1. Characteristics of Infancy &
Toddlerhood: (From 2 weeks to 2
years)
i) Babyhood is the true foundation age. At this time, many behavior patterns, attitudes and emotional
expressions are established. It is a critical period in setting the pattern for personal and emotional
adjustments.
ii) Babies grow rapidly both physically and psychologically. Changes are rapid in appearance (height
and weight) and capacities. The limbs develop in better proportion to the large head. Intellectual
growth and change are parallel to physical growth and change.
iii) Ability grows to recognize and respond to people and objects in the environment. The baby is
able to understand many things and communicate its needs and wants.
2. iv) The babyhood is an age of decreasing dependency. The baby begins to do things to
itself. With decrease of dependency, a rebellion against being treated as baby. A protest
takes protest comes in the form of angry outbursts and crying when independence is denied.
v) It is an age of high individuality which can be realized in appearance and in patterns of
behavior.
vi) Babyhood is the beginning of Creativity, sex role and socialization for adjustment in
future life. vii) Babyhood is a hazardous period. The physical hazards are illness, accidents,
disabilities and death. Psychological hazards are disinterests and negative attitudes
3. Adjustments
• Temperature changes- There is a constant temperature of 100 degree Fahrenheit in the
uterine sac, while temperatures in the hospital or home may vary from 60-70 degree
Fahrenheit.
• Breathing- When the umbilical cord is cut, infants must began to breathe on their own.
• Sucking and swallowing- The infant must now get their nourishment by sucking and
swallowing, instead of receiving it through the umbilical cord. These reflexes are
imperfectly developed at birth, and the infant often gets less nourishment than is needed
and thus lose weight.
• Elimination- The infant’s organs of elimination begin to work soon after birth; formerly,
waste products were eliminated through the umbilical cord.
4. Learning Capacities
• In the very beginning, it may seem that our baby does nothing but eat, sleep,
cry. But our infant is learning too. He/She can see and hear what is
happening around them and can communicate their needs and interests to
others. Parents can help their babies learn by playing with them.
• Infants have the ability to see faces and objects of different shapes, sizes,
and colors. They can tell the difference between the voices of their parents
and others.
5. Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive
Development
• Piaget argued that children do not just passively learn but also actively try to make
sense of their worlds. He argued that, as they learn and mature, children
develop schemas — patterns of knowledge in long-term memory — that help
them remember, organize, and respond to information.
• When children employ assimilation, they use already developed schemas to
understand new information.
• Accommodation, on the other hand, involves learning new information and thus
changing the schema.
6.
7. Information Processing
• The information processing theory is an approach to cognitive processes (e.g. Memory,
language, attention) which analyses the sequence that information passes through for
processing
• The Information Processing model is another way of examining and understanding how children
develop cognitively. This model, developed in the 1960's and 1970's, conceptualizes children's
mental processes through the metaphor of a computer processing, encoding, storing, and
decoding data.
• By ages 2 to 5 years, most children have developed the skills to focus attention for extended
periods, recognize previously encountered information, recall old information, and reconstruct it
in the present.
8. Individual differences in Early Mental
Development
• Formation and Growth of the Brain
• Plasticity of the Brain- Brain plasticity, also known as neuroplasticity , is a
term that refers to the brain's ability to change and adapt as a result of
experience.
• Functional Brain Development- Traditionally, researchers believed that
the emergence of changes in sensory, motor, cognitive, and language
functioning are a result of the maturation of specific regions or pathways in
the brain
10. Language development
• Language development refers to the way your child communicates, starting with the first sounds your
baby makes right up to using sentences.
• From the time your child is born, they are communicating with you, even if they don’t have any words.
• Language for infants is crying, cooing and gurgling, whereas six-year-olds can talk nonstop, using more
complex language and adding emotional texture to their words to relay happiness, sadness or anger.
• Children often understand more language than they are able to use themselves. Understanding is called
receptive language development. When a child begins to use sounds, words and then sentences to
express meaning, this is called expressive language.
• The first year is filled with babbling, cooing and sing-songy noises as babies learn to use their vocal
cords. Around nine months, the babbling may turn into two syllable sounds, such as gaga, mama or
dada.
11. Developmental tasks
• A developmental task is a skill that needs to be acquired at a particular stage
in life in order for development to continue.
• The first major developmental tasks begin in infancy and early childhood.
• Basic tasks like walking, eating solids and being toilet trained are among
the first physical milestones.
• Learning to talk and bonding with people are some of the first motor,
cognitive and social tasks.
12.
13. Emotional Development in Infants
• The emotional development can be explained based on the infant's age growth. Here are some stages
that show how infants normally develop emotionally:
1. The First 3 Months
• See objects clearly, within a distance of 13 inches
• Feel comforted by someone familiar
• Have positive responses to touch
• Become quiet when we pick them up
• Start listening to voices
• Begin smiling and responding to social stimulation
14. 2. Month 3 to 6
• Start making warm smiles and laughter
• Recognize familiar faces
• Seek comfort and cry when uncomfortable
• Express excitement by waving their arms and legs
• Be able to sense the difference between people based on how they look, feel, or sound
like
• Smile when looking at herself in a mirror
• Enjoy seeing other babies
• Recognize their name
• Start laughing aloud
15. 3. Months 6-9
• Be able to express different emotions
• Play peek-a-boo and other games
• Respond when we talk or make gestures to them
• Start understanding your emotions (an angry voice, for example, can make
them frown)
• Show displeasure when they loses a toy
• Be comfortable around familiar persons, but anxious about strangers
• Start sucking their thumb or holding a toy or a blanket to comfort themself
16. 4. Months 10-12
• Begin having separation anxiety
• Start to develop self-esteem
• Respond to positive affirmation by clapping
• Become more aware of heights
• Show various moods such as happy, sad, and angry
• Try to gain our approval and avoid our disapproval
• Display temper tantrums
• Sometimes be cooperative, sometimes uncooperative
• Start developing a sense of humor
• Cling to one parent or both
17. Temperament and Development
• Easy Child (40%) who is able to quickly adapt to routine and new
situations, remains calm, is easy to soothe, and usually is in a positive
mood.
• Difficult Child (10%) who reacts negatively to new situations, has trouble
adapting to routine, is usually negative in mood, and cries frequently.
• Slow-to-Warm-Up Child (15%) has a low activity level, adjusts slowly to
new situations and is often negative in mood.
18. Development of Attachment
• In the 1960's, Mary Ainsworth, one of Bowlby's colleagues, conducted seminal longitudinal studies
of 26 pairs of mothers and babies in their natural setting.
• Trained observers visited the subjects in their homes, in Baltimore, Maryland, for four hours at a
time, every three weeks during the first year, making notes on the infants' behaviors and mothers'
sensitivity in responding to the infants.
• At the time these babies were approaching their first birthday, Ainsworth and her colleague,
Barbara Wittig, developed the "Strange Situation," a semi-standardized laboratory procedure for
observing babies' responses to being in a new place, meeting an adult female stranger, being
separated from the mother for a brief period, and being left alone in an unfamiliar place for a brief
period.
19. • In this technique, highly experienced coders use scales to rate the intensity of interactive behavior in four
areas: proximity and contact-seeking: contact-maintaining; resistance; and avoidance.
• Ainsworth described three major categories of attachment: secure, anxious/avoidant,
and anxious/ambivalent. After years of additional research by many investigators, Mary Main and Judith
Solomon in 1986 identified a fourth pattern: anxious/disorganized/disoriented.
These four major patterns of attachment describe unique sets of behavior:
• Secure: Securely attached babies are able to use the attachment figure as an effective secure base from which
to explore the world.
• When such moderately stressful events as brief (3-minute) separations in an unfamiliar environment occur,
these securely attached babies approach or signal to the attachment figure at reunion and achieve a degree of
proximity or contact which suffices to terminate attachment behavior.
20. • They accomplish this with little or no open or masked anger, and soon return to
exploration or play.
• Avoidant: Babies with avoidant attachments are covertly anxious about the attachment
figure's responsiveness and have developed a defensive strategy for managing their
anxiety.
• Upon the attachment figure's return after the same moderately stressful events, these
avoidant babies show mild version of the "detachment" behavior which characterizes
many infants after separations of two or three weeks; that is, they fail to greet the mother,
ignore her overtures and act as if she is of little importance.
21. • Ambivalent: In babies with anxious/ambivalent attachments, both anxiety and mixed feelings
about the attachment figure are readily observable.
• At reunion after brief separations in an unfamiliar environment, they mingle openly angry behavior
with their attachment behavior.
• Disorganized/Disoriented: Babies classified in this group appear to have no consistent strategy for
managing separation from and reunion with the attachment figure.
• Some appear to be clinically depressed; some demonstrate mixtures of avoidant behavior, openly
angry behavior and attachment behavior. Other show odd, often uncomfortable and disturbing
behaviors.
• These infant are often seen in studies of high-risk samples of severely maltreated, very disturbed or
depressed babies, but also appear in normal middle-class samples.
22. Self Development
• One of the important milestones in a child’s social development is learning
about his or her own self-existence.
• This self-awareness is known as consciousness, and the content of
consciousness is known as the self-concept.
• The self-concept is a knowledge representation or schema that contains
knowledge about us, including our beliefs about our personality traits,
physical characteristics, abilities, values, goals, and roles, as well as the
knowledge that we exist as individuals (Kagan, 1991).
23. Hazards
• Physical hazards
Unfavorable prenatal environment
Difficult and complicated birth
Multiple birth
Post-maturity
Pre-maturity
• Individuality of the infant
• Developmental lag
• Plateau in development
