Development in EARLY Childhood (Developmental Psychology)

 Early childhood represents a time period of continued rapid growth, especially in the areas of
language and cognitive development.

Overall Physical Growth

 Children between the ages of two and six years tend to grow about 3 inches in height 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.

Brain Maturation

 The brain is about 75 percent its adult weight by three years of age. By age 6, it is at 95 percent
its adult weight (Lenroot & Giedd, 2006).
 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 and understand how to play games.

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 (Clark, 1994).
 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.
 Children’s art highlights many developmental changes.
 Kellogg (1969) noted that children’s drawings underwent several transformations.
 Starting with about 20 different types of scribbles at age 2, children move on to experimenting
with the placement of scribbles on the page.

Cognitive Development in Early Childhood

Piaget’s Preoperational Stage

 Piaget’s stage that coincides with early childhood is the preoperational stage.
 According to Piaget, this stage occurs from the age of 2 to 7 years.
 In the preoperational stage, children use symbols to represent words, images, and ideas, which
is why children in this stage engage in pretend play.

Pretend Play: Pretending is a favorite activity at this time.

Egocentrism: Egocentrism in early childhood refers to the tendency of young children not to be able to
take the perspective of others, and instead the child thinks that everyone sees, thinks, and feels just as
they do.

Critique of Piaget: Similar to the critique of the sensorimotor period, several psychologists have
attempted to show that Piaget also underestimated the intellectual capabilities of the preoperational
child.

Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory

 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 (Crain, 2005). He believed that the social interactions with adults and more learned
peers can facilitate a child’s potential for learning.

Private Speech: Vygotsky, however, believed that children talk to themselves in order to solve problems
or clarify thoughts.

Contrast with Piaget: Piaget was highly critical of teacher- directed instruction believing that teachers
who take control of the child’s learning place the child into a passive role (Crain, 2005).

Information Processing

 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).

Attention

 Changes in attention have been described by many as the key to changes in human memory
(Nelson & Fivush, 2004; Posner & Rothbart, 2007).

Divided Attention: Young children (age 3-4) have considerable difficulties in dividing their attention
between two tasks.

Selective Attention: Children’s ability with selective attention tasks improve as they age. However, this
ability is also greatly influenced by the child’s temperament.
Sustained Attention: Most measures of sustained attention typically ask children to spend several
minutes focusing on one task, while waiting for an infrequent event, while there are multiple distractors
for several minutes.

Memory
Children’s understanding of the world

 Both Piaget and Vygotsky believed that children actively try to understand the world around
them, referred to as constructivism.
 More recently developmentalists have added to this understanding by examining how children
organize information and develop their own theories about the world.

Theory-theory

 is the tendency of children to generate theories to explain everything they encounter. This
concept implies that humans are naturally inclined to find reasons and generate explanations for
why things occur.

Theory of mind

 refers to the ability to think about other people’s thoughts. This mental mind reading helps
humans to understand and predict the reactions of others, thus playing a crucial role in social
development.

Language Development

 Vocabulary growth: A child’s vocabulary expands between the ages of two to six from about
200 words to over 10,000 words. This “vocabulary spurt” typically involves 10-20 new words per
week and is accomplished through a process called fast- mapping.
 Literal meanings: Children can repeat words and phrases after having heard them only once or
twice, but they do not always understand the meaning of the words or phrases.
 Overregularization: Children learn rules of grammar as they learn language but may apply these
rules inappropriately at first.
Psychosocial Development in Early Childhood

Erikson: Initiative vs. Guilt

 The trust and autonomy of previous stages develop into a desire to take initiative or to think of
ideas and initiative action (Erikson, 1982).

Self-Concept and Self-Esteem

 Early childhood is a time of forming an initial sense of self. Self- concept is our self-description
according to various categories, such as our external and internal qualities. In contrast, self-
esteem is an evaluative judgment about who we are.

Self-Control

 Self-control is not a single phenomenon but is multi-facetted. It includes response initiation, the
ability to not initiate a behavior before you have evaluated all the information, response
inhibition, the ability to stop a behavior that has already begun, and delayed gratification, the
ability to hold out for a larger reward by forgoing a smaller immediate reward (Dougherty et al.,
2005).

Gender

 Another important dimension of the self is the sense of self as male or female. Preschool aged
children become increasingly interested in finding out the differences between boys and girls,
both physically and in terms of what activities are acceptable for each.

Theories of Gender Development

 One theory of gender development in children is social learning theory, which argues that
behavior is learned through observation, modeling, reinforcement, and punishment (Bandura,
1997).

Parenting Styles

 Authoritarian is the traditional model of parenting in which parents make the rules and children
are expected to be obedient.
 Permissive parenting involves holding expectations of children that are below what could be
reasonably expected from them.
 Uninvolved parents are disengaged from their children. They do not make demands on their
children and are non-responsive