Please respond to the discussion questions below. Each response should be 250-300 word count for a total of 500 word minimum.

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Home>Psychology homework help>Please respond to the discussion questions below. Each response should be 250-300 word count for a total of 500 word minimum.

Kathleen Stassen Berger

Part II

The First Two Years: Biosocial Development

Chapter Five

  • Body Changes
  • Brain Development
  • Senses and Motor Skills
  • Public Health Measures

  • In infancy:
  • growth is fast
  • consequences of neglect can be severe
  • gains need to be monitored

  • Check-ups need to include:
  • measurement of height
  • weight
  • head circumference

Body Changes

  • At birth the average infant weights 7 ½ lbs.
  • typically doubles by 4th month
  • triples by 1st birthday

  • physical growth slows in 2nd year
  • by 24 months weight is about 30 lbs, height about 32”-36”

  • head-sparing: biological mechanism that protects brain when malnutrition affects body growth

  • percentiles: numbers fall between 0 and 100, with 50 being exactly average

  • New babies spend about 17 hours daily

sleeping.

  • Regular sleep correlates with:
  • normal brain maturation
  • learning
  • emotional regulation
  • psychological adjustment

Sleep

  • Over the first month, amount of time in each stage of sleep changes.
  • Newborns dream a lot with a high proportion of REM sleep.

  • rapid eye movement sleep (REM): stage of sleep characterized by:
  • flickering eyes
  • dreaming
  • rapid brain waves

Maturation and Sleep Patterns

  • First-borns typically receive more attention, which correlates to them having more sleep problems than later borns.

  • Insisting that an infant conform to parents’ sleep-wake schedule can be frustrating.
  • in some cases, harmful
  • brain patterns and digestion not ready for adult sleep patterns.

  • co-sleep: custom in which parents and children (usually infants) sleep together in same bed

  • Parent hear contradictory advice about this practice.
  • Parents in Asia, Africa, and Latin America favor co-sleeping.
  • Western parents put infants to sleep in a crib in a separate bedroom.

Brain Development

  • Newborn’s skull is disproportionately large.
  • at birth is 25% of the adult brain
  • body only 5% of the adult weight
  • By age 2 the brain is almost 75% of the adult brain weight.
  • The child’s total body weight is only about 20% of its adult weight.

Basic Brain Structures

  • In infancy, human brains have billions of neurons.
  • Some deep inside brain stem, region that controls automatic responses, such as:
  • heartbeat
  • breathing
  • temperature
  • arousal

  • about 70% of neurons are in the cortex

  • cortex: outer layers of the brain
  • most thinking, feeling, and sensing involve cortex

  • axon: fiber that extends from a neuron
  • transmits electrochemical impulses to dendrites of other neurons
  • dendrite: fiber that extends from the neuron
  • receives electrochemical impulses transmitted from other neurons via their axons

  • synapse: intersection between the axon of one neuron and the dendrites of other neurons.

  • Axons and dendrites do not touch at synapses.
  • the release of chemicals called neurotransmitters are sent by electrochemical impulses.

  • At birth the brain contains more than 100 billion neurons.
  • more than any person will ever use

  • A fivefold increase in dendrites in the cortex occurs in the 24 months after birth.
  • about 100 trillion synapses at age 2
  • growth called transient exuberance

  • Pruning occurs when the unused neurons and disconneted dendrites atrophy and die.

Transient Exuberance and Pruning

  • Brain structure and growth depends on genes and experiences.

  • Increasing cognitive complexity of childhood related to a loss rather than a gain of synapses.

Experience Shapes the Brain

  • experience-expectant brain functions
  • require certain basic common experiences, which an infant can be expected to have in order to develop normally

  • experience-dependent brain functions
  • depend on particular, variable experience

that may or may not develop

Necessary and Possible Experiences

  • Necessary to develop a person’s potential:
  • caressing newborn
  • talking to preverbal infant
  • showing affection toward a small child

Implications for Caregivers

  • self-righting: inborn drive to remedy a developmental deficit

  • Human brain designed to grow and adapt.
  • some plasticity retained throughout life
  • brain protects itself from overstimulation
  • overstimulated babies cry or sleep
  • understimulated babies adjust by developing new connections lifelong.

Sensation and Movement

  • Piaget called the first period of intelligence the sensorimotor stage.
  • emphasizes that cognition develops from senses and motor skills

  • Infant brain development depends on sensory experience and early movement.

  • sensation: response of a sensory system
  • eyes, ears, skin, tongue, nose

  • perception: mental processing of sensory information when brain interprets a sensation

The Five Senses

  • develops during last trimester

acute at birth

  • Young infants are particularly attentive to the human voice.
  • before comprehension babies understand:

rhythm

segmentation

cadence of spoken words

Hearing

  • Vision is the least mature sense at birth.

  • Newborns “legally blind”
  • focusing only on objects between 4 and 30 inches away

  • binocular vision: ability to focus the two eyes in coordinated manner in order to see an image

Seeing

The senses of smell, taste, and touch function at birth and rapidly adapt to the social world.

Smelling, Tasting, and Touching

  • motor skills: learned ability to move some part of the body

  • reflex: unlearned, involuntary action or movement emitted in response to a particular stimulus

Motor Skills

Reflexes Critical for Survival

  • Breathing reflex
  • Also hiccups, sneezes, and thrashing
  • To Maintain Body Temperature
  • Cry, shiver, tuck legs
  • To facilitate feeding
  • Sucking, rooting, swallowing, spitting up

  • reflexes that are important signs of normal brain and body functioning:

Reflexes

  • Babinski reflex–
  • when feet are stroked, toes fan upward
  • Stepping reflex–
  • held upright move their legs to walk
  • Swimming reflex–
  • when laid horizontally on their stomachs, stretch out arms and legs

Sensation and Movement

gross motor skills: physical abilities involving large body movements, such as walking and jumping

fine motor skills: physical abilities involving small body movement, especially of hands and fingers

Public Health Measures

  • Pubic health refers to the wellness of an entire population.
  • 9 billion children born between 1950 – 2008.
  • 2 billion died before age 5

  • preventive care includes:
  • childhood immunization
  • clean water
  • adequate nutrition

  • immunization: process that stimulates the body’s immune system to defend against attack by a particular contagious disease

  • successes in immunization include:
  • smallpox
  • polio
  • measles
  • rotovirus

  • Infant mortality worldwide has plummeted in recent years.
  • sudden death syndrome (SIDS)– a seemingly healthy infant suddenly stops breathing and dies unexpectedly while sleeping
  • 1990 in the U.S.:
  • 5000 babies died of SIDS (about 1 in 800)

Sudden Infant Death Syndrome

  • For most newborns, good nutrition starts with mother’s milk
  • Less likely to get sick
  • breast milk provides antibodies against any diseases to which the mother is immune.

  • colostrum: thick, high-calorie fluid secreted by woman’s breast for first three days after birth

Breast is Best

  • Chronically malnourished infants and children suffer in three ways:
  • brains may not develop normally
  • have no body reserves to protect against common disease
  • some diseases result directly from malnutrition

Malnutrition

  • marasmus: disease of severe protein-calorie malnutrition during early infancy
  • growth stops
  • body tissues waste away
  • eventually dies

  • kwashiorkor: disease of chronic malnutrition during childhood
  • makes child more vulnerable to other diseases
  • measles
  • diarrhea
  • influenza