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.