PHYSICAL AND COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT IN THE PRESCHOOL YEARS

1. Chapter 7 PHYSICAL AND COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT IN THE PRESCHOOL YEARS

2. Learning Objectives

3. Physical Growth Growing Body • By age 2, 25 to 30 pounds and close to 36 inches tall • By 6 years old, about 46 pounds and 46 inches tall

4. Individual Differences in Height and Weight • Averages mask great individual differences in height and weight • Gender differences • National and global economic differences

5. Changes in Body Shape and Structure • Bodies vary in height, weight, and shape • Toddler fat burns off • Internal physical changes occur

6. Internal changes ERROR • Book says the Eustachian tube “which carries sound from the exterior part of the ear to the inner part” changes position • Under normal circumstances, the human Eustachian tube is closed. • SO book’s statement is idiotic as well as wrong. • Two basic functions: • Equalizing pressure between middle ear & atmosphere. • Also drains mucus from the middle ear.

7. More Changes • Muscles bigger and stronger • Bones less flexible and stronger • Characteristics of face change • Lose “baby fat” • Proportions change

8. Nutrition: Eating the Right Foods Slower growth = less caloric requirements • Children can maintain appropriate intake of food, if provided with nutritious meals • Inappropriate encouragement to increase food intake beyond an appropriate level may cause obesity • Inappropriate dietary restrictions can be harmful • Low cholesterol => creates neural growth issues • Low salt => correct balance of body fluids, acid-based balance, neural conduction • Low protein => damage to muscles, brain, organs • Low sugars => malaise, muscle weakness

9. Avoiding a Butter Battle Good nutrition w/o adversarial situations occurs by: • Providing a variety of foods, low in fat, and high in nutritional and iron content and Vitamin D • Allowing development of natural preferences • Exposing children to a wide variety of foods • In cold climates fats provide a very large % of energy used to maintain core body temperatures.

10. Health and Illness • Majority of US preschoolers are reasonably healthy • 7 to 10 colds and other minor respiratory illnesses in each of years from age three to five • Depends on family size & exposure to other kids • Strongly relate to vitamin D levels. • Minor illness permits children to understand body better, learn coping skills, and develop empathy for others who are sick • Rationalization for large group exposure • But is require to ‘train’ immune system

11. Increasing number of children being treated with drugs for emotional disorders such as depression Use of drugs such as antidepressants and stimulants has grown significantly Pill-Popping Preschoolers? No SSRI has been tested or approved for kids. Antidepressants modify brain structure in kids!

12. Injury During the Preschool Years • Accidents are greatest risk of death • Danger of injuries • “High levels” of physical activity • Curiosity • Lack of judgment • Individual differences • Gender • Cultural • Socioeconomic Children in the United States have a 1 in 3 chance every year of receiving an injury that requires medical attention. 2,400 children die every day because of injury and violence (That’s 876,000 per year – REALLY?!

13. The statistics are just awful… • One study found that the most common accidental causes of injury and death among preschool-aged children were drowning, falls, impact and bites. • Or • Childhood Unintentional Injuries: Factors Predicting Injury Risk jpepsy.oxfordjournals.org/content/29/4/2734Motor-vehicle crashes, drowning, fires, and burns were the leading causes of death of preschool children (National Safety Council, 2001). • Your tax dollars at work… Presumably the ‘burns’ were not caused by ‘fires’

14. Injury by location • National statistics confuse “rural” and “farm” • Such comingling makes it appear that • Farm kids are undernourished • Farm kids have a higher rate of accidental death • Farm kids have poorer physical health • Rural stats dominated by areas we would think of as • Small towns • Non-farmers • High population density like SE and NE states • “Unincorporated” would be a better term for their rural • My neighborhood has ~ 2 humans per section

15. Range of Preschool Dangers Misleading Chart NOT equal %s

16. Silent Danger: Lead Poisoning • Some 14 million children are at risk for lead poisoning (Centers for Disease Control) • U.S. DHHS calls lead poisoning most hazardous health threat to children under the age of 6 • Nearly 100% of risk is from children with poor nutrition consuming lead based paint (cribbing). • Nearly 100% is aging inner city housing but… • Some industrial exposure • Some residual fuel additive exposure

17. True or False? Children in poverty are more susceptible lead poisoning Yes Poor children are particularly susceptible to lead poisoning, and the results of poisoning tend to be worse for them than for children from more affluent families. Because poor nutrition: • Cause them to ingest lead containing products (sweet) • Lack of vitamins & nutrients means no bio-competition Data skewed so it appears minorities more affected Even tiny amounts of lead can permanently harm children. Just give kids free vitamins

18. High levels of lead are linked to higher levels of antisocial behavior in school age children Aggression Delinquency Effects of Lead Poisoning Does this explain Chicago? No one knows because government will not fund research.

19. Growing Brain Grows at faster rate than any other part of the body • Increase in interconnections among cells and myelin • Corpus callosum isa bundle of nerve fibers that connect the two hemispheres of the brain • Corpus callosum becomes thicker • 800 million individual fibers • Two year-old’s brain ~75% the size & weight of adult brain. • Five year-old’sbrain 90% average adult brain weight. • Five year-old's total body weight 30% average adult weight

20. Growing Brain • Lateralization is the process in which certain functions are located more in one hemisphere than the other. • Lateralization increases during this period

21. Left Hand, Right Hand: Looking into the Brain • This set of PET brain scans illustrates that activity in the right or left hemisphere of the brain differs according to the task in which a person is engaged.

22. Ya gotta hand it to him…or her! Gender-related lateralization differences • Boys • Greater lateralization of language in left hemisphere • Higher autism incidence (Baron-Cohen's theory) OR • gender predisposition to functioning differences • Girls • Language is more evenly divided between two hemispheres OR • Verbal abilities emerge earlier in girls because girls receive greater encouragement for verbal skills than boys

23. Brain Growth and Cognitive Development Growth spurts • Myelin increases • Cerebellum and cerebral cortex connection growth

24. Reticular Formation & Hippocampus • Attention • Reticular Formation attention & concentration • Myelination completed about age 5 • May be associated growing attention spans • Memory • improvement may also be associated with myelination • myelination completed in hippocampus, by age 5-6

25. Cerebellum & Cerebral Cortex • Cerebellum controls balance and movement • Cerebral cortex responsible for sophisticated information processing • By 5 years: • Significant growth in nerves connecting them together • Growth related to significant advances in motor skills as well as to advances in cognitive processing

26. So…does brain development produce cognitive advances or do cognitive accomplishments fuel brain development?

27. Good Question • Direction of causality not known. • Gee, could it be interactive?

28. Significant Gross Motor Skills in Early Childhood By age 3 children can jump, hop on one foot, skip, and run

29. Potty Wars: When-and How-Should Children Be Toilet Trained? Few child-care issues raise so much concern among parents as toilet training • Brazelton • Suggests flexible approach • Advocates waiting until child shows signs of readiness • Rosemond • Suggests rigid approach • Advocates for early and quick training

30. American Academy of PediatricsCurrent Guidelines • Dry at least 2 hours during day or after nap • Regular, predictable bowel movements • Indications that bowel movement or urination is about to occur • Ability to follow simple directions • Ability to get to bathroom and undress on time • Discomfort with soiled diapers • Asking to use toilet • Desire to wear underwear • Begin only when children are ready

31. Normal Parent Guidance • Impossible for child to be potty trained until nerves are myelination • Is possible for parent to be trained • Myelination time varies • Some kids are interested - some are not • Boys often enjoy being dirty girls usually don’t • Your mileage will vary – a lot! Oh, you CAN drive your kid nuts or your kid can drive you nuts. Most kids figure it out. So chill…

32. Fine Motor Skills At the same time that gross motor skills are developing, children are progressing in their ability to use fine motor skills • Involve more delicate, smaller body movements • Require much practice • Show clear developmental pattern • Strongly affected by Fetal Alcohol Syndrome

33. Handedness How do preschoolers decide which hand to use? • Early preference for some young infants • Preference shown by many by end of preschool years • No scientific basis of myths that suggest there is something with being left-handed • (I was taught left handedness was caused by minimal brain damage probably at birth – really!) • Sinister – evil, untrustworthy, even criminal. • Lots of lefty kids were emotionally and physically harmed

34. Handedness • 90% of western population right handed • More boys left-handed • Brains of left-handed people are shaped differently than those of right-handed people. • Right-handers usually have asymmetric brains; their left cerebral hemispheres tend to be larger than their right hemispheres. • Broca's and Wernicke's areas, two regions involved with language, are likely to be much larger in the left hemisphere than in the right. • left-handers generally have more symmetrical brains, with similarly sized language centers in each hemisphere.

35. Becoming an Informed Consumer of Development

36. Vaccination Schedule Let's take a quick look at Table 7-1 for current vaccination schedule recommendations

37. Vaccination Schedule

38. INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT

39. PIAGET- A Quick Review Knowledge is product of direct motor behavior • All children pass through series of stages • Universal • Fixed order • Preoperational Stage lasts from age of two years until around seven years

40. What does Piaget tell us? • Quantity and quality of knowledge changes • Focus on change in children's understanding

41. Preoperational Thinking Preoperational Stage 2-7 • Characterized by symbolic thinking • mental reasoning and use of concepts increase • Still not capable of operations • organized, formal, logical mental processes that characterize school age children. • Use of operations appear at end of stage

42. Relationship Between Language and Thought Symbolic function: • Ability to use symbols, words, or object to represent something that is not physically present Language allows preschoolers to: • Represent actions symbolically • Think beyond present to future • Consider several possibilities at same time

43. Centration: What You See Is What You Think Centration The process of concentrating on one aspect of a stimuli & ignoring others • Is key element and limitation of preschool thinking • Involves inability to consider all available information • Dominated by superficial, obvious elements within sight • Clearly preschoolers should not be witnesses in court

44. Which Row Contains More Buttons? When preschoolers are shown these two rows and asked which row has more buttons, they usually respond that the lower row of buttons contains more because it looks longer. They answer in this way even though they know quite well that 10 is greater than 8. Do you think preschoolers can be taught to answer correctly?

45. Common Tests of Children's Understanding of the Principle of Conservation Why is a sense of conservation important? Some adults have problems About half or so adults do this well Few adults do this really well

46. Incomplete Understanding of Transformation Preoperational children • Unable to envision successive transformations • Ignore middle steps Figure 7-10 The Falling Pencil Children in Piaget's preoperational stage do not understand that as a pencil falls from the upright to the horizontal position it moves through a series of intermediary steps. Instead, they think that there are no intermediate steps in the change from the upright to horizontal position. My First Grade teacher Didn’t understand this.

47. Transformation • The process in which one state is changed into another. • Adults know that if a pencil that is held upright is allowed to fall down, it passes through a series of successive stages until it reaches its final, horizontal resting spot. • In contrast, children in the preoperational period are unable to envision or recall the successive transformations that the pencil followed in moving from the upright to the horizontal position. If asked to reproduce the sequence in a drawing, they draw the pencil upright and lying down, with nothing in between. Basically, they ignore the intermediate steps.

48. Egocentrism • Preschoolers do not understand that others have different perspectives from their own • Egocentric thought takes two forms • Lack of awareness that others see things from a different physical perspective • Failure to realize that others may hold thoughts, feelings, and points of view that differ from theirs Some adults are stuck in the Preoperational Stage. This is how you identify them

49. Egocentrism Consequences • Egocentrism lies at heart of several types of behavior during the preoperational period. • Preschoolers may talk to themselves, even in the presence of others, and at times they simply ignore what others are telling them. • Such behavior illustrates the egocentric nature of preoperational children's thinking: the lack of awareness that their behavior acts as a trigger to others’ reactions and responses. • Consequently, a considerable amount of preschooler verbal behavior has no social motivation but is meant for the preschoolers’ own consumption.

50. Emergence of Intuitive Thought • use of primitive reasoning and avid acquisition of world knowledge • Curiosity blossoms and answers to wide variety of questions sought • Often act as authorities on particular topics feeling certain that they have the correct—and final—word on an issue. • Leads preschoolers to believe that they know answers to all kinds of questions, but there is little or no logical basis for this confidence