Transcript Chapter 6: Infancy (First 24 Months) Infancy (First 24 Months) • Chapter Objectives – To identify important milestones in the maturation of the sensory and.

Chapter 6:
Infancy (First 24 Months)
Infancy (First 24 Months)
• Chapter Objectives
– To identify important milestones in the
maturation of the sensory and motor systems,
and to describe the interactions among these
systems during the first 2 years of life
– To define social attachment as the process
through which infants develop strong
emotional bonds with others, and to describe
the dynamics of attachment formation during
infancy
Infancy (First 24 Months)
• Chapter Objectives (cont.)
– To describe the development of sensorimotor
intelligence, including an analysis of how
infants organize experiences and
conceptualize causality
– To examine the nature of emotional
development, including emotional
differentiation, the interpretation of emotions,
and emotional regulation
Infancy (First 24 Months)
• Chapter Objectives (cont.)
– To analyze the factors that contribute to the
resolution of the psychosocial crisis of trust
versus mistrust, including the achievement of
mutuality with the caregiver and the
attainment of a sense of hope or withdrawal
– To evaluate the critical role of
parents/caregivers during infancy with special
attention to issues of safety in the physical
environment; optimizing cognitive, social, and
emotional development; and the role of
parents/caregivers as advocates for their
infants with other agencies and systems
Infancy (First 24 Months)
• Newborns
– On average 7 to 7 1/2 pounds and 20 inches
– Low-birth-weight-babies: weigh 5 pounds 8
ounces or less
– Small for their gestational age: low weight for
a given gestational age
Infancy (First 24 Months)
Infancy (First 24 Months)
• The Development of Sensory/Perceptual
and Motor Functions
– 5 Senses
– Hearing - Newborns can hear a wide variety
of sounds, but they are more responsive to
some than to others, such as the mother’s
voice
– Vision
• Visual acuity, or fineness of discrimination, is
limited for newborns, but improves rapidly within
the first four months
• Infants have special appeal for the human face or
‘faceness’
Infancy (First 24 Months)
• The Development of Sensory/Perceptual
and Motor Functions (cont.)
– Taste and Smell - taste and smell preferences
apparent at birth and may be at least partially
functioning in utero
– Touch - fundamental means of interaction
which enhances infants’ responsiveness to
the environment
• Swaddling or wrapping a baby in a soft blank uses
the tactile senses to soothe the baby
Infancy (First 24 Months)
• The Development of Sensory/Perceptual
and Motor Functions (cont.)
– The sensory/perceptual capacities function as
an interconnected system to provide a variety
of sources of information about the
environment at the same time
Infancy (First 24 Months)
Infancy (First 24 Months)
• Temperament
– Relatively stable characteristics or response
to the environment that can be observed
during the first months of life
– Significant source of individual differences
which emerge from a combination of genetic,
environmental, and socially construed factors
– Assessed by child’s positive or negative
reaction to environmental events and the
stability of this reaction, which leads to a
patterned reaction by others
Infancy (First 24 Months)
• Another View of Temperament
– Reactivity or the child’s threshold for arousal,
which could be evidenced at the
physiological, emotional, or motor level
– Self-regulation or behavioral inhibition that
can be thought of as a continuum from bold or
brazen to inhibited and cautious
Infancy (First 24 Months)
• Case Study: The Cotton Family
– Thought Questions
• How would you describe Anna’s temperament?
What problems might the Cotton family face if
Anna had been a more passive, reserved, and
inhibited child?
• In what ways was Anna being expected to adapt to
the Cotton family lifestyle?
• What are some of the challenges Nancy and Paul
faced as new parents? How did they cope with
these challenges?
• How would you describe Nancy’s enactment of the
mother role?
Infancy (First 24 Months)
• Case Study: The Cotton Family (cont.)
– Thought Questions (cont.)
• Anna seems to be influencing the well-being of her
mother, father, and her grandmother. What impact
does Anna have on each of these family
members?
Infancy (First 24 Months)
• Attachment
– Process through which people develop
specific, positive emotional bonds with others
– Parenting or caregiving is the nurturing
responses of the caregiver to the child
– Synchrony, or interactions that are rhythmic,
well-timed, and mutually rewarding establish
attachments
Infancy (First 24 Months)
Infancy (First 24 Months)
• The Development of Attachment
– Goal-corrected partnership or as the child
becomes aware that other people have their
own separate points of view, they begin to
include the other person’s needs and goals
into their plans
– Stranger anxiety develops during the second
half the first year and is the baby’s discomfort
or tension in the presence of unfamiliar adults
Infancy (First 24 Months)
• The Development of Attachment (cont.)
– Separation anxiety occurs at about 9 months,
and is when infants give another indication of
the intensity of their attachment to their
parents by expressing rage and despair when
their parents leave
Infancy (First 24 Months)
• Formation of Attachments with Mother,
Father, and Others
– The amount of time the infant spends in the
care of the person
– The quality and responsiveness of the care
provided by the person
– The person’s emotional investment in the
infant
– The presence of the person in the infant’s life
across time
Infancy (First 24 Months)
• Measuring the Security of Attachment: The
Strange Situation
– A 20 minute period
– Child is exposed to a sequence of periods of
separations and reunions with the caregiver
– How the child responds to these periods is
used to assess their level of attachment to the
caregiver
Infancy (First 24 Months)
• Four Patterns of Quality of Attachment
– Secure Attachment - actively explore
environment and interact with strangers while
their caregiver is present
– Anxious-Avoidant Attachment - avoid contact
with caregiver after separation or ignore their
efforts to interact
– Anxious-Resistant Attachment - are very
cautious in the presence of a stranger and
their exploratory behavior is noticeably
disrupted by the caregiver’s departure; upon
return of the caregiver, the child is very hard
to comfort
Infancy (First 24 Months)
• Four Patterns of Quality of Attachment
(cont.)
– Disorganized Attachment - noticeable in the
reunion sequence, infants have no coherent
strategy for managing stress and behave in
contradictory, unpredictable ways that seem
to convey feeling of extreme fear or utter
confusion
Infancy (First 24 Months)
Figure 6.3 Factors Contributing to Caregiver Sensitivity
Infancy (First 24 Months)
• The Relevance of Attachment to Later
Development
– The nature of one’s attachment influences
expectations about the self, others, and the
nature of relationships
– The formations of a secure attachment
relationship is expected to influence the
child’s ability to explore and engage the
environment with confidence
Infancy (First 24 Months)
• The Relevance of Attachment to Later
Development (cont.)
– From a life-span perspective, the quality of
the attachment formed in infancy influence the
formation of later relationships (friends,
romantic, and collegial) but is not the sole
determinant
– Reactive Attachment Disorder - linked to
serious disturbances in infant attachment
– Inhibited Type - the person is very withdrawn,
hypervigilant in social contacts, and resistant
to comfort
Infancy (First 24 Months)
• The Relevance of Attachment to Later
Development (cont.)
– Uninhibited Type - the person shows a lack of
discrimination, being overly friendly and
attaching to any new person
Infancy (First 24 Months)
• Sensorimotor Intelligence and Early
Causal Schemes: How Do Infants
Organize their Experiences?
– Sensorimotor intelligence, or motor routine,
that reflects organization
– Sensorimotor adaptation is Piaget’s chief
mechanism governing the growth of
intelligence during infancy
– Causality or the capacity to anticipate that
certain actions will have specific effects on
objects in the environment is based largely on
sensory and motor experiences
Infancy (First 24 Months)
Infancy (First 24 Months)
• The Nature of Objects
– Object Permanence - concept that objects in
the environment are permanent and do not
cease to exist when they are out of reach or
view
– Precursors of Object Permanence habituation tests of events have shown that
object permanence develops earlier than
Piaget thought, but the question still remains
whether an infant’s visual response to hidden
objects is evidence that object permanence
exists long before Piaget expected
Infancy (First 24 Months)
• The Nature of Objects (cont.)
– Object Permanence and Attachment - the
scheme for the permanent object applies to
both humans and inanimate objects, thus one
reason babies experience separation anxiety
is that they are uncertain whether a person to
whom they are attached will continue to exist
once out of sight
Infancy (First 24 Months)
• The Categorization of Objects
– Fundamental element of information
processing in which children treat certain
individual objects as similar because they
belong to the same basic grouping
– Four properties of physical objects
• Have a location, a path, and speed of motion
• Have mechanical properties that include how they
move and their relation to other objects
• Have features, such as size, shape, and color
• Have functions (this is what objects do or how they
are used)
Infancy (First 24 Months)
Figure 6.4 The Feedback System of Emotions
Infancy (First 24 Months)
Infancy (First 24 Months)
• Emotions as a Key to Understanding
Meaning
– Provide a channel for determining the
meaning the child is giving to a specific
situation
• The Ability to Regulate Emotions
– One of the most important elements in the
development of emotional regulation is the
way caregivers assist infants to manage their
strong feelings
Infancy (First 24 Months)
• Emotions as a Channel for Adult-Infant
Communication
– Emotions provide a two-way channel through
which infants and their caregivers can
establish intersubjectivity
– One of the most notable ways that infants and
adults have of co-constructing their reality is
the mechanism of social referencing
Infancy (First 24 Months)
• The Psychosocial Crisis: Trust versus
Mistrust
– Trust - refers to an appraisal of the
availability, dependability, and sensitivity of
another person and emerges in the course of
a relationship as one person discovers those
traits in another person
– Mistrust - can arise, during infancy, from at
least three sources: infant wariness, lack of
confidence in the caregiver, and doubt in
one’s own lovableness
Infancy (First 24 Months)
• The Central Process for Resolving the
Crisis: Mutuality with the Caregiver
– Mutuality is a characteristic of a relationship
and initially is built on the consistency with
which the caregiver responds appropriately to
the infant’s needs
Infancy (First 24 Months)
• Coordination, Mismatch, and Repair of
Interactions
– Coordination refers to two related
characteristics on interaction - matching and
synchrony
– Matching means that the infant and the
caregiver are involved in similar behaviors or
states at the same time
– Synchrony means that the infant and
caregiver move fluidly from one state to the
next
Infancy (First 24 Months)
• Coordination, Mismatch, and Repair of
Interactions (cont.)
– In normal mother-infant pairs, however,
periods of mismatch are usually followed by
communication repairs, so that infants and
mothers cycle again through points of
coordination in their interactions
Infancy (First 24 Months)
• The Central Process for Resolving the
Crisis: Mutuality with the Caregiver
• Establishing a Functional Rhythm in the
Family
– The match or mismatch between an infant’s
rhythms and the family’s rhythms is an
important factor in the overall adjustment of a
family to a new baby
• Parents with Psychological Problems
– The importance of reciprocal interactions in
building trust and hope during infancy is
highlighted by studies of parents with
psychological problems
Infancy (First 24 Months)
• The Prime Adaptive Ego Quality and the
Core Pathology
– Hope - the first prime adaptive ego quality,
hope, pervades the entire life story. It is a
global cognitive orientation that one’s goals
and dreams can be attained and that events
will turn out for the best
– Withdrawal - a general orientation of wariness
toward people and objects
Infancy (First 24 Months)
• The Role of Parents
– Safety in the physical environment
– Fostering emotional and cognitive
development
– Fathers’ and mothers’ parental behavior
– Parents as advocates
– The importance of social support
Infancy (First 24 Months)