Psychical Changes In Early Childhood

The second sub-stage is primary circular reactions that occur around one to four months of age. In this stage infants start to organize schemes for sensory and motor activities, actions are voluntarily repeated, but the infant actions are still centered on bodily experiences and instinct satisfaction. The third sub-stage is when the baby starts to focus on the external world and secondary circular reactions; this happens around four to eight months. Babies also develop schemes for repeating actions with interesting effects on things and people in the world during this sub-stage. The fourth sub-stage is coordinating the secondary circular reactions around eight to twelve months. In this stage infants can organize a series of mental structures for various actions and develop intentionality of behavior, they can separate schemes for means and ends, and facilitate the accomplishment of simple goals. The fifth sub-stage is when the external-oriented attention generates and tertiary circular reactions, this is from twelve to eighteen months. Around this time infants grow into toddlers and they seek discovery of new information about how things and people work. The final/sixth sub-stage is pretty important and several development milestones occur, this is eighteen to twenty four months. In this sub-stage object permanence is acquired and toddlers understand objects continue to exist independent from self-generated actions and sensory experiences. (Petrill,

Babies and toddlers show amazing progress in all aspects of their development from birth to three years, considering they are born with simple reflexes and are quite helpless and dependent. It is essential to have a good understanding of the development stages in this group in order to support their development. The changes that occur in a child’s development in the first few years of life are truly remarkable. Practitoners note children’s

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.

Piaget’s three major stages of sensorimotor intelligence include the primary circular reactions, the secondary circular reactions, and the tertiary circular reactions. The primary circular reactions distinguish substage 2 of Piaget’s sensory motor stages. Which is Piaget’s way to define a baby’s simple actions that are repetitive, such as repeating to suck his thumb after figuring out that it’s pleasurable, this usually occurs between 1 to 4 months old. The secondary circular reactions refer to substage 3, which is when a baby repeats an action that triggers a reaction outside his or her own body. This is when a baby becomes aware of the objects around them, which they apply a trial and error learning, in order to see the response between a stimuli. The tertiary circular reactions occur in substage 5. The baby does not necessarily repeat the action but rather tries out variations. This happens between 12 to 18 months old. They’ll try a variety of actions to trigger an expression from the people around

The 3rd substage of the sensorimotor stage, according to Piaget’s cognitive development, takes place when infants are 4 to 8-months-old. As the previous stages, this 3rd stage is defined by typical adaptive behavior. That is, infants sit up and become skilled at reaching for and manipulating objects, exercising the secondary circular reaction on interesting events in the surrounding environment. Furthermore, this substage is primarily link to object permanence failure. In other words, Infants fail to understand that objects continue t exist even though they are not in immediate sight or within reach to be acted upon. For example, Jade a 8-moths-old infant at the Guidepost Montessori was laughing while Ella a 5-year-old child was showing a stuffed

Piaget established that thought is developed through six sub stages, the sensorimotor stage. I will be discussing stage three and four, which are known as secondary circular reactions. In this stage, infants initiate motor activities to fulfill their own needs. Sub stage three is typically when babies reach four months and can continue up to eight months. Infants become much more responsive to people and objects in environment. They learn to repeat specific actions that have caused them pleasure. For example, a baby clapping her hands when a toy appears from behind a blanket while playing a hide and seek game. Another example is when a baby is sucking his thumb just by reflex, but then discovers it is pleasing so he will suck it habitually. In this sub stage, Infants begin to use their logic.

In this essay, I will discuss my experience during middle and late childhood. I will address three stages which are the physical, cognitive, and socioemotional development. The physical development consists of body and brain growth, health issues, and motor skills. The cognitive development consists of language, memory, and attention. Socioemotional development is based on relationship, employment, and personality.

Laura Schulz’s presentation, The Surprisingly Logical Minds of Babies, explores the idea of how babies and young children are able to learn so much in such a short span of time. In Schulz’s presentation, the viewers see multiple video experiments where she introduces babies to different balls and toys that make noises. I choose to explain and break down the first experiment, that she discusses. In the first experiment Schulz has a colleague reach into a bucket with mostly blue balls and a few yellow balls. The colleague pulls out three of the balls and when she takes each ball out she squeaks them. The colleague then pulls out a yellow ball and hands it to the baby. The child copies what Schulz’s colleague has done, but however the

Imitation and observational learning are important in aiding the attainment and portrayal of new behaviours, beginning as early as infancy (Meltzoff, 1993, p. 467). Deferred imitation and mental representations were concepts by developmental psychologist Jean Piaget in his theory of infant cognitive development. Deferred imitation refers to a child’s ability to imitate the actions that they have seen others perform, following a delay, (Slater, Lewis, Anzures & Lee, 2011). Piaget proposed that the emergence of deferred imitation during the sensorimotor period, is a sign of mental representation, (Jones & Herbert, 2009, para. 14). His proposal of the formation of this ability has been accredited by several studies that document the presence of deferred imitation in infants from as early as birth to 24 months of age and beyond (Barr, Dowden, & Hayne, 1996; Heimann & Meltzoff, 1996). A study by Heimann and Schaller (1985) used infants between 14-21 days old, (p.33). The mother was told to either protrude her tongue or open her mouth while the infant was engaged and observing during the exposure sessions, (p. 33). Two observers scored each infant on the number of times they opened their mouth or protruded their tongue, depending on the groups they were assigned to within the 60 second response period, (p.33). The results showed that the total number of tongue protrusions or mouth openings were highest when the behaviours were modelled to the infant, (p. 36). To reproduce the

Cognitively, the way infants process information undergoes rapid changes during the infant’s first year. For instance, the Piagetian theory of cognitive development includes (1) the sensorimotor stage in which infants, through trial an error, build their understanding of things around the world (e.g. imitation of familiar behaviour); (p. 203, Chapter 6); (2) building schemas (e.g. a 5 month old child can move or drop an object fairly rigidly, whereas an older child can do the same action but with more intentional and creative movement);(p. 202, Chapter 6) and (3) the concept of object permanence (e.g. an infant knows that an object exists even though it is hidden encourages the child’s perceptual skills and awareness of the objects ‘realness’ in the world (p.

In the first, or sensorimotor, stage (birth to two years), knowledge is gained primarily through sensory impressions and motor activity. Through these two modes of learning, experienced both separately and in combination, infants gradually learn to control their own bodies and objects in the external world. Toward the end of Piaget¡¦s career, he brought about the idea that action is actually the primary source of knowledge and that perception and language are more secondary roles. He claimed that action is not random, but has organization, as well as logic. Infants from birth to four months however, are incapable of thought and are unable to differentiate themselves from others or from the environment. To infants, objects only exist when they are insight

Children and young people often experience many things which have a direct impact on their development; things such as their family environment and structure, personality, hospital visits, childcare arrangements, and culture.

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.

For this assignment, I have organized my responses into a report based on the following periods of development: infancy and toddlerhood (birth to 30 months), early childhood (3 to 5 years), middle childhood (6-11 years), and adolescence (12-18 years). The last section of my paper includes my responses to the personal reflection questions.

Early childhood is one of the most critical developmental periods in a human’s lifespan. The child transitions from infancy and begins the essential changes needed before the next developmental period begins, middle childhood which begins at six years of age. Development refers to “the orderly patterns of change, as well as continuities that occur in an individual through their life span” (text, p3). Human development is determined by both genes and environmental influences or nature and nurture. Nature refers to heredity which is the passing of traits from parents to their children and maturation which is the changes biologically programmed by genes (text, p7). Nurture refers to the changes that occur due to the individual’s environment