OUTLINE OF CHILD
DEVELOPMENT
Dr. Fatima Al-Haidar
Professor & Consultant Child & Adolescent
Psychiatrist
Department 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 Development
1. 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 wellbeing 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.
2.
Factors within the child.
- Developmental maturity of the child.
- Temperament.
- Presence of sensory defects.
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.
2.
3.
4.
Sensorimotor stage – it lasts for the 1st 2 years &
infant construct sensorimotor schemata based on his
or her interactions with the environment  object
permanence.
Pre-operational thought – between 2 & 7 years. The
child begins to use an internal representation of his or
her external world.  conservational problem.
Concrete operations – between 7 & 11 years.
Children apply logical reasoning to concrete objects
and problems.
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 turntaking 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.
-
-
-
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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.