Middle Childhood

Middle childhood is a stage where children move into expanding roles and environments.
Children begin to spend more time away from their family and spend more time in school. A
child's developmental path in their middle childhood years (between 6 and 12 years of age)
contributes substantially to the adolescent, and adult they will become and other activities.

Height and Weight: Growth during middle childhood slows considerably. Children grow
about 2 to 3 inches each year between ages 6 and 11 and approximately double their weight
during that period. Girls retain somewhat more fatty tissue than boys, a characteristic that
will persist through adulthood. The average 10-year-old weighs about 11 pounds more than
those of 40 years ago—nearly 85 pounds for a boy and 88 pounds for a girl.

Nutrition and Sleep: School children need 2,400 calories everyday, more for older children
and less for younger ones. Nutritionists recommend a varied diet including plenty of grains,
fruits, and vegetables and high levels of complex carbohydrates, found in potatoes, pasta,
bread, and cereals. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine has recommended that
children aged 6–12 years should regularly sleep 9–12 hours per 24 hours. Children who do
not get enough sleep have a higher risk of obesity, diabetes, injuries, poor mental health, and
problems with attention and behaviour.

Brain Development

The brain reaches its adult size at about age 7. Then between 10 and 12 years of age, the
frontal lobes become more developed and improvements in logic, planning, and memory are
evident. The school-aged child is better able to plan and coordinate activity using both the left
and right hemispheres of the brain, which control the development of emotions, physical
abilities, and intellectual capabilities. The myelin also continues to develop and the child’s
reaction time improves as well.
Hippocampus:
The hippocampus, which is responsible for transferring information from the short-term to
long-term memory, also shows increases in myelination resulting in improvements in
memory functioning. Changes in the brain during this age allow children to understand what
others think of them and dealing socially with the positive and negative consequences of that.
Within this development period, children may struggle with mental health disorders or other
health problems.
Motor development and Physical play
Motor skills continue to improve in middle childhood. However, a nationally representative
survey found that school-age children in the United States spend less time each week on
sports.
Health Fitness and Safety
The development of vaccines for major childhood illnesses has made middle childhood a
relatively safe time of life in most of the world. The death rate in these years is the lowest in
the life span.

Obesity and Body image Obesity in children has become a major health issue worldwide.
By 2010, if current trends continue, nearly 50 percent of the children in North and South
America, 39 percent in Europe, and 20 percent in China will be overweight. Unfortunately,
children who try to lose weight are not always the ones who need to do so. Concern with
body image —how one believes one looks—becomes important early in middle childhood,
especially for girls, and may develop into eating disorders in adolescence. Playing with
physically unrealistic dolls, such as Barbie, may be an influence in that direction.

Medical Conditions: According to a nationally representative survey of more than 200,000

households, an estimated 12.8 percent of U.S. children have or are at risk for chronic medical
conditions: physical, developmental, behavioural, or emotional conditions that persist for
three months or more.

Asthma:
One chronic condition that has become increasingly common is asthma. Asthma is a chronic
respiratory disease, apparently allergy-based and characterised by sudden attacks of
coughing, wheezing, and difficulty in breathing. Almost 13 percent of U.S. children and
adolescents up to age 17 have been diagnosed with asthma at some time, and 8.9 percent
currently have asthma Researchers have identified a gene mutation that increases the risk of
developing asthma. Some researchers point to environmental factors.

Accidental Injuries
As in early childhood, accidental injuries are the leading cause of death among school-age
U.S. children. In a nine-year study of 96,359 children born in Alberta, Canada,21 percent
suffered at least one injury each year, and 73 percent had repeat injuries during the study
period. Boys were more likely to be injured than girls and to have repeat injuries. An
estimated 23,000 children each year suffer serious brain injuries from bicycle accidents, and
as many as 88 percent of these injuries could be prevented by using helmets.
Cognitive development
At about age 7, children enter the stage of concrete operations when thy can use mental
operations such as reasoning to solve the actual problem. Children can think logically as they
know all those aspects of the problem.

Partial relationship and causality

How children’s found out the solution of their problem?? The one reason is that they have a
clear vision and they think more logically.
Seriation
Ability to order items along a dimension.
Transitive inference
Understanding the relation between the two objects by knowing the relationship of
each to a third object.
Class inclusion
Understanding the relationship between the whole and it’s parts.
Inductive reasoning
Types of logical reasoning that moves from particular observation about members of
the class to a general conclusion of the class.
Deductive reasoning
Types of logical reasoning that moves from a general observation about a class to a
conclusion about the particular members of that class.
Conversation
In solving various types of conversation problems, children in the stage of concrete
operations can work out the answers in their heads they do not have to measure or weigh the
object.

Influences of neurological developmental, culture and schooling

Piaget maintained that shift from the rigid logical thinking of younger children into the
flexible logical thinking of older children both depend upon the Neurological developmental
and the experience in adapting the environment.

Executive information
The conscious control of the thought, emotions to accomplish goals or problems.
Metamemory: understanding memory:-
Understanding the process of memory
Mnemonic strategy
Technique’s to aid memory.
External memory aid:-
Mnemonic strategy using something outside the person.
Rehearsal:-
Mnemonic strategy to keep an item in working memory through conscious repetition.
Organization:-
Mnemonic strategy of categorization material to be remembered.
Elaboration:-
Mnemonic strategy of making the material association involves items to be
remembered.

Influence of Brain Development:

The prefrontal cortex and other brain regions under strong genetic influence contribute to
intelligent behavior.

Influence of schooling:

Schooling seems to increase tested intelligence.

Influence of culture:

Some critics of IQ tests attribute ethnic different in IQ to culture bias a tendency to includes
questions that we use vocabulary or call for information or skills more familiar to some
culture groups then to others test develops have tried to design culture free tests with no
culture linked content by posing takes that do not require language such as tracing mazes
putting right shapes in the right holes and completely pictures but they have been unable to
eliminate all culture influence. The mental processes that under bill intelligence may be the
same across cultures.