OUTLINE OF CHILD DEVELOPMENT

2. OUTLINE OF CHILD DEVELOPMENT Dr. Fatima Al-Haidar Professor & Consultant Child & Adolescent Psychiatrist Department of Psychiatry College of Medicine

3. Introduction: • Development → changes in a person’s long-term growth, feelings and pattern of thinking and behavior. • Some developmental changes are relatively specific. Others are more general.

4. Why Study Development? Knowing about human development can help you in five major ways: • It can give you realistic expectations for children and adolescents. • Knowledge of development can help you respond appropriately to children’s actual behavior. • Knowledge of development can help you recognize when departures from normal are truly significant. • Studying development can help you understand yourself. • Studying development can make you better advocate for the need rights of children.

5. Factors Influencing Child Development 1. Genetic Influences: • The whole process of normal brain formation and development is under the control of genetic mechanisms. • However, the expression of the genetic endowment will depend on many environmental constraints. • Physical characteristics have a clear genetic basis and some of these may directly or indirectly affect behavior. • General personality dimensions may have a genetic basis, however, individual cognition, behavior and interpersonal relationship develop from actual experiences.

6. Prenatal Influences: These refer to a wide range of factors which can affect fetal development. They include: the mother’s age, diet, and the state of mental and physical health of the mother as well as such external factors as drugs and environmental toxins. • Neonatal Influences: Complications during the process of delivery can affect the physical and psychological well-being of the baby.

7. Nutrition: - Malnutrition appears to have its greatest effects during the later stages of pregnancy and the 1st few months of life when a great deal of brain development occurs. - Poor nutrition is often associated with poor psychosocial environment. • Environmental Chemicals: Some of the chemical products of modern industry and war consequences appear to have a potential harmful effect on the development of the brain mechanisms.

8. 6. Physical handicaps and brain injury: These can have lasting influences on psychological development. These effects can be direct or indirect. • Critical Periods: a. Attachment: * Attachment Theory: - Bowlby describes attachment as a complex two-way process in which the child becomes emotionally linked to members of his or her family, usually the mother, father, and sibs. - It is an adaptive, biological process serving the needs of the child for protection and nurture.

9. - Although it is genetically determined, the behavior of those around the child will influence the security of the attachment. - Failure to establish such close relationship would result in different type of difficulties in personality, relationship and emotional disorders. -* Attachment of family members: As the child has been born, most of the family members especially the mother will show positive warm feelings towards him. They are likely to show: - strong protective feelings. - a need for proximity to the child. - exclusion of other relationship. - empathic feelings with the child.

10. - * Attachment of the Child: It is governed by the child’s level of perceptual and other abilities. - Evidences for attachment include: - Recognition of other family members as special people. - Expression of especially intense feelings towards family members. - Expectation that the family members will meet all needs. - Empathy with the feelings of other family members.

11. * Attachment interaction between child and family members. - Mutually satisfactory biological rhythms. - Bodily interplay. - Communication interplay.

12. Factors affecting the development of attachment: • Factors within the child. - Developmental maturity of the child. - Temperament. - Presence of sensory defects. • Factors within family members, especially parents. - The wish for the child. - Parental personality, physical and mental health. - Behavior of older brothers and sisters. - Quality of family relationships. - Living conditions. • Early environment and language. Early environmental stimulation is important for language development.

13. Child Development • The Newborn: - Many important capacities are present at a very early stage. - Great difficulty in studying psychological processes in babies. - Newborns have considerable learning abilities e.g. buzzer stimulus. - Perceptual abilities are more than imagined e.g. turning eyes appropriately. - Social behavior is present in the earliest days of babyhood. e.g. imitate simple facial gesture. - Making body movement which are coordinated with the speech pattern of adults who talk to them (non-verbal communication).

14. Motor development. - It starts before birth and is effectively completed in infancy. - Motor skills are a prerequisite to effective control of the environment and result from a complex interactions between genetic potential, opportunity and personal attributes such as motivation and organizational skills. - Tables exist which list the average age at which certain motor skills are obtained. - The sequence and timing of motor development is largely genetically preprogrammed. However, fine motor development is more sensitive to social influence and opportunities.

15. Perceptual Development: - Even in very young babies, perception is an active process. - Compared with adults, children tend to cover less of the object and to fixate on details. - Selective attention is markedly improved between ages of 5 and 7 years. - There is strong preference for looking at faces from birth but appears about the 4th or 5th month.

16. Cognitive Development: - There are 4 key concepts in Piaget’s theory and these help describe the way children process information and deal with the world: 1. The schemata are the inferred cognitive structure or internal processes that the child uses in conceptualizing experiences. 2. Assimilation; describes the way in which the child deals with new information. 3. Accommodation; occurs when an existing schema modified to incorporate new information. 4. Equilibrium is exist when the two processes are in a state of relative balance.

17. Children tend to pass through 4 broad stages: • Sensorimotor stage – it lasts for the 1st 2 years & infant construct sensorimotor schemata based on his or her interactions with the environment  object permanence. • Pre-operational thought – between 2 & 7 years. The child begins to use an internal representation of his or her external world.  conservational problem. • Concrete operations – between 7 & 11 years. Children apply logical reasoning to concrete objects and problems. • Formal operations – it begins at about 11 years. - full adults thinking ability. - abstract reasoning skills.

18. Language Development - Language comprises the sum of skills necessary for the process of communication. - It consists of the ability to understand and utilize communications, verbal and non-verbal and to make such communications to others with meaning. - The newborn shows a remarkable ability to distinguish among speech sound e.g. his mother’s voice. - Speech production lags behind the capacity for recognizing and responding to speech. - By 3 – 4 months early bubbling usually occurs.

19. Mother and baby can be observed to be involved in turn-taking conversation. • At about 12 months the 1st words with meaning usually occur. • By 18 months the child is usually generating combinations of words. • By age of 5, the child not only accumulates a large vocabulary but also learns the rules for producing grammatically correct utterances. Influences on normal language development: • Genetic factors • Physical factors • Social class • Family size • Multiple births • Gender • Quality of stimulation • Bilingual households

20. Social development - During the 1st few months attachment will be established. - At age of 8 months, infants begin to show a definite fear of strangers and not long after this, they will show fear of separation from their caretakers. - During the preschool years, new behaviors & attitudes develop as children increasingly interact with their social environment as part of a process called socialization. - One area of behavior during this phase is the gender roles & is mediated through identification. - Moral constraints on behavior is learned in part through identification with parents.

21. g. Adolescence. - The period between the end of childhood and beginning of adulthood (12-20 ). - It is a time of great biological, psychological and social changes. - Puberty is established with characteristic Physical changes. - It is the time for establishing personal identity.

22. Adolescence cont. - Cognitive and physical changes will give rise to self-awareness. - Peer influence is considerably increased. - Fighting authority control is an important issue. - Oversensitivity to criticism, moodiness and easily provocation are common. - By the end, they will establish personal identity, independence and workable relationship with peers.