Healthy Growth & Cognitive Advancements in Preschoolers

1. Chapter 7 PHYSICAL AND COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT IN THE PRESCHOOL YEARS

2. Learning Objectives

3. Physical Growth Growing Body • By age 2, 25 to 30 pounds and close to 36 inches tall • By 6 years old, about 46 pounds and 46 inches tall

4. Individual Differences in Height and Weight • Averages mask great individual differences in height and weight • Gender differences • National and global economic differences

5. Changes in Body Shape and Structure • Bodies vary in height, weight, and shape • Toddler fat burns off • Internal physical changes occur

6. Nutrition: Eating the Right Foods Slower growth = less caloric requirements • Children can maintain appropriate intake of food, if provided with nutritious meals • Inappropriate encouragement to increase food intake beyond an appropriate level may cause obesity

7. Avoiding a Butter Battle Good nutrition without adversarial situations occurs by: • Providing a variety of foods, low in fat and high in nutritional and iron content • Allowing development of natural preferences • Exposing children to a wide variety of foods

8. Health and Illness • Majority of US preschoolers are reasonably healthy • 7 to 10 colds and other minor respiratory illnesses in each of years from age three to five • Minor illness permits children to understand body better, learn coping skills, and develop empathy for others who are sick

9. Increasing number of children being treated with drugs for emotional disorders such as depression Use of drugs such as antidepressants and stimulants has grown significantly Pill-Popping Preschoolers?

10. Injury During the Preschool Years • Accidents are greatest risk • Danger of injuries • High levels of physical activity • Curiosity • Lack of judgment • Individual differences • Gender • Cultural • Socioeconomic

11. Range of Preschool Dangers

12. Silent Danger: Lead Poisoning • Some 14 million children are at risk for lead poisoning (Centers for Disease Control) • U.S. DHHS calls lead poisoning most hazardous health threat to children under the age of 6

13. True or False? Children in poverty are more susceptible lead poisoning

14. High levels of lead are linked to higher levels of antisocial behavior in school age children Aggression Delinquency Effects of Lead Poisoning

15. Growing Brain Grows at faster rate than any other part of the body • Increase in interconnections among cells and myelin • Corpus callosum becomes thicker • Lateralization improves

16. Left Hand, Right Hand: Looking into the Brain • This set of PET brain scans illustrates that activity in the right or left hemisphere of the brain differs according to the task in which a person is engaged. • How might educators use this finding in their approach to teaching?

17. Ya gotta hand it to him…or her! Gender-related lateralization differences • Boys • Greater lateralization of language in left hemisphere • Higher autism incidence (Baron-Cohen's theory) OR • gender predisposition to functioning differences • Girls • Language is more evenly divided between two hemispheres OR • Verbal abilities emerge earlier in girls because girls receive greater encouragement for verbal skills than boys

18. Brain Growth and Cognitive Development Growth spurts • Myelin increases • Cerebellum and cerebral cortex connection growth

19. So…does brain development produce cognitive advances or do cognitive accomplishments fuel brain development?

20. Significant Gross Motor Skills in Early Childhood

21. Potty Wars: When-and How-Should Children Be Toilet Trained? Few child-care issues raise so much concern among parents as toilet training • Brazelton • Suggests flexible approach • Advocates waiting until child shows signs of readiness • Rosemond • Suggests rigid approach • Advocates for early and quick training

22. American Academy of PediatricsCurrent Guidelines • Dry at least 2 hours during day or after nap • Regular, predictable bowel movements • Indications that bowel movement or urination is about to occur • Ability to follow simple directions • Ability to get to bathroom and undress on time • Discomfort with soiled diapers • Asking to use toilet • Desire to wear underwear • Begin only when children are ready

23. Fine Motor Skills At the same time that gross motor skills are developing, children are progressing in their ability to use fine motor skills • Involve more delicate, smaller body movements • Require much practice • Show clear developmental pattern

24. Handedness How do preschoolers decide which hand to use? • Early preference for some young infants • Preference shown by many by end of preschool years • No scientific basis of myths that suggest there is something with being left-handed

25. Becoming an Informed Consumer of Development

26. Vaccination Schedule Let's take a quick look at Table 7-1 for current vaccination schedule recommendations

27. Vaccination Schedule

28. Review and Apply

29. Review and Apply

30. Review and Apply

31. INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT

32. PIAGET- A Quick Review Knowledge is product of direct motor behavior • All children pass through series of stages • Universal • Fixed order • Stage lasts from age of two years until around seven years

33. What does Piaget tell us? • Quantity and quality of knowledge changes • Focus on change in children's understanding How could you use this information to answer a friend who tells you that his young son keeps putting things in his mouth?

34. Preoperational Thinking Preoperational Stage • Time of stability and change • Use of operations at end of stage

35. Relationship Between Language and Thought Symbolic function: • Ability to use symbols, words, or object to represent something that is not physically present Language allows preschoolers to: • Represent actions symbolically • Think beyond present to future • Consider several possibilities at same time

36. Centration: What You See Is What You Think Centration • Is key element and limitation of preschool thinking • Involves inability to consider all available information about stimulus • Dominated on superficial, obvious elements within sight

37. Which Row Contains More Buttons? When preschoolers are shown these two rows and asked which row has more buttons, they usually respond that the lower row of buttons contains more because it looks longer. They answer in this way even though they know quite well that 10 is greater than 8. Do you think preschoolers can be taught to answer correctly?

38. Common Tests of Children's Understanding of the Principle of Conservation Why is a sense of conservation important?

39. Incomplete Understanding of Transformation Preoperational children • Unable to envision successive transformations • Ignore middle steps Figure 7-10 The Falling Pencil Children in Piaget's preoperational stage do not understand that as a pencil falls from the upright to the horizontal position it moves through a series of intermediary steps. Instead, they think that there are no intermediate steps in the change from the upright to horizontal position.

40. Egocentrism • Preschoolers do not understand that others have different perspectives from their own • Egocentric thought takes two forms • Lack of awareness that others see things from a different physical perspective • Failure to realize that others may hold thoughts, feelings, and points of view that differ from theirs

41. Emergence of Intuitive Thought • Curiosity blossoms and answers to wide variety of questions sought • Often act as authorities on particular topics • Leads preschoolers to believe that they know answers to all kinds of questions, but there is little or no logical basis for this confidence

42. Late Stages of Intuitive Thought • Slowly certain qualities prepare children for more sophisticated forms of reasoning • Begin to understand the notion of functionality • Begin to show an awareness of the concept of identity

43. Evaluating Piaget's Approach Positive • Masterful observer • Useful way to consider progressive advances in child cognition Negative • More recent experimental work suggests higher child performance on tasks involving conservation, reversibility, transformation, and ability to count • Contentions about continuity of development as theorized in Piaget's stages

44. INFORMATION PROCESSING APPOACHES TO COGNITVE DEVELOPMENT

45. Focus of Approaches • Changes in kinds of “mental programs” that children use when approaching problems • Changes analogous to way computer program becomes more sophisticated as a programmer modifies it on basis of experience

46. Often Used Research Approaches: Understanding Numbers Gelman suggests that preschoolers • Follow a number of principles in their counting • May demonstrate a surprisingly sophisticated understanding of numbers, although their understanding is not totally precise

47. 1, 2, 3, 7…11-T-hundred! How can we tell when a preschooler knows how to count?

48. You must remember this…maybe! • Recollections of events are sometimes, but not always, accurate • Typically accurate in responses to open-ended questions • Partly determined by how soon memories are assessed • Affected by cultural factors • Autobiographical memory • Largely inaccurate before age 3 • Not all last into later life

49. Why are some preschool memories inaccurate? • Preschoolers’ memories of familiar events often organized in scripts • Scripts become more elaborate with age • Frequently repeated events meld into scripts • Particular instances of scripted event are recalled with less accuracy than those that are unscripted in memory

50. Any other causes of inaccuracies? • Difficulty describing certain kinds of information, such as complex causal relationships, may oversimplify recollections