The Growing Years: Social Development and Attachment
From the moment of birth, children are social creatures. Infants in all cultures develop an intense bond with their caregivers, a bond researchers call attachment. The experiences children have in the first years of life shape their sense of themsel...
The Growing Years: Brain Development in Infancy
From infancy on, the brain and mind, the neural hardware and cognitive software of an infant develop together. At birth the limbic areas are quite immature, and the cortex is almost entirely underdeveloped. The neurons are there, but the connections...
The Growing Years: Developing a Sense of Self
By the end of childhood, most children have developed a sense of themselves as individuals, unique and apart from others they know and see. Although the general consensus of researchers is that this sense does not emerge before the age of two, Karen...
The Growing Years: Do Babies Have a Sense of Numbers?
Karen Wynn and a team of researchers at the Yale Infant Cognition Laboratory are conducting experiments related to young babies and their ability to grasp number and mathematics concepts. Using "looking time" as a measure of a baby's expectations, r...
The Growing Years: Early Motor Development
As the infant's muscles and nervous systems mature, more complex skills emerge...first sitting, then standing, and walking. The brain uses the sensory feedback it receives to guide the development of movement. The age at which a baby acquires variou...
The Growing Years: Does Daycare Impair Attachment?
For many children today childcare and preschool begin at an early age. A National Institute of Child Health and Human Development study shows that most children do well in daycare as long as the quality of childcare is good to excellent. They do not...
The Growing Years: Piaget's Concrete Operational Stage Revisited
Piaget believed that by the age of 6 or 7 children are able to move beyond simple mathematical operations to the "concrete operational stage." Then as children approach adolescence they begin to think outside the box of actual experience and deal wi...