4: Early Childhood
- Page ID
- 146895
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- 4.1: Introduction to Early Childhood
- Early childhood is a time of pretending, blending fact and fiction, and learning to think of the world using language. As young children move away from needing to touch, feel, and hear about the world toward learning some basic principles about how the world works, they hold some pretty interesting initial ideas. Concepts such as time, size and distance are not easy to grasp at this young age. Understanding concepts are all tasks that are part of cognitive development in the preschool years.
- 4.2: Sleep
- During early childhood, there is wide variation in the number of hours of hours of sleep recommended per day. For example, two year-olds may still need 15-16 hours per day, while a six year-old may only need 7-8 hours.
- 4.3: Physical Development
- Children between the ages of 2 and 6 years tend to grow about 3 inches in height each year and gain about 4 to 5 pounds in weight each year. This growth rate is slower than that of infancy and is accompanied by a reduced appetite between the ages of 2 and 6. By age 6, the brain is at 95 percent its adult weight. Sexuality begins in childhood as a response to physical states and sensation and cannot be interpreted as similar to that of adults in any way.
- 4.4: Sexual Development
- Historically, children have been thought of as innocent or incapable of sexual arousal. Yet, the physical dimension of sexual arousal is present from birth. However, to associate the elements of seduction, power, love, or lust that is part of the adult meanings of sexuality would be inappropriate. Sexuality begins in childhood as a response to physical states and sensation and cannot be interpreted as similar to that of adults in any way.
- 4.6: Motor Skill Development
- Early childhood is the time period when most children acquire the basic skills for locomotion, such as running, jumping, and skipping, and object control skills, such as throwing, catching, and kicking. Children continue to improve their gross motor skills as they run and jump. Fine motor skills are also being refined in activities, such as pouring water into a container, drawing, coloring, and buttoning coats and using scissors.
- 4.7: Cognitive Development
- Piaget’s stage that coincides with early childhood is the preoperational stage. The word operational means logical, so children were thought to be illogical. However, they are learning to use language or to think of the world symbolically. The theory of mind is the understanding that the mind can be tricked or that the mind is not always accurate. Before about 4 years of age, a child does not recognize that the mind can hold ideas that are not accurate.
- 4.8: Brain Maturation
- The brain is about 75 % its adult weight by three years of age. By age 6, it is at 95 % its adult weight. Myelination and the development of dendrites continue to occur in the cortex and as it does, we see a corresponding change in what the child is capable of doing. Greater development in the prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain behind the forehead that helps us to think, strategize, and control attention and emotion, makes it increasingly possible to inhibit emotional outbursts.
- 4.9: 4.9 Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory of Cognitive Development
- Lev Vygotsky argued that culture has a major impact on a child’s cognitive development. Piaget and Gesell believed development stemmed directly from the child, and although Vygotsky acknowledged intrinsic development, he argued that it is the language, writings, and concepts arising from the culture that elicit the highest level of cognitive thinking. He believed that the social interactions with adults and more learned peers facilitates a child’s learning potential.
- 4.10: Information Processing
- Information processing researchers have focused on several issues in cognitive development for this age group, including improvements in attention skills, changes in the capacity and the emergence of executive functions in working memory. Additionally, in early childhood memory strategies, memory accuracy, and autobiographical memory emerge. Early childhood is seen by many researchers as a crucial time period in memory development (Posner & Rothbart, 2007).
- 4.13: Neo-Piagetians
- As previously discussed, Piaget’s theory has been criticized on many fronts, and updates to reflect more current research have been provided by the Neo-Piagetians, or those theorists who provide “new” interpretations of Piaget’s theory. Morra, Gobbo, Marini and Sheese (2008) reviewed Neo-Piagetian theories, which were first presented in the 1970s, and identified how these “new” theories combined Piagetian concepts with those found in Information Processing.
- 4.16: Psychosocial Development
- Early childhood is a time of forming an initial sense of self. A self-concept or idea of who we are, what we are capable of doing, and how we think and feel is a social process that involves taking into consideration how others view us. One of the ways to gain a clearer sense of self is to exaggerate those qualities that are to be incorporated into the self. Another important dimension of the self is the sense of self as male or female.
- 4.18: Family Life
- Relationships between parents and children continue to play a significant role in children’s development during early childhood. Baumrind offers a model of parenting that includes three styles: authoritarian, permissive parenting, and authoritative parenting. Lemasters and Defrain offer another model of parenting which suggest that parenting styles are often designed to meet the psychological needs of the parent rather than the developmental needs of the child.
- 4.20: Preschool
- Providing universal preschool has become an important lobbying point for federal, state, and local leaders throughout our country. In his 2013 State of the Union address, President Obama called upon congress to provide high quality preschool for all children. He continued to support universal preschool in his legislative agenda, and in December 2014 the President convened state and local policymakers for the White House Summit on Early Education.
- 4.21: Childhood Stress and Development
- Normal, everyday stress can provide an opportunity for young children to build coping skills and poses little risk to development. Even more long-lasting stressful events such as changing schools or losing a loved one can be managed fairly well. But children who experience toxic stress or who live in extremely stressful situations of abuse over long periods of time can suffer long-lasting effects. The effects of stress can be minimized if the child has the support of caring adults.
- 4.23: Autism Spectrum Disorder
- Autism spectrum disorder is probably the most misunderstood and puzzling of the neurodevelopmental disorders. Children with this disorder show signs of significant disturbances in three main areas: (a) deficits in social interaction, (b) deficits in communication, and (c) repetitive patterns of behavior or interests. These disturbances appear early in life and cause serious impairments in functioning (APA, 2013).