The Brain, Body, Motor Skills , and Sexual Development

1. Physical Development The Brain, Body, Motor Skills, and Sexual Development

2. What happens with large individual variations in the timing of the adolescent growth

3. Development of the Brain Brain growth spurt the period between the seventh prenatal month and 2 years of age when more than half of the child’s eventual brain weight is gained. The brain grows from 25 percent of its eventual adult weight at birth to 75 percent of adult weight by age 2. Indeed, the brain growth spurt because more than half of one’s adult brain weight is gained at this time (Glaser, 2000). Between the seventh prenatal month and a child’s first birthday, the brain increases in weight by about 1.7 grams a day, or more than a milligram per minute..

4. Motor Development One of the more dramatic developments of the first year of life is the remarkable progress that infants make in controlling their movements and perfecting motor skills. Dynamical systems Theory they view each new skill as a construction that emerges as infants actively reorganize existing motor capabilities into new and more complex action systems. At first, these new motor configurations are likely to be tentative, inefficient, and uncoor-dinated

5. What about adolescent? adolescent growth spurt the rapid increase in physical growth that marks the beginning of adolescence. puberty the point at which a person reaches sexual maturity and is physically capable of fathering or conceiving a child.

6. The onset of adolescence is heralded by two significant changes in physical development. First, children change dramatically in size and shape as they enter the adolescent growth spurt (Pinyerd & Zipf, 2005). Second, they also reach puberty (from the Latin word pubertas,meaning “to grow hairy”), the point in life when an individual reaches sexual maturity (Mustanski et al., 2004) and becomes capable of producing a child (Pinyerd & Zipf, 2005).

7. Sexual Maturation Sexual Development in Girls Sexual Development in Boys

8. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL IMPACTS OF PUBERTY Does Timing of Puberty Matter? Think back for a moment to your own adolescence when you first realized that you were rapidly becoming a man or a woman. Did this happen to you earlier than to your friends, or later? Do you think that the timing of these events could have influenced your personality or social life? Timing of puberty does have some meaningful implications, although its impact differs somewhat for boys and girls.

9. What do you prefer