Infant (Birth- 1) Development Packet

You will need to know the information in this packet. You will have a quiz over it and be using the ideas.  Make sure when you read it you understand it and can apply it.

Physical Development

How a child develops                                        

Cephalocaudal

Head to foot

Proximodistal

In to out

Simple to complex

General to Specific

Control of Muscles

Muscles are small, soft, and uncontrolled.

Those in the arms and hands are more developed than those of the neck and legs.

Newborns neck muscles are not strong enough to hold their head up

By the end of the 2nd month they can turn their head and follow

Newborns behave randomly.

Their responses are characterized by mass activity – general movements of the whole body.

When one part of the body is stimulated the whole body responds.

Physiological adjustments that infants have to go through from the uterus to the outside world

Changes in varying temperature place demands on body temperature regulation.

Change in breaking from a fluid to a dry environment

Breathing is irregular in the beginning – fast, noisy with frequent sneezing, coughing, and yawning.

Greatest growth and development in life occurs in infancy!

Weight

Best sign of good health

Most loose a little then they begin to rapidly gain weight

1-2 pounds per month

Birth 6-10 lbs - 22 lbs by the time they are 1

Depends on eating habits, activity, and hereditary

Height

Steady height growth

Birth 20 inches – 30 inches by the time they are 1

Depends on hereditary

Proportion        

Size relationship between different parts of the body

Head and abdomen are larger and legs and arms are short and small

Head grows rapidly during the first year to provide for the rapid brain development

½ total growth of the head occurs during the first year.

The head accounts for ¼ of the body length (in adults 1/7) and it is wider than the chest

Fontanels

Gaps where bones have not yet joined

Allow the head to grow

Close at 18 months

Taste and Smell

Newborn can distinguish several basic tastes

At birth they have Sweet, Sour, Bitter

Salt taste

Birth – indifferent to or reject salt solutions

4 months prefer salt taste

Prepares them for solid foods

Salty, acid or bitter solutions make them stop sucking

Within 10 days they can determine their mother by smell

Little is known how these two develop

Feeding

1-3  months – eat liquids

Teeth begin to appear at 6 months

Start between 4 months to 6 months working in solid food

about 9 - 12 months start with table food

Cry

1st way a baby communicates

Need attention, held, protest, etc.

Varies in intensity – from a whimper to a message of all out distress

Within the 1st few weeks – Parents can identify which is their baby by their cry.

Parents don’t always interpret the baby’s cry correctly, experience improves accuracy.

How quickly to respond to a crying baby

Ethological theory

Parental responsiveness is adaptive in that it ensures the infant’s basic needs will be met and provides protection from danger.

Behaviorist – Operant Conditioning – by Skinner

Operant Conditioning is a form of learning in which a spontaneous behavior is followed by a stimulus that changes the probability that the behavior will occur again.

Responding to a crying infant reinforces the crying response and result in a whiny, demanding child.

Fussy Time – 4 weeks to 3/4 Months

Lasts 4-5 days per week and goes down.

Occurs from 3:00 pm and into the evening.

Hearing

Maybe unable to hear during the 1st few days until amniotic fluid drains.

Newborns prefer complex sounds to pure tones

Prefer human speech that is high pitched, expressive using a rising tone

3 days – they can turn their eyes and head in the general direction of the sound

4 months can reach fairly accurately toward a sounding object in the dark

4-7 months have a sense of musical and speech phrasing

12 months – if two melodies, that differ only slightly are played and infants can tell they aren’t the same

Vision

Least mature of all the newborns senses

Visual structures in both the eye and the brain continue to develop after birth

The muscles controlling the lens, the part of the eye that permits us to adjust our focus to varying distances are week

Cells in the retina are not as mature or densely packed as they will be in several months.

The optic nerve and other pathways that relay these messages, along with the cells in the visual cortex that receive them, will not be adult like for several years

Newborns can’t focus their eyes very well.

Newborns – while holding them your face will be fuzzy.

3 months – can focus on objects just as well as adults can and visual acuity, the fineness and sharpness, improves steadily

2 years – it reaches a near-adult level (binocular vision).

Prefer high contrast (alternating stripes, bull’s eyes), faces, patterns and the color red (they spend a longer time looking at it).

Depth Perception

They become able to recognize that an object is three-dimensional,

1st month everything is 2-D (flat)

2nd month they can see 3-D

3 month- they prefer to look at real objects rather than flat pictures of objects

Hand-eye Coordination

They gain increasing ability to move their hands and fingers precisely in relation to what is seen

As their vision improves, so does their hand-eye coordination

Necessary for eating, catching a ball, coloring, and tying shoes

3-4 months they begin to reach for object they see

Once they can reach they start to modify their grasp

Unlar grasp – 3-4 months - a clumsy motion in which the fingers close against the palm

4-5 months their hands are free thus allowing both hands to explore objects

Pincer grasp – 9 months – use the thumb and index finger to grab an object.

Reflexes

An inborn, automatic response to a particular form of stimulation

All brain cells are present at birth, however many are not mature enough to function in a newborn. Therefore most of their activity is of a reflex nature.

Some have a survival value, others help parents and infants establish interaction

Most disappear during the first 6 months

Due to a gradual increase in the control over their own behavior.

Pediatricians test infant reflexes carefully since they provide one way of assessing the health of the baby’s nervous system

Individual differences in responses are not cause for concern

Reflex response must be combined with other observations to distinguish normal from abnormal central nervous system functioning.

Newborn states

6 states of arousal, or degrees of sleep and wakefulness.

1st month they alternate frequently

Newborns spend the greatest amount of time asleep - about 16 to 18 hours a day

Changes in arousal patterns are due to brain maturation, but the social environment affects them as well.

Newborns sleep about 17 hours a day

By the 3rd month infants should sleep through the night.

Social Development

Infants are totally egocentric and they need to be.

They see everything only from their own point of view

They may show interest in another baby but only as they would another object. They do not perceive the baby as another person.

It is impossible for them to understand how anyone else thinks or feels.

It takes several years of social experiences to help children grow beyond egocentrism.

Security is very important

When infants learn to trust caregivers, they learn to value a social relationship.

They discover that they can depend on others for assistance.

Communication – encouraging & warm

Imitating language - “conversation”

Stranger anxiety

The fear of unfamiliar people, usually expressed by crying.

Expressed by crying

Common as object permanence develops, usually around 9 months

Ability to recognize that objects exist even when not in site.

Depends on infant’s temperament, past experience, and the situation in which baby and stranger meet.

Also showing that the memory is improving

Emotional Development

General Information

Functionalist approach

A view that emphases the function of emotions is to get us to take action in pursuing our goals and that emotions are central forces in all aspects of human activity.

Emotions are central forces in all aspects of human activity –

Views emotions as important in the emergence of self-awareness

Stresses that to adapt to their physical and social worlds, children must gradually gain voluntary control over their emotions, just as they do over motor, cognitive, and social behavior.

Emotions and cognitive development

Emotions have a powerful effect on memory

Shots at the doctors

Emotions are interwoven with cognitive processing, serving both as outcomes of mastering a task and as the foundation for approach to the next learning phase

Emotions and Social Development

Children’s emotional signals affect others’ behavior in powerful ways

Children of depressed parents are 2 to 5 times more likely to develop behavior problems than are children of non-depressed parents

Emotions and Physical Development

Temporary or permanent separation from a loved one depresses the immune response and is associated with a variety of health difficulties from infancy into adulthood.

Psychoanalytic Perspective  - Theories on how people develop their personality

Freud’s Theory (Freud (1856-1939) was a Viennese physician)

Psychosexual theory of development

He believed that personality develop through a predictable pattern of stages. As children move through each of these stages, the source of pleasure moves to different areas of the body.

Oral Stage -  Look in History Packet  

Erik Erikson’s Theory (1902-1994)

Psychosocial Theory

A series of crises to describe successive turning points or choices that influences personality growth across the life span.

 Trust vs Mistrust - Look in History Packet  

General

Infants can’t describe their feelings determining exactly which emotions they are experiencing is a challenge

Vocalization & body movement provide some information

Facial expressions offer the most reliable cues

Cross-cultural people make the same face for the same emotions

Come into the world with basic emotion

Signs are present at early infancy

Overtime they become clear

Happiness

Smile or laugh when they achieve new skills, expressing their delight. Waves arms.

Also encourages caregivers to be affectionate as well as stimulating

Anger and Sadness

Hunger, painful medical procedures, changes in body temperature, and too much or too little stimulation

4-6 months into the second year angry expressions increase in frequency and intensity

Fear

Rare – can’t protect themselves – caregivers do

Fear rises at about 6 months

Stranger anxiety

Temperament

Basic disposition with which babies seem to be born

Thomas and Chess’s study

The easy child (40% )

This child quickly establishes regular routines in infancy, is generally cheerful, and adapts easily to new experiences

Quiet, soothed quickly, sleeps soundly

The difficult child (10%)

This child has irregular daily routines, is slow to accept new experiences, and tends to react negatively and intensely.

Energetic, not easily soothed, does not sleep soundly

The Slow to warm up child (15%)

This child is inactive, shows mild, low-key reactions to environmental stimuli, is negative in mood, and adjusts slowly to new experiences

Not a good indication of future personality!

How parents respond effects how baby

Feels about itself

Sense stress, fatigue, unhappiness

Sense of security – important for future development.

Love & Affection

Feel secure – trust develops

Reward with a smile

Smile – 5-6 weeks

Attachment & Bonding

Attachment - Strong affectional tie that humans feel toward special people in their lives.

Bonding – forming a strong attachment to and preference for primary caregivers

For a good self-esteem and develop trust

6 months– infants have become attached to familiar people who have responded to their needs for physical care and stimulation

Early theories

Freud 1st suggests that their emotional tie to the mother provides the foundation for all later relationships

Behaviorism emphasizes the importance of feeding

Monkey experiment

Separation Anxiety

An infant’s distressed reaction to the departure of the familiar caregiver

Appears worldwide at around  6 months till 15 months

Infants have a clear understanding that the caregiver continues to exist when not in view (object permance)

Intellectual/Cognitive Development

Cognition

Refers         to the inner processes and products of the mind that lead to “knowing”

Piaget’s Cognitive-Developmental Theory

Jean Piaget – a Swiss psychologist

Refer to “Historical Foundations and Theorists” Packet page 4

Claimed that major cognitive advances take place as children act directly on the physical word, discover the disadvantages of their current ways of thinking, and revise them to create a better fit with reality

Thought of human cognition as a network of psychological structures, or schemes, created by an human that is constantly striving to make sense of experiences

Schemes change with age

“dropping game”

The most important source of cognition is the child himself – a busy, self-motivated explorer who forms ideas and tests them against the world, without external pressure

Believed that children move through for stages of development

He identified how the development of a child’s thought processes and intellect proceeds through a series of stages, were the child (a scientist) begins to experiment and explore their world from the moment they are born.

Sensorimotor Stage (Birth to 2 year)

Children learn through their senses and own action

Object permanence –

According to Piaget the most important

The understanding that objects continue to exist when they are out of sight

Develop by  6 to 9 months

Six sub-stages

Reflexes (0-1 month):

During this substage, the child understands the environment purely through inborn reflexes such as sucking and looking.

Primary Circular Reactions (1-4 months):

This substage involves coordinating sensation and new schemas. For example, a child may such his or her thumb by accident and then later intentionally repeat the action. These actions are repeated because the infant finds them pleasurable.

Secondary Circular Reactions (4-8 months):

During this substage, the child becomes more focused on the world and begins to intentionally repeat an action in order to trigger a response in the environment. For example, a child will purposefully pick up a toy in order to put it in his or her mouth.

Coordination of Reactions (8-12 months):

During this substage, the child starts to show clearly intentional actions. The child may also combine schemas in order to achieve a desired effect. Children begin exploring the environment around them and will often imitate the observed behavior of others. The understanding of objects also begins during this time and children begin to recognize certain objects as having specific qualities. For example, a child might realize that a rattle will make a sound when shaken.

Tertiary Circular Reactions (12-18 months):

Children begin a period of trial-and-error experimentation during the fifth substage. For example, a child may try out different sounds or actions as a way of getting attention from a caregiver.

Recent years other psychologists have raised questions about Piaget’s ideas

His experiments focused on only a certain kind of learning

They are too rigid

Lev Semenovich Vygotsky – a Russian Psychologist

Believed that human mental activity is the result of rich social and cultural context to affect that way the way children’s cognitive world is structured

It is social, not independent, learning

Infants are endowed with basic perceptual, attention, and memory capacities that they share with other animals.

These undergo a natural course of development during the first 2 years through direct contact with the environment

Once they can communicate through language their ability to participate in there learning is enhanced

Infants develop 4 abilities that show their growing ability to think

Remembering

A child may stop crying when someone enters the room because the baby knows that he or she is likely to be picked up an comforted

Making associations

Children associates a parent or other caregiver with receiving comfort

Understanding cause and effect        

The idea that one action results in another action or condition

Eyes, sucking  - every time the infant does something, something else happens

7-8 months they throw things deliberately – have a better understanding of their own power to make certain things happen

they also learn by repetition

dropping game

Paying attention

Attentions span goes longer

The length of time a person can concentrates on a task without getting bored

Encouraging learning

Give your time and attention

Provide positive feedback

Express your love

Talk, talk, talk

Learning to speak

Crying – 1st tool

Before learning to talk, a baby must learn to associate meanings with words.

Understand by 12 months

It depends on caregivers talking to the child, even when the baby doesn’t appear to respond

2 month – Coo’s, gurgles, vowel sounds

Toys and Play

Learn from toys

Play is work as well as pleasure

Play is also a physical necessity through which development takes place

Strengthen their muscles, refine their motor skills, and learn about the world

Choosing Toys

Look for toys that encourage participation and use

As the child’s abilities increase toys can by more complex

Look for ones that will remain interesting and appropriate for a number of years

Reminder I need you have your forms to do the activity!!!

Infants are Physically Totally Dependent on Adults!