Papaliahd 11e PPT Ch07

Physical and Cognitive
Development in Early Childhood
Chapter 7
© 2009 by the McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc 1

Guideposts for Study
 How do children’s bodies and brains change

between ages 3 and 6, and what sleep problems
and motor achievements are common?
 What are the major health and safety risks for
young children?
 What are typical cognitive advances and
immature aspects of preschool children’s
thinking?

Guideposts for Study
 What memory abilities expand in early childhood?

 How is preschoolers’ intelligence measured, and what are
some influences on it?
 How does language improve during early childhood, and
what happens when its development is delayed?
 What purposes does early childhood education serve, and
how do children make the transition to kindergarten?

Bodily Growth and Change
 Aroundage 3, children lose ‘baby

roundness’
– Limbs lengthen, height increases
 Cartilage turns to bone faster

Physical Growth: Ages 3 to 6
Age Height in Inches Weight in Pounds
Boys Girls Boys Girls
3 37.5 37 32 30
4 40.5 39.5 36 35
5 43 425 40 40
6 45.5 45.5 46 45

Preventing Obesity
 Over 10% of 2-5 year olds overweight

 Low-income children of all ethnicities at
greatest risk
 Heredity and learned eating habits also
contribute
– As ‘junk food’ spreads through developing
countries, obesity rate increases

Sleep Patterns
 By age 5, most children

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

Typical Sleep requirements

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
Brain Development
 By 6 years, brain is at 95% peak volume

 Corpuscallosum, linking left and right
hemispheres, improves functioning
 Most rapid growth in areas that support
thinking, language and spatial relations

Motor Skills
 Gross
– Involves large muscle groups
– Jumping and running
 Fine
– Using eye-hand and small-muscle
coordination
– Buttoning a shirt, drawing pictures

Handedness
 Usually evident by age 3

 Heritability
 Single-Gene Theory
– Dominant allele for right-handedness
– 82% of population is right-handed

Artistic Development

Preventing Obesity
 Approximately 14% of 2-5 year olds

obese
 Overweight children tend to become
overweight adults

Malnutrition
 Almost 30% of children worldwide are

underweight, some severely.
 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.
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.

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

Exposure to Pollutants
 Parentalsmoking: Increases child’s risk

of asthma and bronchitis
 Air
pollution: Increases risk of chronic
respiratory diseases
 Pesticidepoisonings: Most occur in
young children

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

Cognitive Development:
Symbolic Function
 The
ability to use symbols that have
meaning
– Words
– Numbers
– Images
 Examples
– Deferred imitation
– Pretend play

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

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.’
Animism
 The tendency to attribute life to

inanimate objects
‘The cloud is smiling at me!’
 Familiarity increases accuracy
‘I know that a person is different from
my doll.’

Numbers:
Five Counting Principles
 Ordinality: number knowledge

 Cardinality
 Counting
 Number patterns
 Abstraction

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

Conservation
Something remains the same even if its

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

Egocentrism:
The Three Mountain Task

Theory of Mind
 Children’sawareness 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

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!

Appearance versus Reality
 Related to awareness of false

beliefs
 Requires child to simultaneously
refer to two conflicting mental
representations
– Is a birthday candle wrapped in a
crayon wrapper a crayon or a
candle?

Fantasy versus 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?!

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

Three Steps of Memory
Encoding
Storage
Retrieval

Types of Memory
Sensory
Working
• Executive function
• Central executive
Short-term
Long-term

Types of Memory Retrieval
 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
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

Social Interaction
Model of Memory
 Children collaborate with

parents and adults when
constructing autobiographical
memories
• Low elaborative style
• High elaborative style
 Culture
affects what children
remember
Intelligence:
Psychometric Measures
 Tests include verbal items

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

Intelligence:
Vygotsky’s Theory
 Children use ‘scaffolds’ to learn – the

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

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 900-1000
words
 By age 6, knows about 2600 and understands
more than 20,000
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

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

Box 7.2: 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

Delayed
Language Development
 About3% of preschool-age children

 May be problems in fast mapping
 Many children catch up – especially if
comprehension is normal
Dialogic reading helps

Emergent literacy
 General linguistic skills

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

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)

Compensatory Preschools:
Goals of Head Start
To improve:
 Physical health
 Cognitive skills
 Self-confidence
 Relationships with others
 Social responsibility
 Sense of dignity & self-worth for child and
family
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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Physical and Cognitive

Development in Early Childhood

© 2009 by the McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc 1

 How do children’s bodies and brains change

© 2009 by the McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc 2

 What memory abilities expand in early childhood?

© 2009 by the McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc 3

 Aroundage 3, children lose ‘baby

© 2009 by the McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc 4

Age Height in Inches Weight in Pounds

Boys Girls Boys Girls

© 2009 by the McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc 5

 Over 10% of 2-5 year olds overweight

© 2009 by the McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc 6

 By age 5, most children

© 2009 by the McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc 7

© 2009 by the McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc 8

 By 6 years, brain is at 95% peak volume

© 2009 by the McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc 10

© 2009 by the McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc 11

 Usually evident by age 3

© 2009 by the McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc 12

© 2009 by the McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc 13

 Approximately 14% of 2-5 year olds

© 2009 by the McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc 14

 Almost 30% of children worldwide are

 73% of deaths of children under 5 occur in

© 2009 by the McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc 16

 Lower SES increases risk of injury, illness and death

© 2009 by the McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc 17

 Parentalsmoking: Increases child’s risk

© 2009 by the McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc 18

 Dangerous levels of lead in nearly 8% of

© 2009 by the McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc 19

© 2009 by the McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc 20

 Why is it hard for children under age 3 to

 Using simple maps and models becomes

easier after age 3

© 2009 by the McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc 21

 Transduction: Mentally linking

 The tendency to attribute life to

© 2009 by the McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc 23

 Ordinality: number knowledge

© 2009 by the McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc 24

© 2009 by the McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc 25

Something remains the same even if its

 Failureto see that an action

© 2009 by the McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc 27

© 2009 by the McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc 28

 Children’sawareness of their own mental

© 2009 by the McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc 29

 What do you think is in the crayon box?

© 2009 by the McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc 30

 Related to awareness of false

© 2009 by the McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc 31

 Distinguishing between real and imagined

© 2009 by the McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc 32

 Heredity and environmental effects

Produces ‘scripts’ - general outlines of repeated

Remembering a specific event at a specific time