Infancy and toddlerhood

Body growth

- Changes in height and weight are rapid during the first two years. In the first nine months, body far is laid down quickly, while muscle development is slow and gradual. Skeletal age is the best way to estimate a child’s physical maturity, which tends to vary by ethnic group and sex. Body proportions change as growth follows cephalocaudal and proximodistal trends.

- By the end of the first year, a typical infant’s height is about 32 inches, more than 50 percent greater then at birth; by 2 years, it is nearly 75 percent greater (36 inches). Similarly, by 5 months of age, birth weights has doubled (to about 15 pounds), at 1 year it has tripled (to 22 pounds), and at 2 years it has quadrupled (to about 30 pounds).

Brain Development

- Early in development the brain grows faster than any other organ of the body. Once neurons, or nerve cells, are in place, they rapidly form synapses. To communicate, neurons release neurotransmitters, which cross synapses. As synapses form, to make room for new synaptic connections, many surrounding neurons die. Neurons that are seldom stimulated lose their synapses in a process called synaptic pruning. Glial cells, responsible for myelination, multiply rapidly into the second year, contributing to large gains in brain weight.

- The cerebral cortex is the largest, most complex brain structure and the last to stop growing. Its regions develop in the general order in which various capacities emerge in the growing child. The hemispheres of the cerebral cortex specialize, a process called lateralization. In the first few years of life, there is high brain plasticity, with many areas not yet committed to specific functions.

- Stimulation of the brain is essential during periods in which it is growing most rapidly. Prolonged early deprivation, as in some babies reared in orphanages, can permanently impair brain growth and all aspects of psychological development.

Influences on Early Physical Growth

- Twin and adoption studies reveal the contribution of heredity to body size and rate of physical growth.

- Breast milk is ideally suited to infants' growth needs, offers protection against disease, and prevents malnutrition and infant death in poverty-stricken areas of the world. Breast- and bottle-fed babies do not differ in emotional adjustment, and cognitive benefits of breastfeeding are inconclusive.

Nororganic failure to thrive, which occurs in infants who lack affection and stimulation, illustrates the importance of these factors in normal physcial growth.

Piaget's Cognitive -Developmental

In Piaget’s theory, by acting directly on the environment, children move through four stages in which psychological structures, or schemes, achieve a better fir with external reality.Schemes change in two ways: through adaptation, which is made up of two complementary activities—assimilation and accommodation—and through organization, the internal rearrangement of schemes into a strongly interconnected cognitive system.

Language Development

According to the behaviorist perspective, parents train children in language skills through operant conditioning and imitation. Behaviorism, however, has difficulty accounting for children‘s novel utterances.

Erikson's Theory of Infant and Toddler Personality

According to Erikson, warm, responsive care giving leads infants to resolve the psychological conflict of basic trust versus mistrust on the positive side. During toddlerhood, the conflict of autonomy versus shame and doubt is resolved favorably when parents provide appropriate guidance and reasonable choices. If children emerge from the first few years without sufficient trust and autonomy, the seeds are sown for adjustment problems.

Personal experience of infancy and toddlerhood

I couldnt really remember anything, so i had to call my mom and ask her. She said i started walking when i was about 10 months old... and other than that, my mom said she doesn't really remember anything... She said i used to pee on my body(of course i was laying down) and my mom was always with me which I really thank her for doing.