What Is Cognitive Development

Children grow and develop rapidly in their first five years

across the four main areas of development. These areas are
motor (physical), language and communication, cognitive
and social/emotional.

Cognitive development means how children think, explore

and figure things out. It is the development of knowledge,
skills, problem solving and dispositions, which help children
to think about and understand the world around them. Brain
development is part of cognitive development.
 To promote your child's cognitive development, it is
important that you actively engage in quality
interactions on a daily basis. Examples include:

1. Talking with your baby and naming commonly

used objects.

2. Letting your baby explore toys and move about.

Singing and reading to your baby.

3. Exposing your toddler to books and puzzles.

 To promote your child's cognitive development, it is
important that you actively engage in quality
interactions on a daily basis. Examples include:
4. Expanding on your child's interests in specific
learning activities. For example, your toddler might
show an early interest in dinosaurs, so you can take
him/her on a trip to the natural history museum to
learn more about the time that these creatures
roamed the earth.

5. Answering your child’s “why” questions.

 Cognitive development is the natural mental
process of growth of perception, memory,
judgment, reasoning, and other conscious
intellectual activity.

Jean Piaget (1896-1980) developed a

comprehensive theoretical framework for studying
the intellectual development of the child through
acquiring intelligence, increasing complex
thinking, and problem-solving abilities from infancy
to adulthood.
 Birth to 24 months is the Sensorimotor period where
development is observed from simple reflex motions to
more repetitive and coordinated responses.
The Preoperational period (ages 2-7) starts with
increased verbal skills that become more social as the
child ages. The child also begins to develop intuitive
logical thinking in some areas. The Period of Concrete
Operations (ages 7-12) shows evidence of organized,
logical thought and concrete problem solving.
The Period of Formal Operations, where thought
becomes more abstract incorporating formal logical
thought, happens from 12 years and up.
WHAT IS AFFECTIVE DEVELOPMENT?
Affective development is the development of emotions as well
as their outward expression that begins in infancy and
progresses throughout adolescence. It encompasses the
awareness and discernment of one’s emotions as well as those
of others, the ability to connect emotions to those of others, to
display emotion, and to manage one’s own emotions. Emotions
involve three components: feeling, cognition, and behavior.
Feeling is the physiological sensation experienced; cognition
relates subjective thoughts to accompany the sensation; and
behavior includes a variety of actions, such as facial display
and body positioning that relate to the feelings and thoughts.
EIGHT SKILLS OF EMOTIONAL COMPETENCE

1.The awareness of one’s own emotions

2.The ability to discern and understand other’s emotions

3.The ability to use the vocabulary of emotion and

expression

4.The capacity for empathic and sympathetic

involvement in others’ emotional experiences
EIGHT SKILLS OF EMOTIONAL COMPETENCE

5. The ability to differentiate subjective emotional experience

from external emotion expression

6. The adaptive coping with aversive emotions and

distressing circumstances

7. The awareness of the nature and structure of emotional

communication within relationships

8. The capacity for emotional self-efficacy