Ch 9 - Phys & Cog Dev, Middle Childhood

Chronic illnesses

-15-20% of all children experience some type of chronic illness, including physical disabilities. asthma, (~2%) others: sickle cell anemia, diabetes, arthritis, cancer, and AIDS -chronic illness is disruptive to a child's daily life in terms of their schooling and social lives

Obesity Causes (5)

-Heredity causes TENDENCY, but mostly related to environment. 1. Consistent relationship btw low SES and obesity in industrialized nations, esp among minorities. - Lack of knowledge about healthy diet - tendency to buy high-fat, low cost foods - family stress prompts overeating -malnourished children in early years at increased risk 2. Parental feeding practices: - overfeeding as a way to solve every discomfort of child - being overly controlling and restrictive also fails to help children learn to self-regulate - treats=high fat & sugary, attaches higher value 3. Sleep habits: -children who get less sleep more likely to be overweight 5 yrs later 4. Physical inactivity - hours in front of television 5. Broader food environment -communities designed for driving, not walking -eating take-out has rised dramatically, which increases overall food consumption

Key Information-Processing Improvements

-Increase in information-processing speed/capacity -Gains in inhibition (Both may be related to brain development)

Concrete operational thought limitations

-Operations work best with concrete information. -problems with abstract ideas -Continuum of acquisition -master concrete operational tasks gradually, step by step

physical education

-Supports many aspects of children's development: health, sense of worth, and cognitive social skills - Cut back in the US despite all of its contributions -resultingly, most kids are not active enough for health -physical education should involve informal games and individual exercise (competitive sports dissuade less athletic kids) -active kids become active adults who have greater physical strength, resistance to illness, enhanced psychological well-being, and longer life

Gains in inhibition

-additional strides as the frontal lobes of the cerebral cortex develop further

nutrition

-children need wel-balanced, plentiful diet to provide energy for learning and increased physical activity -children eat dinner with family less and less, which is to their detriment as eating evening meals with parents leads to diets higher in fruits and vegetables -poverty stricken children suffer from serious and prolonged malnutrition, which leads to permanent physical and mental damage -government-sponsored supplementary food programs focused on the early years through adolescence can prevent such effects

rough and tumble play

-friendly chasing and play fighting -emerges in preschool years and peaks in middle childhood -resembles social behavior of many young mammals -more common among boys, primarily due to prenatal exposure to androgens -may have been important for developing fighting skill in our evolutionary past -play fighting may be utilized to asses strength of peers versus selves in a safe context -declines in adolescence, when this becomes linked to aggression

Games with rules

-important advance in play -attributed to gains in perspective taking, i.e. the ability to understand the roles of several players in the game, which contributes greatly to emotional and social development. learning the necessity of rules fosters the concepts of fairness and justice. 1. Informally organized: tag, jacks, hopscotch, red rover, leapfrog, etc. This type of play is in decline today. 2. Organized sports: soccer, hockey, etc. increasingly popular. associated with increased self-esteem and social competence. leads to athletic behavior later in life. Can be detrimental if parents and coaches become competitive to the point of prompting anxiety in the child.

obesity treatment

-most effective interventions are family-based, bc it often stems from family disfunction -Early intervention of paramount importance as children maintain weight loss more effectively than adults

asthma

-one-third of childhood chronic illness and most frequent cause of school absence and childhood hospitalization -characterized by high sensitivity of bronchial tubes; involves mucus and contraction of bronchial tubes accompanied by wheezing, coughing, and serious breathing difficulties brought on by cold weather, infection, exercise, allergies, and/or emotional stress -number has doubled over the past 3 decades -results from both heredity and environmental factors -most common in boys, African-American children, children born underweight, children of smokers, children of poverty -environmental stresses: pollution, stressful home life, lack of health care access

Increase in information-processing speed/capacity

-time needed to process information on a wide variety of cognitive tasks declines rapidly between the ages of 6 and 12 -suggests a biologically based gain in speed of thinking, possibly due to myelination and synaptic pruning in the brain -researchers believe this greater efficiency contributes to more complex, effective thinking because a faster thinking can hold on to and operate on more information in working memory -digit span improves

fine motor development

-writing goes from large to small as children learn to control wrist and fingers as opposed to entire arm -children master uppercase letters first due to the horizontal and vertical motions vs small curves in lowercase letters -children should master cursive writing by 3rd grade -depth cues begin to appear -objects in drawings relate to each other as organized whole

Obesity Consequences (2)

1. Physical Health -high blood pressure, high cholesterol levels, respiratory abnormalities, insulin resistance, heart disease, diabetes, gallbladder disease, sleep & digestive disorders, cancer, early death, stroke, kidney failure, circulatory problems (leading to leg amputation and blindness) 2. Emotional/Social -obese people stereotyped as lazy, sloppy, ugly, stupid, self-doubting, and deceitful. -become socially isolated in middle childhood -predicts defiance, aggression, depression -results in reduced life chances in relationships and employment

Obesity Rates

Rising in the past several decades in western countries. also increasing rapidly in developing countries due to urbanization.

gross motor development

Gains in four major capacities: 1. Flexibility 2. balance 3. agility 4. force Additionally, motor performance improves.

Sex differences

Girls: better at fine motor skills of handwriting and drawing as well as gross-motor capacities depending on balance and agility Boys: better at all other gross motor skills; thought to be more due to social experiences as opposed to muscle mass

Information-Processing View of Concrete Operational Thought

Neo-Piagetians: gains in information-processing speed, rather than shift to a new stage -Automatic schemes free working memory. -Central conceptual structures

Seriation

The ability to order items along a quantitative dimension, such as length or weight. for example, arrange sticks from shortest to longest

obesity

a greater than 20 percent increase over healthy weight, based on body mass index (BMI). A BMI above the 85th percentile for a child's age and sex is considered overweight, a BMI above the 95th percentile obese.

body mass index (BMI)

a ratio of height and weight based on body fat

transitive inference

ability demonstrated by the concrete operational child to seriate mentally

Conservation tasks

ability to pass them provides clear evidence of operations-mental actions that obey physical rules. Decentration: focusing on several aspects of a problem and relating them rather than centering on just one Reversibility: the capacity to think through a series of steps and then mentally reverse direction, returning to the starting point

concrete operational stage

according to Piaget, extends from about 7 to 11 years of age and makes a major turning point in cognitive development. thought is more logical, flexible, and organized than it had been earlier.

Impact of Culture and Schooling

affects task performance. -Going to school gives experience on Piagetian tasks. -Relevant nonschool experiences of some cultures can help, too. Accordingly, some investigators have concluded that the forms of logic required by Piagetian tasks do not emerge spontaneously but, rather are heavily influenced by training, context, and cultural conditions.

Classification

btw the ages of 7 and 10, children pass Piaget's class inclusion problem. this indicates that they are more aware of classification hierarchies and can focus on relations between a general category and two specific categories at the same time - that is, three relations at once. Collections become common in middle childhood.

digit-span tasks

children try to repeat an adult-provided string of numbers - this assesses the size of working memory

cognitive maps

children's mental representations of familiar, large scale spaces, such as their neighborhoods or school

Incidence of illness

increases in the first two years of elementary school due to new exposures and continued development of immune system

central conceptual structures

networks of concepts and relations that permit them to think more effectively about a wide range of situations. the central conceptual structures that emerge from integrating concrete operational schemes are broadly applicable principles that result in increasingly complex, systematic reasoning.

scale

notion grasped by 10 - 12 year olds; proportional relation between space and its representation on a map

spatial reasoning

school aged children's understanding of space is more accurate than that of preschoolers. able to create organized maps along an organized route of travel and can give clear, well organized instructions for getting from one place to another using a mental walk strategy

inhibition defined

the ability to control internal and external distracting stimuli by preventing their minds from straying to irrelevant thoughts, thereby preserving space in working memory for the task at hand

working (or short-term) memory

the part of the information-processing system in which we "work" on a limited amount of information, actively applying mental strategies so the information will be retained and used effectively