Physical Development:

6 The Brain, Body,

Motor Skills, and
Sexual Development.
 “Few aspects of development are
more interesting to the casual
observer than the rapid
transformation”
AN OVERVIEW OF
MATURATION AND
GROWTH
Change in HEIGHT and WEIGHT
Babies grow very rapidly
during the first 2 years, often
doubling their birth weight by 4
to 6 months of age and tripling
it (to about 21 to 22 pounds) by
the end of the first year.
“Growth is very uneven in infancy.”
• From age 2 until puberty,
children gain about 2 to 3
inches in height and 6 to 7
pounds in weight each year.
During middle childhood
(ages 6 to 11), children may
seem to grow very little; over
an entire year, gains of 2
inches and 6 pounds are hard
to detect on a child who stands
4 to 4½ feet tall and weighs 60
to 80 pounds (Eichorn, 1979).
Changes in Body Proportion
To a casual observer, newborns may appear to
be “all head”— and for good reason. The
newborn’s head is already 70 percent of its
eventual adult size and represents one-quarter
of total body length, the same fraction as the
legs.
 As a child grows, body shape
rapidly changes (see Figure 6.2).
Development proceeds in a
cephalocaudal (head downward)
direction. The trunk grows fastest
during the first year. At 1 year of
age, a child’s head now accounts
for only 20 percent of total body
length.
 While children grow upward, they are also
growing outward in a proximodistal (center outward)
direction (Kohler & Rigby, 2003). During prenatal
development, for example, the chest and internal
organs form first, followed by the arms and legs,
then the hands and feet.
Skeletal Development
• The skeletal structures that
form during the prenatal
period are initially soft
cartilage that will gradually
ossify (harden) into bony
material. At birth, most of the
infant’s bones are soft,
pliable, and difficult to break.
The neonate’s skull consists of
several soft bones that can be
compressed to allow the child to
pass through the cervix and the birth
canal, making childbirth easier for
the mother and the baby.
Other parts of the body—
namely the ankles and feet and
the wrists and hands—develop
more (rather than fewer) bones
as the child matures. In Figure
6.3, we see that the wrist and
hand bones of a 1-year-old are
both fewer and less
interconnected than the
corresponding skeletal
equipment of an adolescent.
One method of estimating a child’s level of
physical maturation is to X-ray his or her
wrist and hand (as in Figure 6.3). The X-ray
shows the number of bones and the extent of
their ossification, which is then interpretable
as a skeletal age.
Muscular Development
Newborns are born with all the muscle fibers they
will ever have (Tanner, 1990). At birth, muscle
tissue is 35 percent water, and it accounts for no
more than 18 to 24 percent of a baby’s body weight
(Marshall, 1977). However, muscle fibers soon
begin to grow as the cellular fluid in muscle tissue
is bolstered by the addition of protein and salts.
Variations in • Physical development is a very
uneven process in which
Physical different bodily systems
display unique growth
Development patterns.
Individua Not only is the development of
body systems an uneven or
l asynchronous process, but there
Variation are sizable individual variations
in the rates at which children
s grow (Kohler & Rigby, 2003).
 People from Asia, South America,
and Africa tend to be smaller than
Cultural those from North America, Northern
Europe, and Australia.and
Asian-American African
Variations American children, for example,
tend to mature faster than European
American and European children
(Berkey et al., 1994; Herman-
Giddens et al., 1997)