When the child recognizes the opposite sex parent as unavailable, the child learns to model
behavior after the same-sex parent
• Chodorow (a neo-Freudian) believed that mothering promotes gender stereotypic behavior
• Both Freud and Chodorow assume that early childhood experiences result in lifelong gender self-
concepts
• Introjection (part of the phallic stage) is the process of learning right from wrong and occurs as
children incorporate values from others into their value set
Social Development: The Importance of Play
• The development of play holds a crucial role in providing a safe, caring, protective,
confidential, and containing space where children can recreate themselves and their
experiences through exploring
• Early childhood play can be understood by observing the elements of fantasy,
organization, and comfort
• Six different types of play are observed in American children at free play:
• Unoccupied play
• Solitary (independent) play
• Onlooker play
• Parallel play (adjacent play)
• Associative play
• Cooperative play
Erikson: Initiative vs. Guilt
• Erikson viewed the relationships people have
as an influence personality development
• Initiative vs. Guilt (begins at age 3) and
builds upon the previous trust and autonomy
in the previous stage into a desire to take
initiative or think of ideas and initiate action
• Parental guidance should help the child
move towards the right actions
• The goal is to find a balance between
initiative and guilt, not a free-for-all where
the parent allows the child to do anything
wanted
Gender and Early Childhood
• Preschool aged children become increasingly interested in finding out the
differences between boys and girls both physically and in terms of acceptable
activities
• Gender identity is followed sometimes later with gender constancy
• Children learn at a young age that there are distinct expectations for boys and
girls with most children firmly entrenched in culturally appropriate gender roles
by age 4 or 5
• Gender stereotyping, involving overgeneralizing about the attitudes, traits, or
behavior patterns of women or men
• Children who are allowed to explore different toys and exposed to non-traditional
gender roles tend to have broader definitions of what is gender appropriate and
may do less gender stereotying
Gender and Early Childhood, continued
• Learning theorists suggest that gender role socialization is a result of the ways in
which others send messages about what is acceptable or desirable behavior for
males or females
• Gender socialization begins as early as the moment a parent learns that a child is
on the way
• Children will most likely choose ”gender appropriate” toys even when cross-
gender toys are available because of positive feedback for gender normative
behaviors
• Gender messages can be seen in parenting, school, and elsewhere in public
settings and persist into adulthood
• Gender differences in India can be a matter of life and death due to preferences
for male children
Family Life and Parenting Styles
• Baumrind offers a parenting model with three styles: authoritarian, permissive,
and authoritative
• Authoritarian parenting is a traditional model in which parents make the rules
and children are expected to be obedient, resulting in children fearing rather than
respecting their parents
• Permissive parenting involves being a friend to a child rather than an authority
figure, resulting in children who may fail to learn self-discipline and may feel
insecure because they do not know their limits
• Authoritative parenting involves being appropriately strict, reasonable, and
affectionate and allowing negotiation when appropriate
• Uninvolved parenting reflects parents who are disengaged from their children,
making no demands and being non-responsive
Family Life and Parenting Styles, continued I
• Lemasters and Defrain looks closely at the motivations of the parent and suggests that
parenting styles are designed to meet parent rather than the child’s needs
• A martyr is a parent who will do anything for the child and may later be used to gain
compliance from the child
• A pal is like the permissive parent who wants to be the child’s friend and sets few
limitations
• The police officer/drill sergeant is similar to the authoritarian parent with a primary
focus on obedience and may find it difficult to let the children learn and grow
• The teacher-counselor parent pays a lot of attention to expert advice on parenting and
seeks to rear a perfect child
• Athletic coach style of parenting (Lemasters and Defrain): helps the child understand
what needs to happen in certain situations and provides guidance
Family Life and Parenting Styles, continued II
• The impact of class and culture is closely related to parenting style
• African-American, Hispanic, and Asian parents tend to be more
authoritarian than non-Hispanic whites while collectivist cultures
see being obedient and compliant as favored behaviors
• Working class parents are more likely than middle-class parents to
focus on obedience and honesty
• Between 1981 and 1997, the amount of time parents spent with
their children increased overall
• 75% of children under age 5 are in child care programs with others
cared by other family members or friends
• Many factors determine the quality of child care including
student/teacher ratio, the physical environment, provider skill
Learning and Behavior Modification
• In operant conditioning, both reinforcement and punishment can be positive or negative
• Positive reinforcement: something is added to increase the behavior likelihood (alarm
clock)
• Positive punishment: something is added to decrease the likelihood of a behavior
(spanking)
• Negative reinforcement: something (an aversive stimulus) is removed to increase the
likelihood of behavior (horse training)
• Negative punishment: something is removed to decrease the likelihood of behavior
(time out for kids)
• Using positive reinforcement is the most effective way of teaching a new behavior
• Reinforcement can be continuous and occur after every desired action or intermittent,
and the schedule impacts how long the behavior continues without reinforcement
Childhood Stress and Development
• Stress in young children can be positive, tolerable, or toxic
• Positive stress (eustress) is needed and promotes resilience and arises from brief,
mild to moderate stress with buffers from caring adults
• Tolerable stress is from adverse experiences more intense in nature but short
lived and able to be overcome
• Toxic stress refers to chronic, excessive stress that exceeds a child’s ability to
cope, especially without supportive caregiving
• Children who experience toxic stress or who live in extremely stressful situations
of above over long periods can suffer long-lasting effects
• If the brain is exposed to long periods of severe stress, it can develop a low
threshold and create future stress hypersensitivity
Childhood Stress and Development, continued
• Stress is encountered in four stages: stress causes alarm, the child attempts to find
meaning from the event, the child seeks coping strategies, and the child executes
coping strategies
• Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs): childhood trauma that might include
neglect, abandonment, sexual abuse, physical abuse, parent of sibling treated
violently, separation or incarceration of parents, or having a parent with a mental
illness
• Kaiser Permanent and the CDC study (1998): determined that traumatic
experiences during childhood are a root cause for many social, emotional, and
cognitive impairments leasing to increased risks for unhealthy self-destructive
behaviors, violence, chronic health issues, low life potential, and premature death
• Food insecurity happens when a family has limited or uncertain availability of
safe, nutritious food
Practice Question 4
For as long as Alesandro can remember his parents have been constantly arguing,
often ignore him and his siblings for long periods of time, and he often does not
get enough to eat. What sort of stress is Alesandro likely suffering from?

A. Tolerable stress
B. Eustress
C. Toxic stress
D. Basic stress