Early Childhood

Physical Development

Body Growth

Children grow more slowly in early childhood than they did in the first two years. As body fat declines, they become longer and leaner. New growth centers appear in the skeleton, and by the end of early childhood, children start to lose their primary teeth.

Different parts of the body grow at different rates. Changes in body size follow the general growth curve--rapid in infancy, slower in early and middle childhood, rapid again in adolescence--except for the genitals, the lymph tissue, and the brain.

Brain Development

In early childhood, frontal-lobe areas of the cerebral cortex devoted to planning and organizing behavior develop rapidly. In addition, the left cerebral hemisphere shows more neural activity than the right, supporting young children’s expanding language skills.

In early childhood, connections are established among different brain structures. Fibers linking the cerebellum to the cerebral cortex myelin ate, enhancing balance and motor control. The reticular formation, responsible for alertness and consciousness, and the corpus callosum, which connects the two cerebral hemispheres, also myelin ate rapidly.

Hand preference strengthens during early and middle childhood, indicating that lateralization is increasing. Handedness reflects an individual's dominant cerebral hemisphere. One theory proposes that most children are genetically biased for right handedness but that experience can sway them toward a left-hand preference.

Cognitive Development

Piaget's Theory: The Preoperational Stage

Rapid advances in mental representation, notably language and make-believe play, mark the beginning of Piaget's preoperational stage. With age, make-believe becomes increasingly complex, evolving into sociodramatic play with others. Preschoolers' make-believe supports many aspects of development. Gradually, children become capable of dual representation--viewing a symbolic object, such as a model or map, as both an object in its own right and a symbol.

Aside from representation, Piaget described the young child in terms of deficits. According to his theory, preoperational children are egocentric, often failing to imagine others' perspectives. By preventing children from reflecting on their own thinking and accommodating, egocentrism contributes to animistic thinking, centration, a focus on perceptual appearances, and irreversibility. These difficulties cause preschoolers to fail conservation and hierarchical classification tasks.

Vygotsky's Socio-cultural Theory

Unlike Piaget, Vygotsky regarded language as the foundation for all higher cognitive processes. According to Vygotsky, private speech, or language used for self-guidance, emerges out of social communication as adults and more skilled peers help children master challenging tasks. Eventually private speech is internalized as inner, verbal thought. Scaffolding is a form of social interaction that promotes the transfer of cognitive processes to children.

A Vygotskian classroom emphasizes assisted discovery. Verbal guidance from teachers and peer collaboration are vitally important. Make-believe play serves as a vital zone of proximal development that enhances many new competencies.

Guided participation, a broader term than scaffolding, recognizes cultural and situational variations in adult support of children’s efforts.

Language Development

Between ages two and three, children adopt the basic word order of their language. As they master grammatical rules, they may overextend them in a type of error called over-regularization. By the end of early childhood, children have acquired complex grammatical forms.

To communicate effectively, children must master the practical, social side of language, known as pragmatics. Two-year-olds are already skilled conversationalists in face-to-face interaction. By age 4, children adapt their speech to their listeners in culturally accepted ways. In highly demanding contexts, preschoolers’ communication skills may appear.

Erikson's Theory: Initiative versus Guilt

Erickson’s image of initiative versus guilt captures the emotional and social changes of early childhood. A healthy sense of initiative depends on exploring the social world through play, forming a conscience through identification with the same-sex parent, and receiving supportive child rearing.

Gender Typing

Gender typing is well under way in the preschool years. Preschoolers acquire many gender stereotypes and behaviors. Heredity, through prenatal hormones, contributes to boys’ higher activity level and overt aggression and to children’s preference for same-sex playmates. But parents, teachers, peers, and the broader social environment also encourage many gender-typed responses.

Although most people have a traditional gender identity, some exhibit androgyny, combining both masculine and feminine characteristics. Masculine and androgynous identities are linked to better psychological.

My experience of early childhood

I remember that i used to go to a kindergarten when i was maybe four to seven......But I don't think I really liked it. I did not really get along with other guys there. I think I would rather like to stay home and play with my toys. There was a housekeeper who was really nice to us and my family really trusted her, I used to go out and play outside with her too. I didn't really have many friends back then.. because the kindergarten was a little bit far from where I used to live(I still live where I used to live!)