Brain development

Hannah Glass

Our brain is a complex structure in the body. There are many stages
that we go through in our lifetime. According to Paula Wiggings at the
University of Texas, by age six, the brain is 95% its adult weight and peak of
energy consumption. With many crucial parts of the brain developing in the
infancy stage as well as early childhood development stage in the brain.
Some of the events that are happening in these stages of life are voluntary
movement, reasoning, perception, Attachments, frontal lobes active in the
development of emotions, planning, working memory, and perception.
Infancy is a time where there are so many things are happening
developmentally in the brain. An infant is considered to be 0 to 18 months of
age. An infant's motor skills start to develop as well as their intellectual
development increases. What comes naturally to an infant is reflexes, there
are four important reflexes that include the rooting reflex, Babinski reflex,
sucking reflex, and the stepping reflex. Jean Piaget is a French phycologist
that is known for his work on child development. Infants motors skills obey
the two general rules the cephalocaudal rule and the proximodistal rule. The
cephalocaudal rule refers to The top-to-bottom standard that describes the
tendency for motor skills to emerge in sequence from the head to the feet

(432). The proximodistal rule is that infants have a tendency for motor skills
to develop in sequence from the center to the periphery. (Page 432). Piaget
developed four different stages of intellectual development. The first stage is
the sensorimotor stage from birth until around the age of 2 years old. The
next stage is the preoperational stage is from about 2 to around 7. Once a
child reaches 7 to 11, they are considered to be in the concrete operational
stage according to Piaget. The final stage is begging in the adolescent years
and spans into adulthood. Infants start to construct schemas about the way
the world works.
According to the phycology textbook, Piaget suggested that infants
lack some very basic understandings of the physical world and therefore
must acquire them through experiences. Infants have also have not yet
developed their object permanence, a belief that objects exist even when
they are not visible. A good example of this would be the game peek-a-boo.
This is a go to game to entertain babies, the moment you put your hands
over your eye the infant think you disappeared. An older child understands
that you did not disappear, however, to a baby you did, that part of the brain
is not fully developed. As adults, we understand the concept but every now
and again we get tripped up on this idea. An example could be a magic trick,
magicians use illusions and disappearing act to deceive out object
permanence. Even though as adults the object permanence is fully
developed doesnt mean we cant be caught off guard by an illusion.

After the infancy, the stage of development the next stage of life is
known as early childhood. This phase starts about ages 18 to about 24
months and can last until about 11 to 14 year of age. When a child reaches
childhood, they also enter the Preoperational stage and begin to understand
the physical world around them. Their object permanence is much more
developed than an infant. With my 4-year-old niece, I sat down with her at
snack time and laid out two cookies for me and one cookie for her and asked
her if that was even. She said no you have two cookies and I only have one,
so I took her cookie and broke it in half and asked her if it was fair now. She
took a moment and said, yes I think so, you have two and I have two. To
her, the size of the cookie didnt make a difference, and it was the number of
cookies that mattered to her. I learned that this part of the brain is not fully
developed.
Children start to develop a sense of what is right and was is wrong.
Piaget noticed that a childs moral thinking usually shifts from realism to
relativism. Children do not realize that what is right and wrong, this can vary
depending on culture. As children get older and start to mature, they come
to see that rules are an expression of more general principles, such as
fairness and equity. A childs moral thinking start to shift. Typically, young
children tend to judge the morality of an action, like breaking a cell phone, is
more serious than breaking a pencil.
During infancy and early childhood development, there are a lot of
things going on in the human brain. Infancy is a time where motor skills start

to develop as well an essential reflex an infant need to survive. As the

developmental stage begins to grow children begin to understand object
permanence. I learned myself that when playing peek-a-boo with an infant
that their brain and their vison is not fully developed and when you cover
your face, infants think you are actually gone. Learning what is culturally
consider right and wrong to a child grows as they learn from experiences.
With time the sense of morality is developed by parents, culture, and
teachers. There are many great milestones that infants and children evolve
in the first few year of life, and are an essential part of life. Understanding
this in children can help with communicating with children.

Work cited page

Schacter, Daniel L.; Gilbert, Daniel T.; Wegner, Daniel M.; Nock, Matthew K..
Psychology (Page
434). Worth Publishers. Kindle Edition.
Wiggins, Paula. "Infant Brain Development." INFANT BRAIN
DEVELOPMENT (2000): 1-7.

National Child Care Information Center, 4 May 2006. Web.

Reiss, Allan L. "Brain Development, Gender and IQ in Children." Brain 119.5
(1999): 1763-774.
Web.
Giedd, Jay J., and B.J Casey. "Structural and Functional Brain Development
and Its Relation to
Cognitive Development." Structural and Functional Brain Development
and Its Relation to Cognitive Development. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Nov.
2016