Child Development: Prenatal and Neonatal Development

The purpose of this applied homework is to understand the parents’ perception of their children development and experiences of transition into parenthood, and applies the knowledge learnt from the classes into interviewee’s real life experiences, trough an interview of a parent who has a baby around age 6 months – 2 years old.

Background

On Feb. 12th, 2013, at 10:30pm, a 30-min on-phone interview of a 23 year-old mother, Mary Doe, was scheduled for this applied project. The interviewee has a female infant, Lime, who is 1 year 3 months old and the first child of the interviewee. As for their family composition, the interviewee and her husband live with the baby, and also the husband’s parents. On the basis of knowing the knowledge and real life experience of prenatal, neonatal, and newborn development, questions used in the interview are related to the interviewee’s personal perspective of getting into the parenthood and the interviewee’s observations of her child’s development. In addition, even though I assume the interviewee has basic knowledge about the terms of pregnancy and children development, questions used in the interview avoided professional terms in this area and only related to the interviewee’s real experiences.

Content

The interview basically focused on three main sections about the interviewee’s real experience of pregnancy and infant’s development. These sections were prenatal and neonatal development, sleeping and eating, sensation and perception.

Prenatal and Neonatal Development

At around 7 weeks, the interviewee first time realized she got pregnant. During the pregnancy period, she didn’t have any symptom of pregnancy complications but only felt morning sickness. Some other symptoms she emphasized, espec...

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...hat she wouldn’t be afraid of new environment. In addition, with regard to the sensation and perception aspect, specifically, the infant showed most interested in blue objects and sour solid food, which is different from the majority of infants in her age. However, it is hard to explain this particular feature of the infant only according to these interview answers in the infant current age and materials learnt from the course. Therefore, I would like to know more information of the interviewee’s infant when she reaches 2 or 3 years old in the future. For example, does Orange change her eating style or still like sour solid food? What kind of color does she like now? How does she interact with toys now?

Works Cited

Levine, E. L. & Munsch, J. (2013). Child Development: An Active Learning Approach. (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, California, SAGE Publications Ltd.