Essay on Childhood and Family Development

Physical development

Child development is the ability of a child to perform more difficult and complicated tasks as they continue to grow. Child development takes place between birth and end of the adolescence period. Physical development is the process that starts while a child is still an infant and continues up until puberty period. It involves physical coordination and the development of the body particularly the development of muscles. The pinnacle of physical development usually takes place in childhood. Neurological brain development and coordination of the body starts taking place during this period. The brain begins to develop synapses, the number of synapses formed is much higher than those in ordinary human beings. These enable the child to adapt to different conditions and environments.

Brain development can be best seen when children hold on to a toy and look at it for an extended period examining it from every angle. Children begin to lose their baby fat, and they straighten up in their body shapes to look more like adults. Averagely, the growth of children during this period is between two to three inches per year. Proper nutrition and a healthy lifestyle are mandatory to enable motor skills that start to develop are fully mastered and utilized. They begin holding things with their hands playing with objects, writing, pulling to stand and other skills.

Middle childhood starts when the child is ready to go to kindergarten. The children have already undergone several changes, and they can dress up well. This is the period where the children start going to school. They develop social physical and mental skills. They start socializing and making friends during this period. During this period, children begin developing muscles; the body starts to develop unevenly ranging from muscles and bones. Outward appearance changes during this time as it is the time that prepares them for puberty. Children in this period engage in different activities such as school work, participating in teamwork and even making friends. It is during this time that they start thinking logically though with limited ability to extend such concepts. This is the period that children learn from adults (McHale, Crouter & Whiteman, 2003).

The children learn to do things like cooking, making things and also fixing things. The children learn better ways to do things. This is the period where the children experience more peer pressure. It is fundamental for them to be taught about peer pressure, puberty to know how to deal with it when they enter the adolescent phase. They tend to be forgetful at this time and are overly disorganized. During this period, the children have the urge to do and achieve greater things; they spell out their dreams and what they want to accomplish in life. They set goals and have interest in achieving those goals. This is the time that they need to be guided on how to control their emotions. The brain develops further during this phase because it need s to accumulate and store much information that is being learned at this stage. The synapses with weak connections are shed off, and new ones are developed. They continue to learn poetry grammar and new vocabularies.

The adolescence period. Adolescence occurs from the age of 13 years, and it is the period that children change into adulthood. During this stage, children tend to eat a lot of food. They also tend to sleep a lot. Puberty starts to cave into their lives more evidently. Hormones are released at this phase in childhood development and affect their behaviors and body changes in general. They develop outward physical changes, there is increased body odor, the voice changes and becomes deep. The children at this age tend to do things that are not good unwary of the consequences that might come from such actions. They develop new thinking skills, and start seeing things in multiple dimensions and not in simple forms. They build sarcasm and use it to create humor. They also argue a lot with the parents which is irritating. The brain cortex continues to grow and develop at this stage of child development.

There is a change to sex organs during this period of adolescence. Many children in late adolescence usually have entirely grown in height and body size, they think maturely and abstractly at this time and can make decisions that are good. This is a period of high transition involving finishing certain levels of education, employment and unemployment and also getting into relationships. This is the period that adolescents engage in activities like drinking alcohol, having unprotected sex, drinking and driving and such harmful things. The period is also used as a time to engage the adolescents by adults to sharpen their skills in some regions of specializations for them. (Belsky, Steinberg & Draper, 1991).

The concepts presented are similar to the ones learned about with Mc Devitt as they focus on the development of a child since childhood through up to adolescence. The concepts focus on the cognitive and moral progress in the classroom in Mc Devitts book. They seem to highlight how children should be taught to enable development in a class by the teachers. The concepts discussed above usually touch on development in a child up to adolescent period.

This topic covers essential learning objectives. The objectives enable candidates to describe the process of building productive relationships both in the family and the community at large. The candidates can create a healthy environment to strive in because they would know the characteristics and influences of development on an individual. Cultural competence is advanced by candidates, and this helps in creating a non-biased environment that allows individuals from different cultural settings to thrive and co-exist with each other. It also enables the shaping of professionalism in the candidate's field of study by providing ethical leadership and creates productive interactions in the community.

References

Belsky, J., Steinberg, L., & Draper, P. (1991). Childhood experience, interpersonal development, and reproductive strategy: An evolutionary theory of socialization. Child development, 62(4), 647-670.

McHale, S. M., Crouter, A. C., & Whiteman, S. D. (2003). The family contexts of gender development in childhood and adolescence. Social development, 12(1), 125-148.