Emotional Development, Psychoanalytic Theory and Behaviorism

As a new parent, you are likely interested and concerned about how your infant is feeling emotionally. It is easy to assume that your newborn is happy and excited if he or she is smiling and clapping. However, as your child matures they begin to develop social and self- awareness, which are foundations of emotional growth and bring about a wide range of complex emotions. “Within the first two years, infants progress from reactive pain and pleasure to complex patterns of social awareness.” (Lewis, 2010-Berger 194)

 

 Soon after only being able to express pleasure and pain, infants are expressing happiness through the “social smile.” This special smile is induced by the sight of another human face around six weeks. (Berger 192) Between 2-4 months, infants show curiosity and also begin to laugh. The interesting fact is that laughter develops simultaneously with curiosity. Examples would be an infant laughing when discovering something new or when a familiar person makes a silly face. (Berger 192) By 6 months, an infant will express anger, usually by crying and is typically a response to frustration. Anger is actually a healthy response to frustration, as opposed to sadness which can be a sign of withdrawal and can lead to health issues. Then around 9 months, infants develop two different types of social fear. The first is stranger wariness and is when an infant no longer smiles at any friendly face, but cries if an unfamiliar person moves too close. (Berger 193) The second type of social fear is separation anxiety is when an infant cries, shows dismay or anger when a familiar person leaves them.

 

During toddlerhood the emotions that were present before become more keen and prominent. There are new emotions developing like pride, shame, embarrassment, disgust, and guilt. These emotions require social awareness, which emerges from family interactions and is influenced by culture. (Berger 193) Basically, toddlers learn (to their own extent) what is acceptable and “the norms” of their own family and social culture.  Toddlers begin to reflect what their family and culture value, whether it is courage, modesty, or pride, etc.

 

Self-awareness is the realization that one’s body, mind and activities are separate from those from other people. (Berger 194) As you could imagine, this is a huge step in emotional development in infants. Researchers have been able to study toddlers and have determined that around 18 months old, a child can recognize themselves in a mirror. Toddlers may also use words like “I”, “me” or “mine,” displaying their comprehension that they separate from their parents, for example.

 

There are a few main aspects of brain maturation that affect social emotions. One is social impulses, for example, certain familiar people evoke specific emotions infants. This is particularly due to past experiences as well as brain maturation. Another aspect that determines brain maturation is stress. Too high of stress in infants, makes them produce excessive amounts of a hormone called cortisol, and too high levels of cortisol for long periods can cause abnormal brain development. A third aspect is synesthesia, in which one sense riggers another on the brain. For example, many infants cry at everything whether they are afraid or happy. In other words, an infant could be laughing and something then their brain triggers a response for crying because it is confused due to certain developments in the brain.

 

Temperament is defined as the “biologically based core of individual differences in style of approach and response to the environment that is stable across time and situations.” Your infant’s temperament is directly linked to the alleles on their genes. Studies show that environmental factors such as poor nutrition or stressful/abusive living situations can actually change those particular alleles, causing emotional disabilities or deficiencies. Personality is not the same as temperament; however they both may share similar traits. Temperament is considered to be strictly genetic, while personality traits are thought to be learned. (Berger 196)

 

Now let me discuss about the theories of infant psychosocial development. Masters of psychoanalytic theories, Sigmund Freud and Erik Erikson, came up with their own stages of psychosocial development. Freud described the infant’s first 12 months as the “oral stage.” This is because during this time, infants receive most of their gratification through the mouth. Examples would be finger sucking, teething or breastfeeding. Freud states that during an infant’s second year of life is the “anal stage.” This is because infants receive the majority of their pleasure from performing a bowel movement and then mastering the technique. Freud believed that infant’s “oral fixation” and toilet training are actually stages that every infant must go through at some time; however, he believed timing of these events were crucial. He thought that the parents must not rush, nor try to delay the timing in which their infants pass through these stages. In other words, they must come and naturally and with instinct. 

 

Erikson described his stages of development as crises. He believed that the first 18 months of an infant’s life is the “trust versus mistrust” crisis. This is when infants learn whether the “world can be trusted to satisfy basic needs.” (Berger 199) The needs for the infant would be things like food and comfort from a parent. Erikson believes that after 18 months, infants enter the “autonomy versus shame and doubt” crisis. This is when self-awareness becomes prominent and they to want to have control their own actions, so they do not feel shame or doubt. Freud and Erikson shared a common belief that problems in infancy could last a lifetime, in turn making a adults that are mistrusting.

 

 

Additionally to Freud’s and Erikson’s psychoanalytic theories is behaviorism. Behaviorism can display how emotions and personality are developed as a response to the parent’s positive and negative reinforcements to the infant’s behaviors. Behaviorists have now studied “social learning,” in which infants learn by watching others. There is a classic experiment conducted by Albert Bandura:

 

Children watched an adult hitting rubber Bobo clown with a mallet and then treated the doll the same way. In this experiment, those children had good reason to follow the example; they were frustrated by being told they could not play with some attractive toys and were then left alone with a mallet and the Bobo doll, having just seen an adult hit the doll. Both boys and girls pounded and kicked Bobo. (Berger 200)

 

 

This infant is displaying a contemporary form of Bandura's "social learning" experiment

 

The social learning theory of behaviorism accepts the genetic influences, yet stresses that examples from the parents can have an extreme effect on emotional development.

 

For all parents, first-timers and experienced veterans; I hope that the information presented here and our entire blog has given you a better understanding of infant and toddler development.

-Chris

Motor skills and proper nutrition in infants and children

Motor skills the ability to move some part of the body, in actions ranging from the large leap to a flicker of the eyelid.(The word motor here refers to the movement of the muscles.) Strictly speaking, the infant's first motor skills are not really skills but reflex's. Reflex's is an involuntary response to a particular stimulus. It is also a automatic response that is naturally built into the infants nervous system and it occurs without conscious thought. There are 18 kinds of reflex's but there are three sets that are critical for survival. Reflexes that maintain the oxygen supply, reflexes that maintain constant body temperature, and reflexes that facilitate feeding.

Gross motor skills is deliberate actions that are coordinating many parts of the body, producing large movements. Between the months eight and ten after the birth most infants can lift their midsections and crawl. If you ever heard that babies must crawl to develop normally is not true. All babies find out some way to move before they can walk. Examples are: inching, bear walking, scooting, creeping, or crawling. Most babies resist whats called "tummy time" by rolling over and fussing to indicate to parents that they do not want crawling practice. (Adolph & Berger 2005)

Fine motor skills are what you call small body movements, especially of the hands and fingers. Examples of that would be drawing, and picking up coins. Newborns have a strong reflexive grasp but seem to lack hand and finger control. By four months, infants sometime grab, but their timing is off: they close there hands to early or too late. Pull, grab, look, and listen. Using every sense at once is a baby's favorite way to experience life, generating Brian connections as well as commotion.

Childhood has many problems when growing up. Their are a lot of deadly virus that are around us. Immunization is a process that stimulates the body's immune system to defend against attacks by particular contagious disease. Examples of those would be the Measles, whopping cough, pneumonia, and other illnesses that could be a childhood killer. The immunization can either be injected or by naturally. Smallpox, the most lethal disease for children in the past, that was worldwide of 1971. Polio a crippling and sometimes fatal disease, has become very rare. Measles is disappearing worldwide, thanks to vaccine developed in 1963. A problem with immunization that parents do not always make sure their children get vaccinated on the recommended schedule. Sudden infant death syndrome is a situation in which a seemingly healthy infant, at least two months of age, suddenly stops breathing and dies unexpectedly while asleep.

Nutrition is best for newborns. Breast is best for most newborns it gives good nutrition. Colostrum, is a thick high-calorie fluid, is secreted by a womens breast for about the first three days following the birth of the child. The specific fats and surgars in breast milk make it more digestible, and probably better for the infant brain, than any prepared formula (Riordan, 2005). Breast milk apperas to have so many advanatges over formula that some critcs question the validity of the research: Perhapes women who choose to breast-feed are better caregivers which might explain the superior situation of breast-fed babies. Other researches say that bottle-feeding may sometimes be better, such as when the mother is HIV-positive or use toxic or addicitve drugs. Many doctors worldwide recommended exclusive breast-feeding for the first four to six months.

Protein-calorie malnutrition is a condition in which a oerson does not consume sufficeint food of any kind. This deprivation can result in several illnesses, severe weight loss, and even death. The worst disease directly caused by malnutrtion is marasmus. Maramus is a diease of serve protein-calorie malnutrition during the early infanacy, in which growth stops, the body tissue waste away, and the infant eventually dies. Another diease is Kwashiorkor in which during childhood, which a protien deficienty makes the child more vaulnerable to other diesease, such as measles, diarrhea, and influneza. The child growth is retarded; the liver is damaged; the immune syster is weakened, the face, legs, and abdomen swell with fluid.

Melissa Becerra

infant growth

Hello parents, your young child is growing quickly. How quickly you can see day to day. You can see in their little bodies and their growing minds.

You can tell by your child's weight that they are growing rapidly, in fact infants double their body weight in the first 4 months, and even triple in by age 1. By age 2, growth has slowed but by 24 months a child on average can weigh about 30 pounds. As you can tell your child’s weight quickly changes, but you can also tell their growth by their height. According to The Developing Person by Kathleen Berger a 2 year old is already half of their adult height! Along with their bodies growing, their brain is also expanding. You may have notice the doctor measuring your baby’s skull. This is because usually the head grows 35% in the first year. Their brains reach 75% of its adult weight by the time they are 2!

*My son and I co-sleeping

While you may not be sleeping, your baby sleeps a lot up to 17 hours a day or more! Most newborns experience REM sleep, which is rapid eye movement sleep; which also indicates they are dreaming. By the time your baby is 3 months, they are experiences more forms of the sleep cycle. Doctors even recommend that your baby conform to your sleep schedule. Co-sleeping is a when your child is sleeping in the bed with you. The experts are divided on the benefits and risks to co-sleeping (Berger, 2009). Some of the benefits and risks include, promoting breastfeeding but can also lead to sudden infant death syndrome (SIDs). With the main risk being SIDs as a down side to co-sleeping, I decided that the benefits of breastfeeding and more bonding time outweighed the slim chance of SIDs.

All of this growth is visible with your child’s use of the 5 senses. A baby’s hearing is still developing after birth. But you can see that your baby can tell the sound of your voice from those of others. At first your baby’s eyesight is restricted to just a few inches but as their bodies and brain develops, their eyesight expands every day. Your child sense of smell, taste and touch are developed with each new sensation they are exposed to. Some doctors even suggest that the taste of sugar can be used as an infant pain reliever (Berger, 2009). Your babies senses are improving with each new experience they have.

Keep reading our blog to find out what else your child will encounter on their way to adulthood. 

- amber broderick

Talking

Hello new parents... today we are going to discuss infants learning to talk. You will learn some statistics about when and what children will say as well as learn that not every child will do these things at the same time. 

The Universal Sequence

There is a sequence that all babies/children go through when learning how to talk. Whether your child is in the most advanced 10 percent of 2-year-olds who speak more than 550 words or in the least advanced 10 percent of 2-year-olds who speak fewer than 100 words, they will still always follow a sequence. 

Infants begin learning language before birth. Newborns look closely at facial expressions and prefer to hear speech over other sounds, a preference that is evident by 4 months (Minagawa-Kawai et al., 2011). By the time an infant is 6 months old, they can distinguish whether that person is speaking their native language or not. Careful analysis has found that adult communication with babies is distinct from communication with other adults (Falk, 2004). Adults tend to use child-directed speech, better known as "baby-talk," when speaking to babies. At around 7 months, infants begin to recognize words that are highly distinctive before words that sound alike. Infants can respond to adults in many ways including crying and cooing. By 4 months, most babies should be able to growl, grunt, and gurgle. 

Babbling can be defined as an infant's repetition of certain syllables, such as ba-ba-ba, that begins when babies are between 6 and 9 months old. All babies babble, even babies who are deaf. However babbling is encouraged by other people's responses and therefore deaf babies stop babbling because they cannot hear responses, while hearing babies continue. Toward the end of the first year, babbling begins to sound like the infant's native language; infants imitate what they hear in accents, cadence, consonants, and so on (Berger, 2012). Many parents and caregivers teach the infants "baby signs" so that they can communicate with hand signs before they are able to make words. At around 10 months old, infants pick up the gesture of pointing. 

First Words

At around 1 year of age, babies can say a few words. However, since their words may not be clear, usually only the caregivers can understand what they are saying. For example, a baby might say "ba-ba" and it mean bottle. My daughter never said "ma-ma" which is usually the norm but instead has always called me "mommy." But, because I call my own mother, Mom, my daughter calls her grandmother, "Mom." So when we are out in public, I am sure that her calling me "mommy" and grandma "mom" confuses people but since I am her caregiver, I can understand exactly what she means. 

At around age 2, spoken vocabulary gradually increases, about one new word per week. However, babies between 6 and 15 months tend to learn meanings more quickly than they learn the words. They understand about 10 times more words than they can say. For example, my daughter can point to a large amount of her body parts but can only actually say a few of them. A single word can convey various messages. This is called a holophrase and can be defined as a single word that is used to express a complete, meaningful thought. 

The naming explosion is a sudden increase in an infant's vocabulary, especially in the number of nouns, that begins at about 18 months of age. Once vocabulary reaches about 50 expressed words, it builds rapidly, at a rate of 50 to 100 words per month, with a 21-month-old saying twice as many words as 18-month-olds (Adamson & Bakeman, 2006). In almost every language, the most common words for 12 to 18 month olds include: the names of caregivers, favorite foods, and elimination (pee-pee, poo-poo). 

Theories of Language Learning

There are a few theories regarding learning languages. Theory one indicates that infants need to be taught. Theory two states that social impulses foster infant language. And the third theory says that infants teach themselves. 

** Here is a chart that might be helpful to you new parents

At About This Time 

        The Development of Spoken Language in the First Two Years

Age                  Means of Communication

Newborn          Reflexive communication-cries, movements, facial expressions.

2 mos.              A range of meaningful noises-cooing, fussing, crying, laughing.

3-6 mos.          New sounds, including squeals, growls, croons, trills, vowel sounds.

6-10 mos.        Babbling, including both consonant and vowel sounds repeated in syllables. 

10-12 mos.      Comprehension of simple words; speechlike intonations; specific vocalizations 

                          that have meaning to those who know the infant well. Deaf babies express their

                          first signs; hearing babies also use specific gestures to communicate.

12 mos.            First spoken words that are recognizably part of the native language.

13-18 mos.      Slow growth of vocabulary, up to about 50 words.

18 mos.            Naming explosion-three or more words learned per day. Much variation; Some 

                          toddlers do not yet speak.

21 mos.            First two-word sentence

24 mos.              Multiword sentences. Half the toddler's utterances are two or more words long.

** The ages of accomplishment in this table reflect norms. Many healthy children with normal intelligence attain these steps in language development earlier or later than indicated above.

Sources: Bloom, 1993, 1998; Fenson et al., 2000; Lenneberg, 1967.

Children will learn to speak at their own age. If I could reflect a little on my own experience. My son (who is now 9 years old), started talking very late. He showed very little signs until around 2 years old. The doctor wasn't really concerned but of course I was, after reading the "norms." Around age 2, he started talking and never stopped!! He is now in 4th grade, an honor roll student, and in the GATE program. My daughter was also showing no interest in talking (she is now a little over 2 years old), but this time, the doctor showed some concern. I told my daughter's doctor that my son started talking late and she said that it could be hereditary but that we really needed to watch it. Now, she is talking up a storm and learning multiple words per day. If I looked at the above chart, yes I would have been concerned. But just know that is it in fact a chart on the norms. Every child is different and will learn and do things at their own speed. Just remember that.   

-Nicole Fanning 

Information Processing

        Hello new parents today we will be going over information processing in depth and you will learn what to expect of your little ones. Information processing theory is "A perspective that compares human thinking processes, by analogy, to computer analysis of data, including sensory input, connections, stored memories, and output." For example you will see how newborns have an automatic cry reflex when they are hungry. Then compare it to a little bit older infant will see their bottle and remember that it helps to relieve their hunger and grab it to start drinking it. "Information-processing research has found impressive intellectual capacities in the infant. For example, concepts and categories seem to develop in the infant brain by about 6 months (mandler, 2007; Quinn, 2004)." Now we will go in depth into information processing the subject will be affordances.

 Affordances

          Affordance is defined as "An opportunity for perception and interaction that is offered by a person, place, or object in the environment." We will first go over the concepts from the Gibsons. "Decades of thought and research led Eleanor and James Gibson to conclude that perception is far from automatic (E. Gibson, 1969; J. Gibson, 1979)."  Gibsons believe that environment can offer a lot of opportunities for their perceptionand interaction. People, places, and objects are all opportunities which are called affordance. Affordance is perceived in four different factors which are: Sensory awareness, immediate motivation, current level of development, and past experience.

         We are now going to look at movement. Dynamic perception which is primed to focus on movement and change. Babies are very interested in movement and people. Infants absolutely love movements as soon as they learn to move there bodies they love to grab, scoot, crawl, and walk. "To their delight, they realize that such motions change what they world affords them. As a result, infants work hard to master each successive motor activity (Adoph & Berger, 2005)." Babies are so attractive to things that move like dogs, cats, and bugs. I know my son who is seven months old loves to watch the cats move and he tries to scoot over to the cat to grab their fur. This is a great example of movement and the different stages your babies will go through. A ball was moved at different speeds in front of three to nine month old babies. Almost all of them would attempt to touch or catch the ball. "However, marked differences appeared in their perception of the affordance of "catchableness." The younger infants would not try to catch the slower moving balls, but would try to catch the faster balls and being unsuccessful. The nine month old would know the balls afforded catching or not. They would then grab the slow moving balls and let the faster balls just fly by them, because they knew they could not catch the faster moving balls. It is so interesting when you look at this study and you can see a difference with out your baby plays in just a few weeks or months. Infants are always changing. Here is an example of my seven month old which I consider an older infant will do when he gets rolled a faster moving ball and a slower moving ball. The first video shows me rolling him a faster ball, he understands that he can to catch it so he just turns to me and starts crying. Then the second video shows me rolling the ball to him much slower and he understands that he is able to catch this ball, because it is moving slower. 

           Now we will look out how infants have a people preference. Infants will respond to their caregivers feelings and expressions if they are smiles, laugh, or yell. "Infants connect facial expression with tone of voice long before they understand language." I can see this in my son he is very affected by tone of voice. He can be perfectly happy and then someone comes into the room shouting and he will begin to cry. This really makes me aware of your tone around your infant, because they can pick it up instantly and be affected by it. At as young as around three months babies can look at their mother and tell if they are happy or on happy by  their tone of voice and expressions on their faces. Infants around that age can also tell familiar faces from strangers faces. They may smile instantly at their mother, but then when a stranger walks up to them at a store it may take them a while to smile at them. Here is an example:

* This picture is from halloween this year my son was affected by his cousin talks too loudly to him and giving him a little too much love so he started to cry.

* Now this photo shows that when his cousin is more calm around him he will smile and have fun.

         I hope this post was good for you of new parents to see what is to come to your little ones and that they really do change from week to week. They are always learning something new and their information processing grows at an incredible rate.

-Nicole Peterson

       

       

Welcome New Parents!

Hello to all the new parents out there our blog is designed to help you understand all of the different stages that your new bundles of  joy are about to go through in their first two years. We will go through Biosocial Development, Cognitive Development, and Psychosocial Development that your child will go through in their first years. We hope you enjoy what all of us have to present to you and hope that this will help you and your baby through their first two years.