(2) From age 1 to before the onset of puberty, growth occurs in a more linear and steadier annual increment.
B. Infants� increases in weight are more dramatic then their early growth in length.
2. Individual Differences
A. Growth differentials depend on heredity, nutrition and eating habits, and total health care.
B. Cultural and ethnical differences also influence growth.
3. Body Proportions
A. Not all parts of the body grow at the same rate.
--Cephalocaudal principle: growth proceeds downward, first from the head, then to the trunk region, and last to the feet.
--Proximodistal principle: growth proceeds from the center of the body outward to the extremities.
4. Organ Systems
A. Three organ systems do not follow the general pattern of growth of the rest of the body and organs.
(1) Lymphoid system: grows fairly constantly and rapidly during childhood, so that at puberty the adolescent has almost two times the lymphoid issue of the adult.
(2) Reproductive system: shows little growth until puberty.
(3) Central nervous system: most of the growth of this system occurs during the early yrs of life.
5. Brain Growth and Nerve Maturation
--The brain not only grows in size, but complex nerve pathways and connections among nerve cells develop so that the central nervous system is able to perform more complex functions.
A. Myelinization: the process by which neurons become coated with myelin, a fatty insulating substance, which helps to transmit nerve impulses faster and more efficiently.
--The increase in myelinization of individual neurons is a very important change.
--This process parallels the maturation of the nervous system.
--At birth, the neonate�s senses are in fairly good working order because the pathways between the brain and sense organs are partly myelinated.
--Children become capable of performing more complex motor activities when the neural pathways between the brain and skeletal muscles myelinate.
--During the first few yrs of life, the myelinization process takes place rapidly. Yet the some area of the brain is not completely myelinated until the late teens or early adulthood.
* Multiple sclerosis: results when the myelin sheaths begin to disintegrate. If this condition worsen the person could lose muscular control and may becomes paralyzed or dies.
B. Cerebral Cortex: the largest structure of the forebrain.
--Controlling intellectual, sensory, and motor functions.
--Largest in proportion to total body weight and is more highly developed in human.
--Accounts for 70% of the neurons in the central nervous system.
--Divided into two hemispheres:
(1) Left hemisphere: controls the right side of the body.
--Superior in logic, math, language, writing, and judging time.
(2) Right hemisphere: controls the left side of the body.
--Superior in music drama, fantasy, intuition, and art.
* Lateralization: the preference for using once side of the body more then the other in performing special tasks.
--May be biologically programmed from birth.
--Occurs throughout childhood, and get stronger over time, the process is not complete until puberty.
C. Cortical Functions
--Development of cortical functions is the result of brain and nervous system maturation combined with experience and practice.
--Neurons grow new dendrite branches and myelin sheaths when they are stimulated.
--Different regions of the cortex mature at different rates.
(1) Motor area: first to mature.
(2) Sensory area: second to mature.
(3) Association area: last to mature.
--Higher functions of thinking, planning, and problem solving, performed by the frontal lobe takes yrs to develop.
--Two areas of the cortex are related to language:
(1) Broca�s area: involved in using language.
(2) Wernicke�s area: involved in understanding language.
--Aphasia, impaired ability to use language will result when the Wernicke�s area is damaged.
6. Teeth Eruption Times
--The timing of teeth eruption is influence by both heredity and nutrition.
--Hypothyroidism: delays teeth eruption.
--Deciduous teeth, baby teeth, eruption is similar in both sexes.
--Permanent teeth tend to appear earlier in girls.
--Lost of teeth:
(1) Incisors: the first baby teeth to be lost.
(2) Molars: second baby teeth to be lost.
(3) Canines: last baby teeth to be lost.
--Bicuspids: permanent teeth that take the place of the baby molars.
II. Motor Development
1. Cross-Motor Skills and Locomotion During Infancy
--Children�s motor development is depended mainly on overall physical maturation, especially on skeletal and neuromuscular development.
--Independent locomotion is a dramatic event where infants learn new motor skills.
--Most infants who had formerly belly-crawled are more proficient crawling on hands and knees than infants who skip this step.
2. Fine-Motor Skills During Infancy
--Fine-motor sills involve the smaller muscles of the body used in reaching, grasping, manipulating, pincering, clapping, turning, opening, twisting, pulling, or scribbling.
3. Cross-Motor Skills of Preschool Children
--Preschool children (age 2 to 5) make important advances in motor development.
--They can skip smoothly, start, turn, and stop effectively in playing games.
4. Fine-Motor Skills of Preschool Children
--Fine-motor skills involve a high degree of small-muscle and eye-hand coordination.
--They can draw simple figures, cut on a line with scissors and copy squares.
5. Handedness
*Handedness: preference for using one hand rather than another when performing motor functions.
--90 to 93% of the population will develop a preference for the right hand, left hemisphere dominated.
--Handedness develops slowly in children and is not always consistent in the early years.
--Left-handed people are right hemisphere dominated; they suffer more from environmental risk.
6. Changes During the School years
--Muscles increase in size and coordination continues to improve, so most children can run, hop, skip, and jump with ease.
--One important factor in motor skills is reaction time, which depends partly on brain maturation.
--Girls are more physically mature than same-age boys.
--Social expectations also play a role in the activity levels of children.
--Older children are generally less active then younger ones, but older children have advantage over younger children in sport activities because of reaction time. Adults are even quicker.
7. Physical Fitness
--Today�s children are less fit than children in the 1960s because:
(1)Watch too much television.
III. Physical handicapped Children
There are four categories:
(1) Speech disorders.
(2) Hearing impairments.
(3) Visual impairments
(4) Various types of skeletal, orthopedic, or motor skills handicaps.
1.Speech-Handicapped Children
--It is the most common of all physical handicaps in children, which maybe resulted from congenital malformations: cleft palate, or arise as a consequence of hearing, neurological, or developmental problems.
A. Types of disorders among speech-handicapped children:
(1) Infantile autism: language disorder with impaired understanding as well as abnormal social relationships, rituals and compulsive activities, and uneven intellectual development. (Appear first two yrs of life)
(2) Developmental expressive language disorder: children with this disorder have difficulties expressing themselves.
(3) Developmental articulation disorder: children with this disorder have trouble making themselves understood.
2. Hearing-Handicapped Children
--Hearing problems in children may not be discovered until the child is 1 or 2 yrs old.
A. A speech reception threshold evaluates children response to tones and speech by having children point to body parts or identify common objects in response to speech of controlled intensity.
B. Tools to correct or aid the hearing impaired children
(1) Hearing aids: it can be given to children as young as 6 months.
(2) Surgical remedies: possible if children suffer chronic and irremedial loss of hearing.
(3) Sign language: when learned, allows the child to communicate with others.
C. Causes of hearing lost
(1) Rubella is the common cause of congenital hearing lost, which is present from birth.
(2) Anoxia: lack of oxygen.
(3) Bleeding into the inner ear due to birth trauma.
(4) Ototoxic drugs: drugs for ear infections taken by the mother.
(5)Hereditary conditions
3.Visually Handicapped Children
--Blindness in children may be congenital or may develop gradually from a wide range of causes.
--Normal babies prefer to look at human faces, and in turns, their caregivers rely in the babies� expressions for feedbacks.
--When infants are visually handicapped, they cannot express themselves properly. This lack of responsiveness can be emotionally upsetting for the caregivers.
--These babies maybe not develop smile languages, have few facial expressions, and use a lot of hand signals.
--Visual impaired infants rely heavily on their mothers for communication about the environment.
--They also lag behind in mobility and locomotion when compared with normal children.
A. Vision correction
(1) Corrective lenses: can be prescribed only if the child is not totally blind.
(2) Glasses: can correct the common far and near sightedness.
4. Children with Skeletal, Orthopedic, or Motor-Skills Handicaps
--These types of disability range from almost complete disability to minor orthopedic or motor-skills dysfunctions.
A. Different types of disabilities:
(1) Quadraplegic: paralysis of all four limbs.
(2) Spinal bifida: a form of handicaps that is congenital.
(3) Ducheme muscular dystrophy: it�s hereditary, but not evident in children until later in childhood.
(4) MD: Boys appear to have the symptoms from 3 to 7 yrs old, are confined in wheelchairs by age 10, and most die by age 20.
5. Adjustments
--Handicapped children maybe subject to judgments from others and cruel remarks, but majority of them lead productive lives.
6. Family Coping
--Coping includes any attempt to manage stress regardless of how well it works.
A. There are two basic type of coping:
(1) Problem-focused coping: active problem solving and seeking social support as well as aggressive interpersonal effects to alter the situation.
(2) Emotion-focused forms: detaching from the situation, controlling one�s feelings, whishing the problem would go away, and blaming one�s self for the situation.
7.Education
--Handicapped children should attend regular school as stated in the federal law, to avoid stigmatizing them.
--In the case of blind and deaf children, going to special schools will be more beneficial for them because they will get special attentions.
IV. Perceptual Development
1. Depth Perception
--It is defined as being able to see things in 3 dimensions, which distinguishes things that are closer from those that are far away.
--This ability develops early in children, when infants begin to crawl.
2. Perception of Form and Motion
--Children under 4 months of age perceive parts of figures rather than whole representations.
--By 4 months of age, they see whole figures rather than parts.
--By 3 to 12 months, children notice figures that are familiar enough to be recognized, but different enough to be novel.
A. Cross-modal perception: Infants have the ability to recognize the visual equivalent of objects that previously have only been touched.
--The speed at which infants process visual information varies among individuals.
B. Types of lookers:
(1) Long-lookers: Infants that focus on the stimuli for long period of time.
(2)Short-lookers: Infants that focus their attention for short intervals. They are more superior at perceptual-cognitive tasks because of their speed and efficiency at stimulus-interpretation processing.
3. Perception of Human Face
--Infants prefer to look at human faces rather than at inert objects.
--By one month of age=>infants can discriminate the aces of their mothers from that of strangers.
--By 3 months=>recognize their mothers age in photographs.
--By 7 months=>infants can discriminated between fearful and happy facial expressions.
4. Auditory Perception
--It depends on 4 factors:
(1) Auditory acuity: ability to detect sound of minimum loudness.
(2) The ability to detect sound of different frequencies.
(3) Sound localization: the ability to detect the direction from which sound is coming.
(4) Auditory temporal acuity: the ability to detect silent gaps between words.
A. Sound localization
--It is possible due to the location of the ear: being placed on opposite sides of the head.
--Sounds from one side arrive sooner and with a higher sound level than from the other side.
--Sound localization improves during the first year after birth.
B. Gap Detection
--The ability to understand human speech depends partly on the ability to detect the gaps between words.
*Gap threshold: the min detectable gap is considerably worse for 3 to 6 month old then for adults.
V. Nutrition
1.Breast-Feeding vs. Bottle-Feeding
A. Advantages
--Breast-feeding provides the best food for infants because it is rich in fats, calories, proteins, vitamins, mineral and amino acids.
--Breast-feed babies gain weight more rapidly, and they seems to be healthier due to the antibodies from their mothers� milk.
--Breast-feeding benefit the mother too by helping to shrink the uterus, and strengthen the bond between mother and infant.
--Mothers that breast-feed should take in extra calcium.
B. Disadvantages
--Mothers� physical freedom is confined.
--Drugs that are taken by the mother can past on to the infant through the milk.
2. Dietary Requirements
--Four basic food provide growing children with the nutrient they need:
(1) Milk
(2) Dairy products
(3) Meat
(4) Fruits and vegetables, and bread and Creoles
A. Breakfast
--Children who eat breakfast before going to school perform better.
3.Obesity
*Obesity: body weight that is 20% over what is shown in standard height-weight tables.
A. Factors that influence obesity:
(1) Heredity: if parents are obese, then their eating habits will be passed down to their kids. Their kids will also have larger fat cell.
(2) Eating Habits: obese children eat foods that are high in fat but low in nutrients.
(3) Activity level: obese children seem to exercise less, which reduces metabolism.
(4) Psychological factors: children sometimes eat to relieve tension or to gather security.
B. Parents participation
--Parents can help their obese children by having less junk food in the house, and enrolling their children in physical activities.
4. Malnutrition
--It is resulted from inadequate intake of all nutrients: proteins, calories, vitamins, and minerals.
A. Types of malnutrition
(1) Inanition: starvation or marasmus, result from children not getting sufficient levels of all nutrients.
--Characteristics are gross weight loss, growth retardation, and wasting of subcutaneous fat and muscle.
(2) Emaciation: malnutrition in which the child�s bones protrude, skin becomes thin, dry, inelastic, and cold.
(3) Kwashiorkor: results from children that lacks protein intake.
--It is characterized by generalized edema, flaky dermatosis, thinning and decoloration of the hair, enlarged liver=>enlarged belly.
5. What is Safe to Eat?
--3 yrs old children do not know what is save to eat, they cannot distinguish between nondeceptive food objects or nondeceptive nonfood items.
VI. Sleep
1. Needs
--When infants are made comfortable, get enough food to eat, and have plenty of fresh air, then most will get the amount of sleep they need.
--Two years old on the other hand will not because events happening will keep them excited and not wanting to sleep.
*Separation anxiety: children try to get out of bed because they are separated from the caregiver that they are attached to.
--When children are out of bed, parents should not allow them to get their way by putting them back into bed.
A. Children�s sleeping hours
(1) 2 yrs old need 12 hrs, plus 1 to 2 hrs of naptime.
(2) 6 to 9 yrs old need 11 hrs of sleep.
(3) 10 to 12 yrs old need 10 hrs.
2. Habits
--Things to do to develop regular sleeping habits for children.
(1) Put children to bed at the same time every night.
(2) Develop a relaxed bedtime routine
(3) Avoid too much stimulation before bedtime.
(4) Keep bedtime relax and happy.
(5) Avoid sending children to bed as a means of discipline.
(6) Avoid frightening stores or TV programs because nightmares will occur.
VII. Health Care
1. Health Supervision of the Well Child
A. Supervision by medical personnel that include:
(1) Instruction of parents in child rearing, health maintenance, accident prevention, and nutrition.
(2) Routine immunizations.
(3) Early detection of disease through interview and examination.
(4) Early treatment of disease.
2. Health Education
--Children should be taught at an early age to be responsible for their own health.
VIII. Sexual Development
1. Infancy
--Sexual responses are found in both male and female infants, and it usually takes place during feeding.
--Since infants are not aware of their sexual response, they cannot be considered sexually awakened.
2. Early Childhood
--Preschool children are curious about everything, including their own bodies, which they explore.
3. Middle Childhood
--Society becomes less accepting of children�s sexually interest during this stage of childhood, yet sexual experiment continues.
--Children are fascinated with sex and with facts concerning sexual development, human reproduction, and sexual intercourse.
--This is the ideal time to have basic sex talk with your children.
4. Parents as Sex Educators
--When parents and children communicate openly, children are more likely to make personal decisions about sexual behavior that reflect parental values and morals.
5. Goals of Sex Education
--Sex education help children to understand the process of the physical development of their own bodies and to prepare for the bodily changes at puberty.
--It also help children to accept their own sexuality including their understand of their gender and their coming to terms with the prescribed sex roles in the society.
IX. Sexual Abuse of Children
1. Patterns of Activity
--Molestation is most likely to take place in the child�s own home or in the molester�s.
--Most molesters know the child; only small percentages are strangers to the child.
--Children may not say anything to their parents due to threats made by the molester, feeling of guilt, and fear of getting into trouble.
2. Effects
--Victims experience feelings of powerlessness, anger, depression, and anxiety.
--They also seem to have low self-esteem by blaming themselves, and feeling guilty and shameful.
--Depression is the most common symptom among sexual abuse survivors.
--Approximately 20% of females and from 5% to 10% of males are sexually abused in childhood or adolescence.