Basic Normal Stages of Child Development
This section is a brief overview of child development looking at children from birth to the age of five. It is easiest show this information as part of a table as it enables us to compare different parts of a child’s development along side each other. It is also very important to realise that the ages and time frames shown in the table have been taken from the average ages and would not be cause for concern if a child developed slightly slower than shown in the table bellow.
Physical Development Norms
This section presents and displays the type of physical development and activities that a developing child is capable of. The Information that follows shows the physical achievements of an average child and therefore uses average ages as a guideline.
Age 2
Walks well, goes up and down steps alone, runs, seats self on chair becoming increasingly independent in toileting, uses a spoon and fork, can kick a ball and attempt to dress self
Age 3
Runs well, marches, stands on one foot briefly, can ride a tricycle, feeds self well can put on shoes and do up buttons.
Age 4
Skips on one foot, can draw a basic man, can wash and dry face, and dress themselves, can perform a standing broad jump and can throw a ball over arm.
Age 5
Can hop and ...
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Age 2
Walks well, goes up and down steps alone, runs, seats self on chair becoming increasingly independent in toileting, uses a spoon and fork, can kick a ball and attempt to dress self
Age 3
Runs well, marches, stands on one foot briefly, can ride a tricycle, feeds self well can put on shoes and do up buttons.
Age 4
Skips on one foot, can draw a basic man, can wash and dry face, and dress themselves, can perform a standing broad jump and can throw a ball over arm.
Age 5
Can hop and skip well, can dress without any help, develops increasingly good balance and smoother muscle actions, likes to associate with parent and is capable of some limited self criticism, enjoys responsibility and likes to follow rules
Socio-emotional Factors in Developing Children
As previously briefly explained through my theorist notes Erik Erikson is possibly the foremost authority on socio-emotional development. Developed in 1956 Erikson’s “Eight stages of Development” is the presentation of his findings when researching child psychology.
Erikson’s eight stages of development
- Learning Basic Trust Versus Basic Mistrust
Description: In the first year of life, infants depend on others for food, warmth, and affection, and therefore must be able to blindly trust the parents (or caregivers) for providing those.
Positive outcome: If their needs are met consistently and responsively by the parents, infants not only will develop a secure attachment with the parents, but will learn to trust their environment in general as well.
Negative outcome: If not, infant will develop mistrust towards people and things in their environment, even towards themselves.
- Learning Autonomy Versus Shame
Crisis: Autonomy (Independence) vs. Doubt (or Shame)
Description: Toddlers learn to walk, talk, use toilets, and do things for themselves. Their self-control and self-confidence begin to develop at this stage.
Positive outcome: If parents encourage their child's use of initiative and reassure her when she makes mistakes, the child will develop the confidence needed to cope with future situations that require choice, control, and independence.
Negative outcome: If parents are overprotective, or disapproving of the child's acts of independence, she may begin to feel ashamed of her behaviour, or have too much doubt of her abilities.
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Learning Initiative Versus Guilt
Description: Children have newfound power at this stage as they have developed motor skills and become more and more engaged in social interaction with people around them. They now must learn to achieve a balance between eagerness for more adventure and more responsibility, and learning to control impulses and childish fantasies.
Positive outcome: If parents are encouraging, but consistent in discipline, children will learn to accept without guilt, that certain things are not allowed, but at the same time will not feel shame when using their imagination and engaging in make-believe role plays.
Negative outcome: If not, children may develop a sense of guilt and may come to believe that it is wrong to be independent.
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Industry versus Inferiority Description: School is the important event at this stage. Children learn to make things, use tools, and acquire the skills to be a worker and a potential provider. And they do all these while making the transition from the world of home into the world of peers.
Positive outcome: If children can discover pleasure in intellectual stimulation, being productive, seeking success, they will develop a sense of competence.
Negative outcome: If not, they will develop a sense of inferiority.
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Learning Identity versus Identity Diffusion Description: This is the time when we ask the question "Who am I?" To successfully answer this question, Erikson suggests, the adolescent must integrate the healthy resolution of all earlier conflicts. Did we develop the basic sense of trust? Do we have a strong sense of independence, competence, and feel in control of our lives? Adolescents who have successfully dealt with earlier conflicts are ready for the "Identity Crisis", which is considered by Erikson as the single most significant conflict a person must face.
Positive outcome: If the adolescent solves this conflict successfully, he will come out of this stage with a strong identity, and ready to plan for the future.
Negative outcome: If not, the adolescent will sink into confusion, unable to make decisions and choices, especially about vocation, sexual orientation, and his role in life in general.
- Learning Intimacy versus Isolation Description: In this stage, the most important events are love relationships. No matter how successful you are with your work, said Erikson, you are not developmentally complete until you are capable of intimacy. An individual who has not developed a sense of identity usually will fear a committed relationship and may retreat into isolation.
Positive outcome: Adult individuals can form close relationships and share with others if they have achieved a sense of identity.
Negative outcome: If not, they will fear commitment, feel isolated and unable to depend on anybody in the world.
- Learning Generativity Versus Self-Absorption
Description: By "generativity" Erikson refers to the adult's ability to look outside oneself and care for others, through parenting, for instance. Erikson suggested that adults need children as much as children need adults, and that this stage reflects the need to create a living legacy.
Positive outcome: People can solve this crisis by having and nurturing children, or helping the next generation in other ways.
Negative outcome: If this crisis is not successfully resolved, the person will remain self-centered and experience stagnation later in life
- Integrity versus Despair
Description: Old age is a time for reflecting upon one's own life and its role in the big scheme of things, and seeing it filled with pleasure and satisfaction or disappointments and failures.
Positive outcome: If the adult has achieved a sense of fulfilment about life and a sense of unity within himself and with others, he will accept death with a sense of integrity. Just as the healthy child will not fear life, said Erikson, the healthy adult will not fear death.
Negative outcome: If not, the individual will despair and fear death.
Language Development in Children
Language development is a complex yet fascinating part of child development. It is still not fully understood why young children have the ability to pick up language so quickly. A young developing child who groups up exposed to more than his own basic language has an incredible advantage.
The table that follows is a descriptive chart showing the development of an average child from 6 months to 8 years.
The Child Subject - Intro
Through getting to know my child subject I have begun to understand what he likes and dislikes and have begun to know a bit about his family. Speaking to his parents has given me a good idea about his upbringing and hopes to relate how his development has been affected by his parents. The parents of the child and the child himself has given me permission to use names and write the findings as I see them, without any form of reverberation, however I am going to substitute the child’s first name for an alias name to avoid any form of identification, I shall also use an alias in place of the parents name.
The Child
Name: Lucius Vicary
Age: 8 years
Nationality: English
Place of Residence: ‘C.A’ (to avoid complications and identifications I shall refer to the area they live as just ‘C.A’)
Description of Residence: A small quite village in the county of Dorset, so the area is very much a rural setting. The village is very quite and with my knowledge of the area I would say the average age of the region would have to be somewhere in the region of mid sixties, which means that the village is possibly not the most sociable of places for a young boy to grow up in (perhaps this could harbour his development). A local first school on the other hand suggests otherwise.
School: ‘C.A’ first School
Parents: John Vicary
Mary Vicary
Parental Occupations: John Vicary is a civil servant, who works in a nearby town and Mary is a home carer in the local village of ‘C.A’.
Description of parents: John Vicary is a hard working civil servant who leaves early in the morning (around 7:15am) and doesn’t return from work until 5:30pm, John says his work is physically strenuous and therefore tiring which means he doesn’t have much energy to do things around the house when he gets back, but still has the energy to take Lucius to football training once a week, which shows support of his child’s interests. Mary Vicary doesn’t work as long hours as her husband and is always at the school to pick Lucius up at the end of the day, whilst still managing to look after her horse and help with others at the stables where she keeps hers every day.
Description of Living quarters: The Vicary family live in a modern (20 year old) semi-detached three bedroom property on the outskirts of the village. The house is of a moderate size and gives Lucius enough space to play by making use of the spare bedroom as a sort of playroom for him. His parents encouragement of education, recreation and socialisation I think will encourage the subject to develop well, although there are also two factors that I think may perhaps harbour the child development, the child was born about a week and a half premature and also suffers from ADD, I feel although not so noticeable now this may play a detrimental part on the young child’s development.
The Child’s Likes and Dislikes
To aid my creation of a suitable learning aid I am going to use my test subject to help develop my game even though once created the game will actually be for children of a younger age than Lucius, but also gives me the chance to have some good critical feedback on my developing game.
I have created a list of some of Lucius’s
Favourite pastimes and subjects, so that I could incorporate at least one of them into my learning aid.
Likes
Football, tennis, cricket, basketball, transformers, music, anything to do with space, horses.
Dislikes
The child seems very happy with life and doesn’t appear to have any distinct dislikes; obviously I wouldn’t create a learning aid for a young boy of that age in an unsuitable colour or something. I know he dislikes the colour pink and has said before he doesn’t like “girls toys” so I wouldn’t use that as the focus for my aid.
The Learning aid Introduction
As for any new product there are essential factors and constraints that need to be specified in the design process, also I need to take into consideration the ideas of theorists and the idea of aiding the child’s developmental process. I feel at this stage that I must make it perfectly clear that the learning aid I am developing is not actually for Lucius, am simply using him to help me design the learning aid. I chose to use Lucius as opposed to a child of the required age group specifically because Lucius is capably of giving constructive criticism and showed real interest in wanting to help.
Design Specifications
The design specifications are the constraints that are not to be varied, these are the areas of criteria that must be fulfilled. I feel that presenting this in a formal format would be the best way to show this.
Subjects or topics to Improve:
Maths or English
Age Range Suitable:
School year 1 and 2
Extras:
Must include relation to at least one theory or theorists, and bare relevance to one type of development (most likely to be intellectual).
Variables:
At this stage in design the variables will be how this is presented in relation to Lucius’ likes and dislikes.
Developing Ideas
My original idea was a basic wet of flash cards with a number of objects on to get the young child to count all the objects on each card, but I scraped this idea straight away as I struggled to relate this to any theoretical work. I was confused and stuck until I stumbled upon a completely new idea. This idea promoted the work of a theorist and would be a fun game for the child to play. I proposed a board game which involved a simple card game as well. I presume most people have played the pairs memory game with a pack of cards before, so I don’t need to go into any detail regarding how to play this part. I proposed a game that made the child use the benefits of operant conditioning through my findings studying the work of B.F Skinner and the Skinner box. Basically the child has to use to trial and error to find a pair of cards with the same number on them to move a space on the boards I created. When one child has had a go, the second child has a turn to try and find a pair of cards.
On my next page was a board I have designed for the game, and the explanation of the board and how to play follow.
Evaluation of the Learning Aid
I created the game after a brainwave I had whilst playing cards with friends, I just thought that card games can be very sociable activities, and generally very easy to learn to play. The game is safe for anyone to play even two children on there own could play this, even slightly older children may enjoy the simplicity of the card football game. I chose to incorporate Lucius’ love of football into the game as I thought young children may like the idea of scoring a goal when they get enough pairs. I tested the finished game first with Lucius’ and then with other children from his school in younger years, most of the students enjoyed the game, and there teacher actually said that she thought the game may help them to develop their numeric skills, and social skills as well as provide a social game for the students to play, one of the students even asked me if I could make a board for him, so I gave him my template copy as I knew I had the board saved on computer anyway. Even the girls of the young group enjoyed the game but said that they didn’t like the board as it represented football, so I explained to them that as they liked horses that they could make a horse board and instead of scoring a goal you could call it either a ‘clear round’ or a ‘race win’.
