Physical and Cognitive

Development in Early
Childhood
CHAPTER 7

Copyright © 2015 McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. No reproduction or distribution without the prior written consent of McGraw-Hill Education.
 Bodily Growth and Change

 Around age 3, children lose “baby

roundness”
 Limbs lengthen, height increases
 Cartilage turns to bone faster

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Learning Objectives

7.1 Identify physical changes in early childhood

7.2 Describe three views of the cognitive changes
that occur in early childhood.
7.3 Summarize how language develops in early
development
7.4 Evaluate different approaches to early
childhood education

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 Physical Growth: Ages 3 to 6

Height in Inches Weight in Pounds

Age
Boys Girls Boys Girls

3 38.7 38.6 33.8 34.2

4 42.1 41.4 39.8 38.6

5 45.1 44 46.3 43.3

6 47.6 46.6 52.2 48.8

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 Sleep Patterns

 By age 5, most U.S. children

 Average about 11 hours sleep a night
 Give up naps
 Bedtime varies among cultures:
 Zuni: No regular bedtime, sleep when sleepy
 Canadian Hare Indians: Bedtime after dinner, but no naps

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Typical Sleep Requirements

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 Sleep Disturbances

 Night Terrors
 Abrupt awakening; extremely frightened
 Nightmares
 Common
 Walking and talking
 Fairly common
 Accidental activation of brain’s motor control
 Bed-wetting (enuresis)
 About 10–15% of 5-year-olds

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 Brain Development

 At about 3 years of age, the brain is approx. 90% of adult

weight
 By 6 years, brain is at 95% peak volume
 Corpus callosum, linking left and right hemispheres,
improves functioning
 Most rapid growth in areas that support thinking,
language, and spatial relations

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 Motor Skills

 Gross
 Involves large muscle groups
 Jumping and running

 Fine
 Using eye-hand and small-muscle coordination
 Buttoning a shirt, drawing pictures

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 Handedness

 Usually evident by age 3

 Heritability
 Single-gene theory
 Dominant allele for right-handedness
 82% of population is right-handed

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 Artistic Development

 Universal progression
 Internal process
 Cross cultural variations

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 Preventing Obesity

 Approximately 14% of 2- to 5-year-olds

obese
 Worldwide 22 million children under 5 are
obese
 Overweight children tend to become
overweight adults
 Key may be appropriate portions

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 Undernutrition

 Underlying cause in more than half of deaths before age 5

 19% of U.S. children under 18 live in food-insecure
households
 Malnutrition can harm long-term cognitive development
 Early education and improved diet can moderate the
effects

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 Research in Action:
Food Security

 Food insecurity is experiences when:

 The availability of future food is uncertain
 The amount and kind of food required for a healthy lifestyle
is insufficient
 Individual must resort to socially unacceptable ways to
acquire food
 Food insecurity adversely affects children’s health,
cognitive abilities and socioemotional well being

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 Food Allergies

 Anabnormal immune system response to a

specific food
 90% of allergies can be attributed to 8 foods:
mild, eggs, peanuts, tree nuts, fish, soy, wheat
& shellfish.

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 Deaths and Accidental Injuries

 73% of deaths of children under 5 occur in poor,

rural regions of Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia
 In U.S. most child deaths are caused by injury rather
than illness

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 Window on the world:
Surviving the First Five Years of Life

 98% of child deaths occur in poor rural regions of

developing countries where nutrition is inadequate, water
is unsafe, and sanitary facilities are lacking.
 What’s your view? What might be done to produce more
rapid and more evenly distributed improvements in child
mortality throughout the world?

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 Low SES and Health

 Lower SES increases risk of injury, illness, and death

 Poor children are more likely to:
 Be of a minority
 Have chronic health problems and/or lack health insurance
 Suffer vision and hearing loss
 10% of poor children are homeless—more likely to have
health problems and/or depression

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 Exposure to Pollutants

 Parental smoking: Increases child’s risk of

asthma and bronchitis
 Air pollution: Increases risk of chronic
respiratory diseases
 Pesticide poisonings: Most occur in young
children

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 Exposure to Lead

 Dangerous levels of lead in nearly 8% of

children
 Mostly poor and on Medicaid
 Lead gets in the bloodstream via:
 Contaminated food or water
 Contaminated dust of lead paint at home or school

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Cognitive Development: Piaget—The
Preoperational Child

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 Cognitive Development:
Symbolic Function

 The ability to use symbols that have meaning

 Words
 Numbers
 Images
 Examples
 Deferred imitation
 Pretend play

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 Understanding Objects in Space

 Why is it hard for children under age 3 to

understand scale models and maps?
 Because they need to keep more than one mental
representation in the mind at one time
 Advancing spatial thinking:
 Using simple maps and models becomes easier after age
3

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 Understanding of Causality

 Transduction: Mentally linking phenomena,

whether logical or not
 “My parents got a divorce because I was bad.”
 Familiar settings help advance causality
 “I am quiet so I won’t wake the baby.”

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Understanding of Identities and Categorization

 World becomes more orderly and predictable

when preschool children understand identity

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 Numbers:
Five Counting Principles

 Ordinality: number knowledge

 Cardinality
 Counting
 Number patterns
 Abstraction

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 Immature Aspects of Preoperational
Thought

 Centration
 Tendency to focus on one aspect of a situation and neglect others
 Egocentrism
 Decentering
 Thinking simultaneously about several aspects of a situation
 Inability to decenter leads to illogical conclusions

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 Egocentrism:
The Three Mountain Task

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 Conservation

Something remains the same even if its

appearance is altered
 Matter/mass
 Liquid
 Length
 Number
 Area
 Volume

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 Irreversibility

 Failureto see that an action can

go two or more ways
 A belief that pouring juice from
glass to glass changes the amount
of juice

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 Theory of Mind

 Children’s awareness of their own mental

processes and those of other people
 Preschoolers generally believe that mental
activity starts and stops
 By middle childhood, understand that activity
is continuous

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 False Beliefs and Deception

 What do you think is in the crayon box?

 Crayons!
 What is actually in the crayon box?
 Candy!
 What do you think Joe will say is in the
crayon box?
 Candy!

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 Appearance vs. Reality

 Related to awareness of false beliefs

 Requires child to simultaneously
refer to two conflicting mental
representations
 Isa birthday candle wrapped in a crayon
wrapper a crayon or a candle?

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 Fantasy vs. Reality

 Distinguishing between real and imagined

events
 Magical thinking … witches and dragons
 Do you want to hold a box with an imaginary
bunny or an imaginary monster?!

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 Influences on
Theory-of-Mind Development

 Heredity and environmental effects

 Child’s social skills
 Talking with children about mental states
 Cultural attitudes
 Bilingual children do somewhat better

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Information-Processing Approach: Memory
Development

Encoding
Storage
Retrieval

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 Types of Memory

Sensory
Working
• Executive function
• Central executive
Short-term
Long-term

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 Recognition & Recall

 Recognition
 The ability to identify something encountered
before
 Picking out a missing mitten from lost-and-
found
 Recall
 Reproduce information from memory
 Describe the missing mitten
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 Three Types of
Childhood Memories

 Generic
 Produces “scripts”—general outlines of repeated and familiar events
 Episodic
 Remembering a specific event at a specific time
 Autobiographical
 Memories that form a person’s life history
 Specific and long-lasting

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 Influences on Memory Retention

 Uniqueness of event
 Children collaborate with parents and adults
when constructing autobiographical
memories
• Low elaborative style
• High elaborative style
 Culture affects what children remember

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 Intelligence:
Psychometric and Vygotskian
Approaches

 Tests include verbal items

Results are more reliable than nonverbal tests for
younger children
 Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale
 WPPSI-III

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Influences on Measured Intelligence

 Rise in standardized norms

 Family environment
 Correlation
between
socioeconomic status and IQ
 Twin studies

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 Intelligence:
Vygotsky’s Theory

 Childrenuse “scaffolds” to learn—the

temporary support of adults
 Assess potential with dynamic tests
 Zone of proximal development (ZPD)

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 Language Development: Vocabulary

 Fast mapping
 Child learns the meaning of a word after hearing
only once or twice
 Theory-of-mind development plays a role
 By age 3, average child knows 900–1,000
words
 By age 6, knows about 2,600 and understands
more than 20,000
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 Grammar and Syntax

 Children start using plurals, possessives,

and past tense
 Know the difference between I, you, and we
 Most sentences are declarative
 Errors with irregular verbs
 Holded instead of held

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 Pragmatics and Social Speech

 Pragmatics
 How we use language to communicate
 Knowing how to ask for something
 Social Speech
 Speech intended to be understood by listener
 Trying to explain something clearly

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 Private Speech

 Talking aloud with no intended listener

 Normal and common in childhood
 Piaget: A sign of cognitive immaturity
 Vygotsky: Conversation with the self
 More research supports this view

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 Delayed
Language Development

 About 3% of preschool-age children

 May be problems in fast mapping
 Manychildren catch up—especially if
comprehension is normal
 Dialogic reading helps

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 Preparation for Literacy

 General linguistic skills

 Vocabulary, syntax, etc.
 Specific Skills
 Phonemic awareness: Understanding that
words are composed of sounds
 Socialinteraction
 Reading to children

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 Types of Preschools

 Child-centered (U.S.)
 Stress social and emotional growth
 Children choose activities and interact individually
with the teacher
 Academically focused (such as China)
 Montessori method
 Reggio Emilia Approach

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 Compensatory Preschools:
Goals of Head Start

To improve:
 Physical health
 Cognitive skills
 Self-confidence
 Relationships with others
 Social responsibility
 Sense of dignity and self-worth for child and family

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 Transitioning to Kindergarten

 Today, kindergarten is more like first grade

 More time with worksheets and pre-reading
 Preschool-experienced children transition easier
 Factors easing transition:
 Prosocial child
 Cognitive maturity
 Supportive family background

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