Following are 2 key areas of child development-

◦ Mental/Cognitive Development - The ability to understand and assimilate new information; the ability of the mind to process information.

◦ Social/Emotional Development - The development of one’s personality: key traits and characteristics, such as initiative. These personality traits will impact the child’s overall adjustment and ability to accomplish goals and interact with people throughout life.

Why seek to understand early development?◦ To know how to best support and guide children, as well

as provide them with an environment appropriate to their learning needs.

Child Development

Stages of Development

Development occurs in stages. A definition is:

◦ The “Growth of a child’s perceptual, emotional, intellectual, and behavioral capabilities and functioning” in recognizable stages.

To illustrate: In The Phantom Tollbooth, Milo encounters a magical boy from a different world:

Milo find himself staring at brown shoes that are at his eye level. He had met a boy about his age where everyone is born in the air, head at the height it will be when he’s an adult, and grows to the ground. The boy thinks growing “up” is silly. . .

“Your head keeps changing its height,” he says,” and you always see things in a different way. Why, when you’re 15 things won’t look at all the way they did when you were ten, and at twenty everything will change again.”

Jean Piaget, a developmental psychologist, is famous for his theory of children’s growth.

Piaget’s theory : The 4 Cognitive Stages of Development

The 4 stages have 2 common traits. Universal - They are consistent. For example, in a culture

where children reach one stage at different age than they reach that same stage in American culture, children from both cultures still follow through the exact same stages of development.

Unvarying sequence - Each stage builds upon the other. This makes the importance of a child’s development during each stage highly important.