ASSIGNMENT #2: PHYSICAL AND
MOTOR DEVELOPMENT
1.
Describe two major physical and motor developments of a child and adolescent.
Explain the reasons for the significance of the two developments.
One of the major aspects of human
development is that growth and development in child and adolescent occurs in an
orderly pattern. During infancy, the greatest growth happens always at the top –
the head with physical growth in size, weight and future differentiation
gradually working its way from top to bottom. This is known as cephalo-caudal
pattern. The c-c trend is the postnatal growth from conception to 5 months when
the head grows more than the body. For instance, infants learn to use their
upper limbs before their lower limbs.
The other pattern is the
proximo-distal developmental trend which is the prenatal growth from 5 months
to birth when the fetus grows from the inside of the body outwards. For example
is the earlier maturation of muscular control of the trunk and arms, followed
by that of the hands and fingers.
Significance : By
understanding the developmental pattern of growth and development, educators
can make an accurate and useful predictions about students and can design
effective instructional strategies suited for each student based on the knowledge
of development.
Children, as they grow, continue to
build and improve gross motor skills – the large scale body movement skills
like running and walking. In general, boys develop the gross motor skills
slightly faster than do girls except for skills involving balance and precision
like skipping and hopping. During childhood, children run faster, jump higher
and farther. Of course this is applicable at the said age group only and not to
individual children. No two children will develop physical skills in exactly
the same pattern or time. By reaching the middle age childhood, children have
refined control over their gross motor skills and gained gradual mastery like
where to hop or jump. They have acquired flexibility, balance and agility.
Part of growth and development of
children is the acquisition of fine motor skills. These skills require “hand-eye”
coordination. If the boys develop the gross motor skills faster than the girls,
in the fine motor skills, it’s more of the opposite. The girls tend to develop
fine motor skills slightly faster than the boys. Middle childhood-aged children
show greater improvements in handwriting (more precision in cursive
handwriting) and sketching more detailed pictures. Furthermore, children of
this age group are more capable of executing complex and difficult
detail-oriented craft projects such as sewing, scrapbooking, manipulating
modern technologies like videos and computer games.
Significance : The increased mastery of fine
motor skills exposes the children to a more complicated world than they have
imagined. Children of this age group should be guided religiously not only by
their parents, but also by their teachers, knowing the positive and negative
potential effects to much exposure and access to internet.
2.
What is the role of the brain in the motor and physical development of a child
and adolescent? Explain.
Development of the brain starts in the
formation and closure of the neural tube, the earliest nervous tissue. The
neural tube forms from the neural plate, which begins forming sixteen days
after conception. This plate lengthens and starts folding up, forming a groove
two days after, which then begins fusing shut into a tube around twenty-two
days post-conception. By 27 days, the tube is fully closed and has already
begun its transformation into the brain and spinal cord of the embryo.
Generally speaking, the central
nervous system (brain and the spinal cord) matures in a sequence from
"tail" to head. Fifth week after conception, the first synapses begin
forming in a fetus's spinal cord. By sixth week, these early neural connections
permit the first fetal movements i.e. spontaneous arches and curls of the whole
body. Many other movements soon follow--of the limbs (around eight weeks) and fingers
(ten weeks), as well as some coordinated actions (hiccuping, stretching,
yawning, sucking, swallowing, grasping, and thumb-sucking). By 11-12th weeks, a
fetus's movement is rich. The second
trimester marks the onset of other critical reflexes: continuous breathing
movements and coordinated sucking and swallowing reflexes. These abilities are
controlled by the brainstem. The brainstem is responsible for many of our
body's most vital functions--heart rate, breathing, and blood pressure. It is
largely mature by the end of the second trimester, which is when babies first
become able to survive outside the womb.
Last of all to mature is the
cerebral cortex, which is responsible for most of what we think of as mental
life--conscious experience, voluntary actions, thinking, remembering, and
feeling. In the last trimester, fetuses are capable of simple forms of learning,
like habituating (decreasing their startle response) to a repeated auditory
stimulus, such as a loud clap just outside the mother's abdomen, responding to
familiar odors (such as their own amniotic fluid) and sounds (such as a
maternal heartbeat or their own mother's voice). In spite of these rather
sophisticated abilities, babies enter the world with a still-primitive cerebral
cortex, and it is the gradual maturation of this complex part of the brain that
explains much of their emotional and cognitive maturation in the first few
years of life.
While babies come into the world
with some very useful survival reflexes, they are still strikingly helpless, because
the cerebral cortex is still quite immature. Although all of the neurons in the
cortex are produced before birth, they are poorly connected. The cerebral
cortex produces most of its synaptic connections after birth, in a massive
burst of synapse formation known as the exuberant period. At its peak, the
cerebral cortex creates an astonishing two million new synapses every second.
With these new connections come a baby's many mental milestones, such as color
vision, a pincer grasp, or a strong attachment to his parents.
By two years of age, a toddler's
cerebral cortex contains well over a hundred trillion synapses. This period of
synaptic exuberance varies in different parts of the cerebral cortex: it begins
earlier in primary sensory regions, like the visual cortex or primary touch
area of the cortex, while it takes off somewhat later in the temporal and
frontal lobes, brain areas involved in higher cognitive and emotional
functions. Nonetheless, the number of synapses remains at this peak,
over-abundant level in all areas of the cerebral cortex throughout middle
childhood (4-8 years of age). Beginning in the middle elementary school years
and continuing until the end of adolescence, the number of synapses then
gradually declines down to adult levels.
This pattern of synaptic production
and pruning corresponds remarkably well to children's overall brain activity
during development. Using PET imaging technology, neuroscientists have found
dramatic changes in the level of energy use by children's brains over the first
several years of life—from very low at
birth, to a rapid rise and over-shoot between infancy and the early elementary
school years, followed by a gradual decline to adult levels between middle
childhood and the end of adolescence. In other words, children's brains are
working very hard, especially during the period of synaptic exuberance that
corresponds to the various critical periods in their mental development.
Besides synapse formation and
pruning, the other most significant event in postnatal brain development is
myelination. Newborns' brains contain very little myelin, a very dense, fatty
substance that insulates axons much like the plastic sheath on a power cable,
increasing the speed of electrical transmission and preventing cross-talk
between adjacent nerve fibers. Myelination (the coating or covering of axons
with myelin) begins around birth and is most rapid in the first two years but
continues perhaps as late as 30 years of age. This lack of myelin is the main reason why babies and young children
process information so much more slowly than adults. Myelination of the cerebral cortex begins in the primary
motor and sensory areas—regions that receive the first input from the eyes,
ears, nose, skin, and mouth—and then progresses to "higher-order," or
association regions that control the more complex integration of perception,
thoughts, memories, and feelings. Myelination is a very extended process:
although most areas of the brain begin adding this critical insulation within
the first two years of life, some of the more complex areas in the frontal and
temporal lobes continue the process throughout childhood and perhaps well into
a person's 20s. Unlike synaptic pruning, myelination appears to be largely
"hard-wired."
One way of
measuring brain development is to look at the speed of neural processing. A newborn's
brain works considerably more slowly than an adult's, transmitting information
some sixteen times less efficiently. The speed of neural processing increases
dramatically during infancy and childhood, reaching its maximum at about age
fifteen. Most of this increase is due to the gradual myelination of nerve cell
axons (the long "wires" that connect one neuron to another neuron's
dendrites.)
Implications : Brain is a very vital
organ that should grow and develop parallel to the physical and motor
development. It is the control center of not only the physical and motor aspect
but also the cognitive and affective part of development. An example of the
cognitive aspect is the language: infants and children who are conversed with,
read to, and otherwise engaged in lots of verbal interaction show somewhat more
advanced linguistic skills than children who are not as verbally engaged by
their caregivers. Because language is fundamental to most of the rest of cognitive
development, this simple action to children — talking and listening — is one of the best ways to make the most of their
critical brain-building years. Emotions are also controlled by the brain. It is
best that children be taught how to handle and control their emotions. Thru
proper guidance, children will grow up with normal to high EQ.
