OUTLINE OF CHILD DEVELOPMENT

Dr. Fatima Al-HaidarProfessor & Consultant Child & Adolescent

PsychiatristDepartment of Psychiatry

College of Medicine

Introduction:

• Development → changes in a person’s long-term growth, feelings and pattern of thinking and behavior.

• Some developmental changes are relatively specific. Others are more general.

Why Study Development?Knowing about human development can help you in five

major ways:

1.It can give you realistic expectations for children and adolescents.

2.Knowledge of development can help you respond appropriately to children’s actual behavior.

3.Knowledge of development can help you recognize when departures from normal are truly significant.

4.Studying development can help you understand yourself.

5.Studying development can make you better advocate for the need rights of children.

Factors Influencing Child Development1. Genetic Influences:

– The whole process of normal brain formation and development is under the control of genetic mechanisms.

– However, the expression of the genetic endowment will depend on many environmental constraints.

– Physical characteristics have a clear genetic basis and some of these may directly or indirectly affect behavior.

– General personality dimensions may have a genetic basis, however, individual cognition, behavior and interpersonal relationship develop from actual experiences.

2. Prenatal Influences:

These refer to a wide range of factors which can affect fetal development. They include: the mother’s age, diet, and the state of mental and physical health of the mother as well as such external factors as drugs and environmental toxins.

3. Neonatal Influences:

Complications during the process of delivery can affect the physical and psychological well-being of the baby.

4. Nutrition:

- Malnutrition appears to have its greatest effects during the later stages of pregnancy and the 1st few months of life when a great deal of brain development occurs.

- Poor nutrition is often associated with poor psychosocial environment.

5. Environmental Chemicals:

Some of the chemical products of modern industry and war consequences appear to have a potential harmful effect on the development of the brain mechanisms.

6. Physical handicaps and brain injury:These can have lasting influences on psychological development. These effects can be direct or indirect.

7. Critical Periods: a. Attachment:

* Attachment Theory:- Bowlby describes attachment as a complex two-way process in which the child becomes emotionally linked to members of his or her family, usually the mother, father, and sibs.- It is an adaptive, biological process serving the needs of the child for protection and nurture.

- Although it is genetically determined, the behavior of those around the child will influence the security of the attachment.

- Failure to establish such close relationship would result in different type of difficulties in personality, relationship and emotional disorders.

-* Attachment of family members:

As the child has been born, most of the family members especially the mother will show positive warm feelings towards him. They are likely to show:- strong protective feelings.- a need for proximity to the child.- exclusion of other relationship.- empathic feelings with the child.

- * Attachment of the Child:It is governed by the child’s level of perceptual and other abilities.

- Evidences for attachment include:- Recognition of other family members as special people.- Expression of especially intense feelings towards family members.- Expectation that the family members will meet all needs.- Empathy with the feelings of other family members.

* Attachment interaction between child and family members.

- Mutually satisfactory biological rhythms.

- Bodily interplay.

- Communication interplay.

Factors affecting the development of attachment:1. Factors within the child.

- Developmental maturity of the child.- Temperament.- Presence of sensory defects.

2. Factors within family members, especially parents.- The wish for the child.- Parental personality, physical and mental health.- Behavior of older brothers and sisters.- Quality of family relationships.- Living conditions.

b. Early environment and language.Early environmental stimulation is important for language development.

Child Development

a. The Newborn: - Many important capacities are present at a very early stage. - Great difficulty in studying psychological processes in

babies. - Newborns have considerable learning abilities e.g. buzzer

stimulus. - Perceptual abilities are more than imagined e.g. turning

eyes appropriately. - Social behavior is present in the earliest days of babyhood.

e.g. imitate simple facial gesture. - Making body movement which are coordinated with the

speech pattern of adults who talk to them (non-verbal communication).

b. Motor development. - It starts before birth and is effectively completed

in infancy. - Motor skills are a prerequisite to effective control

of the environment and result from a complex interactions between genetic potential, opportunity and personal attributes such as motivation and organizational skills.

- Tables exist which list the average age at which certain motor skills are obtained.

- The sequence and timing of motor development is largely genetically preprogrammed. However, fine motor development is more sensitive to social influence and opportunities.

c. Perceptual Development:

- Even in very young babies, perception is an active process.

- Compared with adults, children tend to cover less of the object and to fixate on details.

- Selective attention is markedly improved between ages of 5 and 7 years.

- There is strong preference for looking at faces from birth but appears about the 4th or 5th month.

d. Cognitive Development:

- There are 4 key concepts in Piaget’s theory and these help describe the way children process information and deal with the world:

1. The schemata are the inferred cognitive structure or internal processes that the child uses in conceptualizing experiences.

2. Assimilation; describes the way in which the child deals with new information.

3. Accommodation; occurs when an existing schema modified to incorporate new information.

4. Equilibrium is exist when the two processes are in a state of relative balance.

Children tend to pass through 4 broad stages:1. Sensorimotor stage – it lasts for the 1st 2 years &

infant construct sensorimotor schemata based on his or her interactions with the environment object permanence.

2. Pre-operational thought – between 2 & 7 years. The child begins to use an internal representation of his or her external world. conservational problem.

3. Concrete operations – between 7 & 11 years. Children apply logical reasoning to concrete objects and problems.

4. Formal operations – it begins at about 11 years.- full adults thinking ability.- abstract reasoning skills.

e. Language Development - Language comprises the sum of skills necessary

for the process of communication. - It consists of the ability to understand and utilize

communications, verbal and non-verbal and to make such communications to others with meaning.

- The newborn shows a remarkable ability to distinguish among speech sound e.g. his mother’s voice.

- Speech production lags behind the capacity for recognizing and responding to speech.

- By 3 – 4 months early bubbling usually occurs.

• Mother and baby can be observed to be involved in turn-taking conversation.

• At about 12 months the 1st words with meaning usually occur.

• By 18 months the child is usually generating combinations of words.

• By age of 5, the child not only accumulates a large vocabulary but also learns the rules for producing grammatically correct utterances.

Influences on normal language development:- Genetic factors- Physical factors- Social class- Family size- Multiple births- Gender- Quality of stimulation- Bilingual households

f. Social development - During the 1st few months attachment will be

established. - At age of 8 months, infants begin to show a definite

fear of strangers and not long after this, they will show fear of separation from their caretakers.

- During the preschool years, new behaviors & attitudes develop as children increasingly interact with their social environment as part of a process called socialization.

- One area of behavior during this phase is the gender roles & is mediated through identification.

- Moral constraints on behavior is learned in part through identification with parents.

g. Adolescence.

-The period between the end of childhood and beginning of adulthood (12-20 ).

-It is a time of great biological, psychological and social changes.

-Puberty is established with characteristic Physical changes.

-It is the time for establishing personal identity.

Adolescence cont.

-Cognitive and physical changes will give rise to self-awareness.

-Peer influence is considerably increased. -Fighting authority control is an important issue.

-Oversensitivity to criticism, moodiness and easily provocation are common.

-By the end, they will establish personal identity, independence and workable relationship with peers.