Early Childhood: Analyzing a child

Essay by TakEaLoOk@meCollege, UndergraduateA, May 2007

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Early development is one of the many main studies through out the field of psychology. According to textbook definition, childhood development is a field devoted to understanding constancy and change from the conception through adolescence and adulthood. Stating the following explains that there are many stages that a child goes through during childhood in order to progress physically, mentally and most importantly emotionally. Determining these stages can help understand where children are according to standard average ratings. In other words, by concentrating on analyzing the physical, intellectual, and social/emotional development stages, the possibility to determine if the child is behind, right on track or even highly ahead in many areas of development are easy to distinguish.

For this particular assignment, our responsibilities included choosing a child (age range: newborn-12 years ofage) and make some observations while connecting it to what we previous learned throughout our class sessions. Luckily, I took the liberty in benefiting from my mother’s occupation, which is working for a day-care center and an elementary school.

Otherwise, with my chaotic schedule would have never allowed me the time to a find a child to observe and analyze. I first decided to observe the children in the day-care center. When I first arrived at the day-care center, as I sat down to play with the children I noticed one thing right away. The kids seemed very shy towards me and they did not seem like they were very sociable. I realize I was a total stranger to them, and I would have to guess that all of the children were experiencing a little bit of stranger anxiety. Stranger anxiety often occurs when children do not recognize unfamiliar faces and become uncomfortable. I walked around the room a few times just to get a feel of the atmosphere for...