Infancy

1. Infancy andChildhood

2. Developmental Psychology: study of changes that occur in people from birth through old age. • How and why do these changes occur and we get older?? • Thinking • Language • Intelligence • Emotions • Social Behavior

3. Prenatal Development • Stage of development from conception to birth. • Two weeks after conception, the cells begin to specialize: some form the baby’s internal organs, others will form muscles and bones, and still others form skin and the nervous system. • Embryo: a developing human between 2 weeks and 3 months after conception.

4. Fetus: a developing human between 3 months after conception and birth. • about one inch in length • Resembles a human being, with arms and legs, a large head, and a heart has begun to beat. • Placenta: organ by which an embryo or fetus is attached to its mother’s uterus and that nourishes it during prenatal development.

5. Teratogens: toxic substances such as alcohol or nicotine that cross the placenta and may result in birth defects. • Drugs • Smoking (Cigarettes) • Causes low birth weight and severe life long asthma • Alcohol • Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) • Causes facial defects, heart defects, stunted growth, and cognitive impairments.

6. The Newborn Baby • When babies are first born they can sleep up to 20 hrs. a day! • Reflexes • Rooting reflex: causes a newborn to turn its head toward something that touches its cheek and to grope around with its mouth. • Sucking reflex: newborn’s tendency to suck on objects placed in its mouth

7. Swallowing reflex: enables newborn to swallow liquids without choking. • Grasping reflex: causes newborns to close their fists around anything that is out in their hands. • Stepping reflex: causes newborns to make little stepping motions if they are held upright with their feet just touching a surface.

8. Temperament: characteristic patterns of emotional reactions and emotional self-regulation. • “Easy” babies are good-natured and adaptable, east to care for and please. • “Difficult” babies are moody and intense, reacting to new people and new situations both negatively and strongly. • “Slow-to-warm-up” babies are relatively inactive and slow to respond to new things, and when they do react. Their reactions are mild.

9. Nature v. Nurture Influence of heredity or genes v. influence of environment or experience on thought and behavior. Ideas to think about? How much of development is the result of inheritance (heredity)? How much is the result of what we have learned?

10. Perceptual Abilities • Newborns can see, hear, and understand far more than previous generations had thought. • Vision: • See most clearly when faces or objects are only 8-10 inches away from them. • By 8-10 months babies can see almost as well as your average college student. • Takes 3-4 years for a babies visual system to fully develop. • Babies would rather see new objects or patterns, rather than ones constantly being repeated.

11. Depth perception • There is no research on a babies depth perception before 4 months of age. • Viewing the world in three dimensions begins as a baby begins to crawl, around 6-12 months of age.

12. Other Senses • Babies ears work before they are even born. • Babies remember sounds that they hear while in their mother’s womb. • Babies can also tell directions from which sound comes from and will turn their heads toward sounds. • Newborn babies have clear likes and dislikes for smells and food. • Likes for sweet flavors can last through childhood. • Two factors are important to the development of all of these factors • Physical maturation of the sense organs and nervous system • Experience in the world

13. Infancy and Childhood • Physical Development • First year of life the average baby grows 10 inches and gains 15 lbs. • First two years of life a baby’s head is larger than his/her body; the brain undergoes rapid growth. • A child’s brain reaches three-quarters of its adult size by about 2 years of age. • Head growth is virtually done by the age of 10. • Motor Development: acquisition of skills involving movement, such as grasping, crawling, and walking. • Developmental norms: ages by which the average achieves various developmental milestones.

14. Maturation: automatic biological unfolding of development as a person grows older and contribute to orderly sequences of developmental changes. • Crawling to toddling to walking

15. Cognitive Development • Most influential theorist in cognitive development was Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1896-1980). • Observed and studied children (including his own three) playing games, solve problems, and perform everyday tasks, and then he asked them questions and devised tests to learn how they thought. • Piaget believed that children progress through four stages of cognitive development.

16. Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development • Sensory Motor Stage (Birth – 2 years) • Stage in which an individual develops object permanence and acquires the ability to form mental representations. • Start by using skills they are born with- grasping, rooting, sucking. • Object permanence: concept that things continue to exist even when they are out of sight. • By 18 -24 months, infants can imagine the movement of an object they do not actually see move. • Mental representations: mental images of symbols (such as words) used to think about or remember an objects, a person, or an event. • By the end of this stage, an infant can recognize itself in the mirror.

17. Pre operational Stage (2-7 years) • Individual becomes able to use mental representations and language to describe, remember, and reason about the world though only in an egocentric fashion. • Lays groundwork for engaging in fantasy play and for using symbolic gestures (slashing a dragon with an imaginary sword). • Egocentric: describes the inability to see things from another’s point-of-view.

18. Concrete Operations (7-11 years) • Individual can attend to more than one thing at a time and understand someone else’s point-of-view, though thinking is limited to concrete matters. • Principles of conservation: concept that the quantity of a substance is not altered by reversible changes in its appearance. (Ex. Volume of liquid stays the same no matter what size or shape the container is) • Ability to grasp complex classification schemes such as those involving super-ordinate or subordinate classes.

19. Formal Operations (11-15 years) • Individuals becomes capable of abstract thought. • Can formulate a hypothesis, test it mentally, and accept or reject it according to the outcome. • Can understand cause and effect. • Develop general rules, principles, and theories.

21. Criticisms of Piaget’s Theory • Many question his assumption that there are distinct stages in cognitive development that always progress in an orderly, sequential way, and that a child must pass through one stage before entering the next. • Another criticism being the assumption that young infants understand very little about the world, such as permanence of objects in it. • They also so sophisticated knowledge of the world that Piaget thought they lacked, such as grasp of numbers. • Critics also believe that Piaget underplayed the importance of social interaction on cognitive development. • Piaget’s theory gives a schematic road map of cognitive development, the interests and experiences of a particular child may influence development of cognitive abilities in ways not accounted for in the theory.

22. Moral Development • Lawrence Kohlberg • Preconvential level • children tend to interpret behavior on terms of its concrete consequences. • Judgments of “right” and “wrong” behavior on whether it is rewarded or punished. • Conventional level • Adolescents first define right behavior as that which pleases or helps others and is approved by them. • Considering various abstract social virtues, such as being a “good citizen” and respecting authority.

23. Postconventional level • Emphasis on abstract principles such as, justice, liberty, and equality. • Personal and strongly felt moral standards become a guideposts for deciding what is right and wrong.

25. Criticisms of Kohlberg’s Theory • Research indicates that many people in our society, adults as well as adolescents, never progress beyond the conventional level of moral reasoning. • Does not take into account cultural differences in moral values. • Kohlberg’s theory is sexist. Kohlberg found that boys usually scored higher than girls on his test of moral development. However, Carol Gilligan found that boys base their moral judgments on the concept of justice. While girls focus on caring and maintaining personal relationships.

26. Current moral development research focuses on the factors that influence moral choices in everyday life, and the extent to which those choices are actually put into action.

27. Language Development • Language development follows a particular pattern. • At about 2 months of age, an infant begins to coo. • In another month or two, the infant begins the babbling stage and starts to repeat sounds such as “da” or even meaningless sounds that developmental psychologists refer to as “grunts”; these sounds are building blocks for later language development. • Babbling: a baby’s vocalizations, consisting of repetition of consonant-vowel combinations.

28. A few months later the infant may string together the same sound, as in dadadada. • Finally, the baby will form combinations of different sounds, as in dabamaga. • Even deaf babies with deaf parents who communicate with sign language engage in a form of babbling. • Like hearing babies, they begin to babble before 10 months of age. • Instead of babbling with their mouths, the babble with their hands.

29. By 4-6 months of age a babies language takes on features of adult language. • Babies vocalizations begin to show signs of intonations (ising and lowering of the voice) • By 1 years old babies use intonations to indicate commands and questions. • Motherese: “mother talk” is spoken slowly. And uses simple sentences, a higher pitch voice, repetition, and exaggerated intonations.

30. All of this preparation leads to a baby’s first words, such as “mama” or “dada.” • The next 6-8 months, involve a child building up their vocabulary with holophrases (one-word sentences). • Cookie • Hi • Bye • Ouch • Me

31. Year two for language development includes naming objects as they appear. • Year three, children begin to for two and three word sentences. • My ball • Baby cry • Me fall down • Doggy for woof-woof

32. Parenting Styles • Children seek independence in a variety of different ways in which they try to resolve conflicts. • Authoritarian Families • Parents are the bosses and rule the roost. • Parents do not believe that they have to explain their actions or demands. • Parents also believe their children has no right to question parental decisions.

33. Authoritative (Democratic) Families • Parents listen to their children’s reasons for wanting to go places or go our with people and make a solid effort to explain their rules and expectations. • Children participate in decisions affecting their lives. • Children are given the opportunity to make their own decisions, but parents still reserve the right to say no.

34. Permissive Families (Laissez-faire families) • Children have final say. • Parents try to play the parenting role, but children still insist in getting their own way. • Parents give up on parenting responsibilities (set no rules, boundaries, or expectations).

35. Uninvolved Parents • Egocentric in parenting • Uncommitted in being a parent • Distant from children

36. Effects of Parenting Styles • Research shows that children that are raised in an authoritative environment are more confident of themselves and their goals. • This comes from the following two features • Establishment of limits on the child and responding to the child with love and support.

37. Authoritative reared children are better at making decisions with or without advice due to • Assume responsibility gradually • Able to identify with parents • Present a model of responsible, cooperative independence • Children themselves may contribute to the style parents embrace, with consequences for their own personal development.

38. Child Abuse • Child abuse includes the physical or mental injury, sexual abuse, negligent treatment, or mistreatment of children under the age of 18 by adults entrusted with their care. • Many abusive parents were themselves mistreated as children, suggesting that these parents may gave learned an inappropriate way of caring for children. • Overburdened and stressed parents are more likely to abuse their children.

39. Low-birth weight infants and those children who are hyperactive or mentally or physically disadvantaged experience a higher than normal incidence of abuse. • Social-cultural stresses such as unemployment and lack of contact with family, friends, and groups in the community are other factors associated with child abuse.

40. The most effective way of stopping child abuse is to prevent future incidents. • Parent education for abusive parents allows them to learn new ways of dealing with their children. • Abuse has many developmental effects for its victims. It may rob children of their childhood and create a loss of trust and feelings of guilt, which in turn may lead to antisocial behavior, depression, identity confusion, loss of self-esteem, and other emotional problems.

41. Social Development • Learning the rules of behavior of the culture in which you are born and grow up is called socialization. Learning what the rules are and when to apply or bend them--- is, however, only one dimension of socialization. • Every society has ideas about what is meaningful, valuable, worth striving for, and beautiful. Every society classifies people according to their family, sex, age, skills, personality characteristics, and other criteria. • Finally, socialization involves learning to live with other people and with yourself.

42. Freud’s Theory of Psychosexual Development • Sigmund Freud believed that all children are born with powerful sexual and aggressive urges. • He also believed that by learning to control these urges children learn the sense between right and wrong. • Boys and girls go through different processes.

43. Freud’s Theory of Psychosexual Development • Oral Stage (First 18 months of life)- weaning the child for nursing, causing the child’s first experience of not getting what he/she wants. • Anal Stage (1 ½ years to 3 years of age)- when the anus becomes the source of erotic pleasure. • Phallic Stage ( 3 years to 6 years of age)- when they become aware of the differences between themselves and members of the opposite sex. • Identification- when the boy takes on all of his father’s values and moral principles. Thus, at the same time that he learns to behave like a man, he internalizes his father’s morality.

44. Latency Stage (6 years to puberty)- sexual thoughts are repressed; child focuses on developing social and intellectual skills. • Sublimation- the process of redirecting sexual impulses into learning tasks. • Genital Stage (puberty through adulthood)- sexual desires are renewed; individuals seek relationships with others.

45. Erikson’s Theory of Psychosocial Development • Erik Erikson takes a broader view of human development. Although he recognizes the child’s sexual and aggressive urges, he believes that the need for social approval is just as important. • Erikson studied what he called psychosocial development -life periods in which an individual’s goals is to satisfy desires associated with social needs.

46. Although Erikson believes that childhood experiences have a lasting impact on the individual, he sees development as a lifelong interactive process between people. • See handout for stages ***