My Virtual Child Reflection Essay

My virtual child’s name is Dominic. He is a white male of average height and weight with blonde hair, green eyes and pale skin. Cognitively he seems younger than his chronological age up until sixth grade. Physically Dominic has always seemed older than his chronological age. The first few months of Dominic’s life were rough at times. I decided from the beginning to feed with formula, and I would respond to different types of cries. At three months he would cry after each bottle and have frequent diarrhea, we then decided to switch to a different formula rather than introducing food (My Virtual Child).

The first of the four stages, sensorimotor, occurs from birth to the time the child is two years old. The preoperational stage begins when the child is about two years old and continues until the child is seven. The next stage, and also the stage in which Pelzer is in during a greater part of this memoir, is the concrete operational stage. This stage continues until the child is roughly eleven years old. The final stage lasts into adulthood. This stage is called formal

1) Q: You are starting to notice that Preslee's crying is rhythmic and moderately loud when she is hungry, wet, or cold. If she is startled, there is a sudden intake of breath and a loud wail, followed by more deep breaths and loud wails. A: You try to respond to the different types of crying by changing, feeding, or soothing little Preslee.

Raising a Virtual Child had been a great experience for me. This assignment made me better understand why adolescents are the way they are. I had my own expectation before the onset of this project, how my virtual child was going to be at age of 18? I was expecting that my child would be a successful and obedient one. She would be nice and polite, follow rules and will be good in education. For me, while raising a child, bonding between child and parents is an important factor to consider. It makes child feel secure and let know that his/her parents are there to look after their needs. Communication between parent and child is important too. It will provide a great scenario for learning and aid in cognitive development. Discussing problem with parents and finding a solution is the best way to go during the childhood. I think parenting is not that much hard as it seems but is absolutely a sensitive and responsible task to raise a child. I had enjoyed raising my virtual child and hope my feedback is going to be a good one too.

Piaget suggests that development in children occurs in four stages: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational and formal operational.

Piaget’s theory was introduced by Jean Piaget who established four periods of cognitive development. The four stages are; Sensorimotor, Preoperational, Concrete Operational, and Formal operational. The sensorimotor is the first stage and begins when the child is born and proceeds until the age of two years. The second stage is the preoperational stage and begins with the child is two years old and continues until the child reaches six years of age. The concrete stage is the third stage and begins when the child is six years old and proceeds until the age of 11 years old. The formal operational stage is the fourth stage and

The virtual child stimulation is an online program that offers students a feel of what it is like to raise a child and make parenting-decisions concerning that child. Students also learn about the situations that occur in the three main life stages, and see how their decisions determine how their child will turn out. The focus of this assignment will be on my virtual child, Jason, the problems that occurred in the life stages, and the options I chose when raising Jason.

Adolescence is defined as the transition between childhood and adulthood. Many changes happen at this stage. Adolescence involves things such as puberty, greater independence, and a time when someone begins to construct their identity. Identity means their life value and goals including a secure sense of who they are in terms of sexual, vocational, and moral ethics. In the next few paragraphs I will be discussing my Virtual Child, Maeve as she went through adolescence (ages 11- 16). I am going to delve into the different changes I saw in her and how they relate to theories proposed by Piaget, Erikson, Marcia, and Gardner. Each

With what I have learned from the My Virtual Child program, I now understand the complexities of raising and guiding a child. Mere decisions made during infancy can affect a child long term, physically, cognitively, and even emotionally. To make important developmental decisions cannot simply be classified as a challenge, it is one of the hardest things parents experience. Making decisions for one’s self, as opposed to making decisions for one’s child is so challenging that most people will not understand until they have children. Even with the realistic impression this program has, I would venture to say that even

I was asked to create and answer questions about a virtual child. When I was told this was an assignment I thought “this should be easy”. Boy was I wrong! I found many things can affect the outcome of my child. If I am too strict or too easy, the child’s behavior will show this. Over time, this will also affect the child’s temperament. I have learned that some of my classmates’ virtual children are harder to get along with and require more discipline then others. I decided to just trust my instinct and answer the questions as if they were for a real child. In this report you will see how my answers affected my virtual daughter Alexis and, my experience throughout the duration of the assignment.

I learned many things through Virtual Child. I learned I babied my baby too much. Any time she cried I picked her up, if she fell I was always there to pick her up. Throughout her life I babied her. As a mother I would need to decode her cry’s (Clinic. M). which in real life I believe I would. I believe this because I would not have as much patient as I did with my virtual child. But decoding cries, would be realizing the difference between a hungry cry and a diaper change cry. This would be easy, new borns need feed every few hours. You change feel or look in the diaper to see if the baby needs a clean diaper or its butt has rashes. The harder cries to decode would be if the baby was hot or cold. You

Children develop cognition through two main stages that Jean Piaget theorized. The stages run from birth and infancy to school age children. Sensorimotor is the first stage and goes from birth to about the age of two. This stage implies that the children learn about the environment they live in and they learn this through the reflexes and movements they produce. They also learn that they are separate people from their parents and they can say goodbye to them and know they will come back. The second stage is called the preoperational stage. During this stage of development, children will learn how to incorporate symbols to represent objects. This is also the beginning of learning the alphabet and speech. The child is still very much egocentric at this point in time, but with the help of understanding educators, the child will grow appropriately onto the next stages of development. Finally, the children need to develop emotionally/socially.

When I started the Virtual Child project I did not have any expectations because I really I did not know what to expect. At the end of the project, I was surprised how much the child turned out like myself. My virtual child was a girl, and I named her Ava. She was born about four weeks premature, only weighing four and half pounds and had an Apgar score of six. Ava also had jaundice. So she needed a few days of neonatal care. During that time, the doctors also wanted to make sure that she could regulate her body temperature. After five days, Ava Apgar score went up to eight. So she was able to go home.

My Virtual Child experience: I was in labor for 8 hours and my son was going into distress. I had an emergency C-section but after 10 minutes I delivered a healthy boy. His Apgar score was great and I was able to bond with him. I named him Phil because I enjoy the Rugrats cartoon. He does not look nothing like me or dad, he is light brown and bald.

In the sensorimotor stage the child discovers the environment through physical actions such as sucking, grabbing, shaking and pushing. During these first two years of life children realize objects still exist, even if it is out of view. This concept is known as object permanence. Children in the preoperational stage develop language skills, but may only grasp an idea with repeated exposure. As Piaget describes in the next stage, children draw on knowledge that is based on real life situations to provide more logical explanations and predictions. Lastly, in the formal operational stage children use higher levels of thinking and present abstract ideas.