Children Ages 0-2: Developmental Changes In Children

Developmental Changes in Children Ages 0-2

Physical Development

The physical changes in a child are quite dramatic in the first two years. They gain significant amounts of weight and have rapid changes to the size of their body. We see these obvious changes through the size of a newborn infant to the size and abilities of a two year old. They go from needing assistance with everything to running around, eating new foods, and playing with a greater sense of their surroundings.

Cognitive Development

The brain of a baby before birth has a rate of creating 250,000 new brain cells every minute. As an infant the brain has billions of brain cells, called neurons. As a child grows, his brain matures to knowing more things and being able to communicate with caregivers and those around them. There are also certain “functions of the brain [that] require basic experiences in order to develop.” (Berger, 2011, p. 131) The developing brain of a young child requires these experiences for them to learn new things.

The brain can also be very fragile and therefore a child should not be shaken. When shaken too much they develop shaken baby syndrome which develops brain damage and is life-threatening to a baby.

Language Development

“As infants' brains continue to develop, infants also develop the ability to communicate; to comprehend and produce spoken language.” (Oswalt, n.d.) In babies and young children they develop the ability to communicate through mimicking the things that go on around them.

As they mature they are more capable of copying what someone around them does. When an infant is born, he will not be able to repeat what you say. But as the child grows he will be able to copy your words more and more with development. Because they learn through mimicking, the more a child is around language, the more opportunities they will have to learn and practice the

language.
Individual/Group Differences
Each child is different when it comes to developing and learning with their maturity. For example a child with a mind of that wants to know how things work, they will play with toy until they can figure it out to their mind's extent of knowledge. However, a child with a mind that goes with the flow of things will not worry about how a toy works, they will just enjoy playing with it. Both children are playing with the toy contently, they just have different ways of thinking, learning, and developing. This form of different play will be seen in their different ways of learning. The first child will want to understand why you do something a certain way while the second child will do it because that is how they are taught.
Personal Reflection
To be someone who will work with young children, it is not only important, but necessary to understand how they think. A young child's brain has not yet matured to the level her instructor's brain has, so it would be the instructor's responsibility to understand the children they are working with. Skinner talked about how enrichment was necessary for learning at a young age. Freud discussed the different parts of the body that children connect with at each age. Both of those things could be used to the advantage of an adult working with children because they could create environments that are geared towards the children they are working with. Piaget discussed cognitive development and the importance of understanding how one thinks in order to understand her behavior. This would be beneficial to an instructor because they could work to understand a child's thought process which could help them to better understand their behavior. If a teacher understands her student's thought process, she may be able to understand why he is acting out in class, and how to help him do better. The different theories on behavior can be the key to successfully working with younger children.