Coping
means adapting to challenges- meeting new people, dealing with frustrations, managing fears and stress- and accommodating to new situations
Competence
is a cluster of related skills, knowledge and abilities. Learning to cope with life’s challenges builds social, emotional, physical and cognitive competencies
Developing social competence
- Around a year and half children are
becoming more independent
o Can move about on their own and starts to use language
- The word “no” for many parents can be seen as a sign of defiance
but it should really be seen as a point in which the child is learning to be independent
o The child begins making their own decisions
1) According to Dr. Bryan Kolb, why are social interactions so important for cognitive development? Relative to puzzles or word games, what is the most complex behaviour?
Interaction of children and the way they engage in play like behaviours is very important- puzzles and board games
o Children set up social hierarchies when they play with each other
This is important because it teaches the children how to engage with one another
o The most complicated/complex behaviour we have is social interaction
We do not behave the same way around different individuals. (Behave differently when in the presence of your mother vs. friends vs. strangers)
1 to 1 interaction rather than 1 to puzzle interactions are important for getting the frontal lobe up to speed in terms of how you keep track of all this contextual information that you are going to need as an adult in a complicated world.
Dr. Lillian Katz
- Unless children achieve at least a minimal level of
social competence by roughly about the age of 6 they will be at risk for the rest of their lives.
o Because once a child has experienced being defined as unlikeable or has been avoided by peers then that child tends to define itself as those traits.
- Children learn best through
play; they also find ways to deal with fears, anger and other strong emotions.
- Between the ages of 1 and 6- play is one of the
main ways children interact with the world
o Play is how they learn about the world around them, how they problem-solve, develop skills, create imaginary worlds, make friends and discover all kinds of new and interesting things.
Stages of play:
- Functional play
- constructive play
- symbolic play
- games with rules play
- Functional play- simple movements that involve the senses.
o Much of the play of infants and toddlers is functional play
o Simple and repetitive - Constructive play- a style of play in which the child uses play materials to create something
o The child may or may not have a plan/intended outcome.
o Children usually start to engage in constructive play around age two. - Symbolic (or dramatic) play- the child using one object to represent another
o this type of play can start off as simple imitation and pretend and it progresses to dramatic and sociodramatic play, in which children act out stories with others and may include props and costumes.
o Typically seen through the preschool years. - Games with rules play- can include games with set rules that the children develop together.
o The games may or may not be competitive, but they require children to agree on the rules and to follow them in order to play together.
o Cognitive advances in the school age period allow children to manage and enjoy more complicated games with rules.
Parten’s categories of social play
- Unoccupied
- Onlooker
- Solitary play
- Parallel play
- Associative play
- Cooperative play
- Unoccupied: when a child is not playing but strands around or fleetingly watches anything that is of interest
- Onlooker: when a child watches other children play without participating. Children at all ages engage in this.
- Solitary play: when a child plays alone, focused on him/herself, whether others are present or not. When others are present or nearby, there is no interaction. Children engage in solitary play at any age
- Parallel play: when two or more children play near each other, engaged in their own activities, without interacting. This type is common among toddlers and young preschoolers.
- Associative play: when children play with similar materials, in close proximity. They might talk and/or share ideas or materials but they are not working together or playing in a coordinated way. Young preschoolers (Ages 3 to 4) tend to play in this way
- Cooperative play: when two or more individuals or groups work together with a plan or desired outcome. This usually requires children to take on roles or tasks and to negotiate in order to sustain the play. By about age 4, children can usually manage cooperative play.
Self-regulation is
“an ability to be boss of one’s own attention, emotion and behaviour at an appropriate level of one’s age and culture”
- Involves taking into account not only our own thoughts and feelings but those of others as well.
- Is central to our transition from helplessness to competence
- Develops post-Nataly- in first 5 or 6 years of life
- Children learn self-regulation by being regulated
- How we manage stress
- About addressing and removing or preventing impulses in the first place
- The regulation of our energy is central to how
we regulate our emotions, behaviour and attention.
o Arousal states operate on a continuum from asleep to crying and unable to cope.
o When experiences are overwhelming, a young child’s arousal regulation can be overwhelmed.
Young children may shut down or become on constant, high alert.
Self-regulation and learning, behaviour and health
There are 3 key aspects
- Emotion regulation: is the process of initiating, maintaining and adjusting the occurrence, intensity or duration
- Behaviour regulation: is the organization of social interactions with others and the coordination of physical movements
- Attention regulation: is the capacity to selectively and consciously focus. It is the basis for persistence, curiosity, memory, cognitive flexibility, planning and problem solving
2) Introduction to temperament
Nine observable dimensions that were used to score children’s behaviours in order to define temperament.
- Activity level: how active is the child i.e., how often do they move and how fast?
- Rhythmicity: how regular is the child’s bodily functions e.g., sleep, hunger, exertion
- Approach or withdrawal: how does the child initially respond to new people? Places? Food? Objects?
- Adaptability: how easily does the children adapt to changes?
- Intensity of reaction: whether a positive or negative reaction, how much energy does the child expend?
- Threshold of responsiveness: how intense does something have to be before the child responds to it?
- Quality of mood: overall, does the child tend to be happy (positive) or not (negative)
- Distractibility: how easily distracted is the child?
- Attention span and persistence: how much time does the child spend in activity and how long do they continue even if they experience interruptions or interference?
Three general types of children
- Easy: these children tend to be positive in mood, regular in their bodily functions and adapt easily to changes
o 40% of children can be categorized as “easy” - Slow to warm up: these children tend to be negative in mood, initially react by withdrawing but adapt slowly to changes
o 15% of children can be categorized as this - Difficult: these children tend to be negative in mood, irregular in their bodily functions, adapt to new experiences slowly and with difficulty and have high-intensity reactions
o 10% can be categorized as this
Temperament refers to
children’s emotionality, activity and attention.
- Can be defined as individual differences in reactivity and self-regulation
- A temperament bias refers to patterns of feelings based in a child’s biology and appear early in development
- Temperament is an individual difference that influences how we react to situations, interactions and environments.
- The terms “goodness of fit” and “the match” are commonly used to describe the temperamental similarities and differences between parent and child.
3) According to Dr. Joan Durrant, goodness of fit with a parent is most important for children with what predispositions or characteristics? What should parents be considering when responding to a given child’s temperament
o A child who is more active, more reactive, more impulsive, less persistent, less regular in their rhythms, is more difficult for the parent if the parent has a different temperament
A very low activity parent with a high activity child can create some challenges
o parents need to look and analyze the different temperaments they both have and try and get them to match
o Parents need to look at things as two personalities coming together that neither one has a whole lot of control over-
When a child is jumping on furniture and you want them to stop- rather than getting mad at the child need to take a step back and realize that maybe this child needs more activity- they need to jump
Hidden regulators
: infant-mother interactions include touch, temperature, sounds, smells and movement that exert an unobserved, discrete impact on regulating the infant’s physiological system and behaviours such as crying.
- Crying signals
a baby’s needs to caregivers.
- Infants typically have 4 distinct types of cries
the birth cry, the pain cry, the hungry cry and the pleasure cry
o Birth cry: occurs only at birth and is how the infant clears out amniotic fluid from the lungs and trachea.
o The other cries are often signals to caregivers and may be difficult to distinguish
4) According to Dr. Ron Barr, does the phenomenon of difficult infants who cry a lot seem to be universal, or is specific to Western societies?
o It seems to be universal. Crying linked to higher survival capacity
o There is huge variations in everything- so why would crying be any different
5) As discussed by Dr. Joan Durrant, what is a common assumption about infant crying amongst parents and what behaviour does it put parents at risk for?
o When babies are crying, if a parent assumes that baby is crying just to make them mad, that parent is likely ignore or get angry and shake the baby.
- Attachment
refers to the intimate emotional bonds that infants develop with their parents and other primary caregivers. Individual interactions build attachment relationships.
o Secure attachment relationships between young children and their parents and caregivers are fundamental to helping children learn to cope with stress and regulate emotions, behaviour and attention
o Attachment is easier when parents are attuned to their babies.
Attunement refers to how parents and other caregivers react to an infant’s signals.
Well attuned caregivers detect what their babies are feeling and are able to reflect those emotions back in their facial expressions, voice, behaviour.
6) What parenting quality does Jean Clinton emphasize as critical for the development of children’s secure attachment?
o Predictable parents- will the parents respond when they cry? Important to so that the child can develop secure attachments
o Parents that ignore the child- child may develop insecure/avoidant attachments
o Parents that cause fear- disorganized attachment
o Important to respond to the baby predictably.
