1 Introduction to Child Development
Chapter Objectives
After this chapter, you should be able to:
- Describe the principles that underlie development.
- Differentiate periods of human development.
- Understand issues in development.
- Distinguish the different methods of research.
- Explain what a theory is and compare and contrast different theories of child development.
Welcome to Child Growth and Development. This text is a presentation of how and why children grow, develop, and learn from conception to adolescence. Registered early childhood educators (RECEs) draw from their professional knowledge of child development, learning theories, and pedagogical and curricular approaches to plan, implement, document and assess child-centered inquiry and play-based learning experiences for children (College of Early Childhood Educators, 2017, p. 10). Understanding the patterns of development help early childhood educators build caring and responsive relationships (College of Early Childhood Educators, 2017) with the children in their care as well as design safe and accessible environments which support children’s play and learning (College of Early Childhood Educators, 2017), both of which contribute to a sense of belonging and overall well-being (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2014b).
The content in this text is being shared with pre-service early childhood educators with an Ontario context, referring to foundational documents that support the early learning and care profession, including, but not exclusive of: The Code of Ethics and Standards of Practice for Early Childhood Educators in Ontario, How Does Learning Happen? and Excerpts from ELECT.
Principles of Development
There are several underlying principles of development to keep in mind:
- Development is lifelong and change is apparent across the lifespan (although this text ends with adolescence). Early experiences affect later development.
- Development is multidirectional. We show gains in some areas of development while showing a loss in other areas.
- Development is multidimensional. We change across three general domains/dimensions: physical, cognitive, and social-emotional.
In Ontario, the Continuum of Development can be found in the Excerpts to ELECT. It outlines the sequence of steps across the five domains of development (social, emotional, communication/language/literacy, cognition, physical) that are typical for the majority of children. It is not an assessment tool, rather it was designed to support RECEs as they observe and document children’s emerging skills (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2014). It should be noted that all five domains are interrelated and no one domain is more important than another (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2014a).
Research in child development tends to fall into one of the following four themes:
- Early Development is related to later development but not perfectly. Can you think of examples?
- Development is always jointly influenced by heredity and envi