emotional and cognitive development of infants

1. Prepared by : Daisy Jane Aniasco

2. • Children grow and change in many ways during their primary school years. As well as
growing physically, children develop socially, emotionally and cognitively.
• Children’s responses to the different feelings they experience every day have a major impact
on their choices, their behaviour, and on how well they cope and enjoy life.
• Emotional development involves learning what feelings and emotions are, understanding
how and why they happen, recognizing one’s own feelings and those of others, and
developing effective ways of managing them. As children grow and are exposed to different
situations their emotional lives also become more complex. Developing skills for managing a
range of emotions is therefore very important for their emotional wellbeing. Parents and
carers have an important role to play in supporting children’s emotional development.
They do this through responding effectively to children’s emotions, through providing
examples of how they manage feelings, and through talking with children about feelings and
how to manage them. In similar ways, school staff can provide important support
for children’s emotional development.

3. Infants
• can differentiate between faces and other objects
• respond to parents' smiles and voices
• begin to develop a social smile

4. • demonstrate increased social awareness
• laugh out loud at the sight of a funny face

5. • Enjoys playing with other people and may cry when play stops
• Recognize their primary caregiver

6. • show displeasure when an object is taken away from them

7. • Can differentiate between family members (parents and siblings)
and strangers
• Draw back from unfamiliar people

8. • Begin to show obvious fear of strangers
• They may cry when taken from their parents

9. Month 8
• Begin having stranger anxiety

10. • Aware of changes in tone of voice
• Show various moods such as happy, sad,
and angry
• Self-esteem begins to develop
• May be more sensitive to the presence of
other children
• Tries to gain approval and avoid
disapproval

11. • Have overcome their fear of strangers
• Alert and responsive
• Sometimes be cooperative, sometimes uncooperative
• Start developing a sense of humor
• Cling to one parent or both

12. • Cognitive development is the construction of thought processes,
including remembering, problem solving, and decision-making, from
childhood through adolescence to adulthood.
• Beginning at birth the construction of thought processes, such as
memory, problem solving, exploration of objects etc, is an important
part of an infant’s cognitive development. An infant needs to interact
with their environment in order to learn about it. By using their senses,
infants educate themselves about the world around them

13. • During this stage infants begin to organize their world through repeated
interactions in their environment. Even though an infant doesn't have
words to describe concepts such as soft, small, hard or big, they are
already beginning to understand these concepts by using their senses.
An infant's memory is also central to cognitive development. They can
only remember objects for only a few minutes. However, by the end of
this stage their ability to remember objects extends to a week or two.
• an infant mainly uses simple reflex activity
• They tend to enjoy people and faces more than they do objects
• Explores objects by grasping
• Appear to be unaware of what actions they can cause

14. From here on, infants will enjoy a stimulating environment which will
enable them to develop skills and concepts faster. Activities and toys
will become a focal point as infants begin to engage and interact with
purpose.
• Can grasp the idea their actions can initiate pleasurable sensations
• Still unaware of the permanence of objects by the end of this stage

15. • Discover object permanence
• Ready for peek-a-boo
• Are capable of reproducing interesting events and producing new
events