Developmental Psychology

1. Unit IV: Infancy and pre-
school child (0-5 years)
By
Sana Israr

2. Learning Objectives
• Physical Growth development
• Physical, cognitive, and psychosocial development occurs in infancy
• Piaget’s sensorimotor stage of development
• Basic trust vs. Basic mistrust
• Autonomy vs. shame & doubt
• Freud’s interpretation and parent –child relationship
• Physical, Cognitive and Psychosocial development in Pre-school Child
• Piaget’s pre-operational thought stage and Erickson: Initiative vs. Guilt

3. Physical Growth development
• Growth is change in size, in proportion, disappearance of old features
and acquisition of new ones. According to Crow and Crow (1962),
growth refers to structural and physiological changes.
Example
• Increase in weight

4. • Development means a progressive series of changes that occur in an
orderly predictable pattern as a result of maturation and experience.
Examples
• Muscles of legs become strong
• Child begins to creep and stands
• Walking
• Standing

5. Physical, Cognitive, and Psychosocial Development Occurs in Infancy
• Physical development: Infants’ physical development in the first two
years of life is extensive.
• PATTERNS OF GROWTH: An extraordinary proportion of the total
body is occupied by the head during prenatal development and early
infancy.

6. • The “cephalocaudal pattern” is
the sequence in which the
earliest growth always occurs at
the top, the head, with physical
growth and differentiation of
features gradually working their
way down from top to bottom
(Pedroso, 2008).
• For example, shoulders, middle
trunk, and so on.

7. • Proximodistal Pattern: the sequence in which growth starts at the
center of the body and moves toward the extremities.
Example
• Infants control the muscles of their trunk and arms before they
control their hands and fingers.
• Motor development: generally proceeds according to the
cephalocaudal principle.
For example:
• Infants see objects before they can control their torso, and they can
use their hands long before they can crawl or walk.

8. HEIGHT AND WEIGHT:
• First days of life, most newborns lose 5 to 7 percent of their body
weight.
• Then they grow rapidly, gaining an average of 5 to 6 ounces per week
during the first month.
• Doubled their birth weight by the age of 4 months and have nearly
tripled it by their first birthday.
• Infants grow about 1 inch per month during the first year
• Approximately doubling their birth length by their first birthday.
• Growth slows considerably in the second year of life.

9. The Brain’s Development:
• At birth, brain is about 25 percent of its adult weight.
• By the second birthday, the brain is about 75 percent of its adult
weight.
Sleep:
• Newborn sleeps approximately 18 hours a day.
• By 6 months of age, they usually have moved closer to adult-like sleep
patterns, spending the most time sleeping at night and the most time
awake during the day (Sadeh, 2008).

10. Cognitive development:
Schemes: are actions or mental
representations that organize knowledge.
• In Piaget’s theory, behavioral schemes
(physical activities) characterize infancy, and
mental schemes (cognitive activities)
develop in childhood.
• Examples: sucking, looking, and grasping.
• Older children have schemes that include
strategies and plans for solving problems.

11. • Assimilation and Accommodation:
children use and adapt their
schemes, through assimilation and
accommodation.

12. • Assimilation occurs when children use their existing schemes to deal
with new information or experiences.
• Accommodation occurs when children adjust their schemes to take
new information and experiences into account.
Example:
• A toddler who has learned the word car to identify the family’s car.
The toddler might call all moving vehicles on roads “cars,” including
motorcycles and trucks; the child has assimilated these objects to his
or her existing scheme. But the child soon learns that motorcycles
and trucks are not cars and fine-tunes the category to exclude
motorcycles and trucks, accommodating the scheme.

13. • Equilibrium: Cognitive balancing of new information with old
knowledge.

14. • Psychosocial development:
• Psychosocial development involve emotional, social, moral, and
personality development.
• Emotional expressions involved in infants’ first relationships.
• Beginning of an emotional bond between parents and child.
• Parents change their emotional expressions in response to infants’
emotional expressions, infants also modify their emotional
expressions in response to their parents’ emotional expressions
(Bridgett & others, 2009).

15. • Face-to-face play often begins to characterize caregiver-infant
interactions when the infant is about 2 to 3 months of age.
• The focused social interaction of face-to-face play may include
vocalizations, touch, and gestures (Leppanen & others, 2007).
• Locomotion: (move from place to place) Infants develop the ability to
crawl, walk, and run, they are able to explore and expand their social
world.

16. • Social referencing: “reading” emotional cues in others to help
determine how to act in a particular situation.
• Infants become better at social referencing in the second year of life.
• At this age, they tend to “check” with their mother before they act;
they look at her to see if she is happy, angry, or fearful.
For example:
14- to 22-month-old infants were more likely to look at their
mother’s face as a source of information for how to act in a situation
than were 6- to 9-month-old infants (Walden, 1991).

17. Piaget’s Sensorimotor Stage of Development
• Birth to about 2 years of age.
• Piaget believed that infants and toddlers “think” with their eyes, ears,
hands, and other sensorimotor equipment.
• They cannot yet carry out many activities inside their heads.
• As a result, they invent ways of solving sensorimotor problems, such
as pulling a lever to hear the sound of a music box, finding hidden
toys, and putting objects into and taking them out of containers.

18. • The circular reaction: provides a special means of adapting their first
schemes.
• It involves stumbling onto a new experience caused by the baby’s
own motor activity.
• The reaction is “circular” because, as the infant tries to repeat the
event again and again, a sensorimotor response that first occurred by
chance strengthens into a new scheme.

19. • Piaget divided the sensorimotor stage into six substages.
1. Reflexive schemes
2. Primary circular reactions
3. Secondary circular reactions
4. Coordination of secondary circular reactions
5. Tertiary circular reactions
6. Mental representation

20. 1. Reflexive schemes (birth–1 month): Coordination of sensation and
action through reflexive behaviors.
Example: Babies suck, grasp, and look in much the same way, no matter
what experiences they encounter.
2.Primary circular reactions (1–4 months): Simple motor habits.
• Such as sucking their fist or thumb.
• Babies begin to vary their behavior in response to environmental
demands.

21. 3. Secondary circular reactions (4–8 months): infants sit up and reach
for and manipulate objects.
4.Coordination of secondary circular reactions (8–12 months): Child
combine schemes into new, more complex action sequences.
• As a result, actions that lead to new schemes no longer have a
random, hit-or-miss quality.

22. 5. Tertiary circular reactions (12–18 months): toddlers repeat
behaviors with variation, emerges.
Example: Imitation of novel behaviors, ability to search in several
locations for a hidden object.
6.Mental representation (18 months–2 years): Child arrive at solutions
suddenly rather than through trial-and-error behavior.

23. Basic trust vs. Basic mistrust
• Infancy (first year) is Erikson’s first psychosocial stage.
• If a child successfully develops trust, the trusting infant expects the
world to be good and gratifying, so he feels confident about venturing
out to explore it.
• When caregivers don’t provide care, and affection, this leads to
mistrust.
• The mistrustful baby cannot count on the kindness and compassion
of others, so he/she protects herself by withdrawing from people and
things around.

24. Autonomy vs. shame & doubt
• Infancy (1 to 3 years)
• This stage occurs in late infancy and toddlerhood.
• After gaining trust, infants begin to discover that their behavior is
their own.
• They start develop independence or autonomy.
• If infants and toddlers are punished too harshly, they are likely to
develop a sense of shame and doubt.

25. • If children emerge from the first few years without sufficient trust in
caregivers and without a healthy sense of individuality, the seeds are
sown for adjustment problems.
• Adults who have difficulty establishing intimate ties, who are overly
dependent on a loved one, or who continually doubt their own ability
to meet new challenges may not have fully mastered the tasks of
trust and autonomy during infancy and toddlerhood.

26. • Children want to decide for themselves, not just in toileting but also
in other situations.
• The conflict of autonomy versus shame and doubt, is resolved
favorably when parents provide suitable guidance.
Example:
A self-confident, secure 2-year-old has parents who do not criticize or
attack him when he fails at new skills, using the toilet, eating with a
spoon, or putting away toys. And they meet his assertions of
independence with tolerance and understanding.

27. • Freud’s Interpretation and Parent-Child Relationship
1. Oral stage: mouth provide babies with the most pleasure.
• Eating, drinking and even nonnutritive sucking are more satisfying
than at other times of life.
• Baby’s experiences with feeding and other parenting behaviors affect
oral pleasure, and influence how much energy he/she invests in
seeking oral pleasure in the future.
• Infant is depended on mother for sucking and gets milk to swallow so
his raised tension, which was caused by hunger, is over.
• Accidentally he finds his thumb and discovers that he can meet his
need of sucking himself.

28. • When child gets love and food by loving mother unconditionally, he
learns to trust her.
• Basic sense of trust in mother starts which is a basis for future
trusting relationship.
• If child’s experience anxious and conditional relationship with mother
so he learns to mistrust her.
• So this basic mistrust gives paranoid idea in adulthood.
• Maternal Depression cause personality disorder.
• Rejection cause schizophrenia in later life.
• Fixations at any stage could be the result of either denial of a child’s
needs, or overindulgence of those needs.

29. 2. Anal stage: Inappropriate parental responses can result in negative
outcomes.
• Rigid toilet training include stubbornness, excessive concern with bowel
function and sadistic.
• If parents are too lenient, it causes “anal-expulsive”
personality.Individual will be messy, wasteful or destructive personality.
• If parents are too strict or begin toilet training too early, an “anal-
retentive” personality develops in which the individual is stringent,
orderly, rigid and obsessive.
3. Phallic stage: The child becomes aware of anatomical sex differences.
• Oedipus conflict boys
• Electra conflict girls

30. Physical, Cognitive and Psychosocial development in Pre-school Child
• Physical development:
• On average, children add 2 to 3 inches in height and about 5 pounds
in weight each year.
• Boys continue to be slightly larger than girls.
• As “baby fat” drops off further, children gradually become thinner,
although girls retain more body fat than boys.

31. Skeletal Growth: The skeletal changes of infancy continue throughout
early childhood.
• By the end of the preschool years, children start to lose their primary,
or “baby,” teeth.
Brain Development: Between ages 2 and 6
• brain increases from 70 percent of its adult weight to 90 percent.
• improvement of skills
physical coordination, perception, attention, memory,
language, logical thinking, and imagination.

32. • Nutrition: With the transition to early childhood, many children
become unpredictable, picky eaters.
• Infectious disease: Disease hinders both physical growth and
cognitive development.
• Illness reduces appetite and limits the body’s ability to absorb food.
• Motor development: By age 2, children’s gaits become smooth
• Running, jumping and skipping.

33. Fine motor skills: Control of hands and finger improves.
- Young children put puzzles together
- Build with small blocks
- Cut and paste
- String beads

34. • Cognitive development:
• Development of language
• Takes the perspective of others in simplified, familiar situations and in
everyday, face-to-face communication,
• Distinguishes animate beings from inanimate objects,
• Understands many cause-and-effect relationships.

35. • Executive functioning: preschoolers, compared with school-age
children
• Spend shorter times involved in tasks and are more easily distracted.
• Control of attention improves substantially during early childhood.
• Scaffolding: adjusting the level of guidance to fit child’s performance.

36. • Psychosocial development:
• Emotional regulation: Children improve cognitive strategies for:
• regulating emotion
• modulate their emotional arousal
• become more adept at managing situations to minimize
negative emotion
• choose effective ways to cope with stress
• Being able to differentiate whether one feels sad or anxious.
• Understanding when another person is sad rather than afraid.
• Knowing that expressing anger toward a friend on a regular
basis is likely to harm the friendship.

37. • Self-Concept and Self-Esteem: Pre- school childhood is a time of
forming an initial sense of self.
• Self-concept is our self-description according to various categories,
such as our external and internal qualities.
• Self- esteem is an evaluative judgment about who we are.
• Children:
• effectively manage their emotions
• become resilient in the face of stressful circumstances
• develop more positive relationships.

38. • Think back to your childhood and
adolescent years.
• How effective were you in regulating
your emotions?
• Has your ability to regulate your
emotions changed as you have grown
older?

39. Piaget’s pre-operational thought stage and Erickson: Initiative vs.
Guilt
Piaget’s pre-operational thought stage: 2 to 7 years of age.
• Children begin to go beyond simply connecting sensory information
with physical action and represent the world with words, images, and
drawings.
• It can be divided into two substages:
(i) the symbolic function substage
(ii) the intuitive thought substage.

40. (i) the symbolic function substage
• Children make distinct progress during this substage, their thinking
still has important limitations.
• Two limitations are egocentrism and animism.
• Egocentrism is the inability to distinguish between one’s own
perspective and someone else’s perspective. The egocentric child
assumes that other people see, hear, and feel exactly the same as the
child does.
• Animism belief that inanimate objects have human feelings and
intentions.
• A young child who uses animism fails to distinguish the appropriate
occasions for using human and nonhuman perspectives (Opfer &
Gelman, 2011).

41. (ii) the intuitive thought substage
• Children begin to use primitive reasoning and want to know the
answers to all sorts of questions.
• By the age of 5, children have just about exhausted the adults around
them with “why” questions.
• The child’s questions signal the emergence of interest in reasoning
and in figuring out why things are the way they are.

42. Initiative versus guilt: (preschool years, 3 to 5 years).
• Preschooler encounter a widening social world, they face new
challenges that require active, purposeful, responsible behavior.
• Feelings of guilt may arise, though, if the child is irresponsible and is
made to feel too anxious.
• Erikson (1950) described early childhood as a period of “vigorous
unfolding.”
• Once children have a sense of autonomy, they become less contrary
than they were as toddlers.

43. Recommended Reading
- Development Through the Lifespan by Laura E. Berk
- The life span human development for helping professionals
by Broderick, Patricia C Blewitt, Pamela