Week 8
Wednesday, October 29, 2025 4:28 PM
Growth and brain development
- 6 month of age
- Rapid development
- Person is growing the
- Half n inch to a inch to a month
- Mosy babbys doubble their birth waight
6 months to 12 months
- 3-8 inch, a month to gain 3-5 ounches a week
- Most baby tribble their birth weight
- Precental mesuraments
Body proportions
Two growth patterns
- Cephalocaudal (head down)
- Proximodistal (center outward)
- Should b able to sit by 4 months
- Fractures r common
- Bones break a lot due to being so delicate
2 years of milestones for exam
Fontanels (soft spots_
- Allows head thru the birth canal
- Disappears by 2nd year
- Since brain grows a lot it needs to be able to let it grow
- Meningitis
- Cerebral hemorrhage
○ Brain bleeding
- Hydrocephalus
○ Abnormal buildup of cerebrospinal fluid
- Encephalitis
Tooth growth
- First teeth 4-6 months
- 20 teeth by age 2
Brain development:
- Developmnet of neurons
- Cells, information messengers
- Babys r born with 100 million neurons
-
○ Neurons n synapses
▪ Chemicals when in between synaptic junction
▪ The axon sends signals to the dendrites which then it sends to other neurons
○ Neurotransmitters
○ Synaptic pruning
▪ To get rid of things it doesn't need or use
▪ Necessary function of the human brain to expand n function.
- Cerebral cortex
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- Cerebral cortex
○ 2 hemispherar
▪ Left n right
○ Lateralization
○ Brain placicity
▪ Its malluble, it was repair
▪ It
○ Contains the greatest
number of neurons and
synapses in the brain
○ Sensitive period
▪ Window of opportunity to take place
○ State of arousal
▪ Sleep patterns - organization of sleep
and wakefulness changes substantially
during the first two years of life
▪ 6 stages of arousal
□ Deep sleep
□ Light sleep
□ Drowsy
□ Quiet alert
□ Active alert
□ Crying
- Influences on physical growth
○ Heredity
▪ Genetic make up affects height and weight
▪ Malnutrition
▪ Impacts brain, heart, liver and other organs n size
○ Nutrition
▪ Essential building blocks for development from bone n mucles formation to
cognitive n hormonal function
▪
○ Failure to thrive
▪ Underweight, slow, physical and development milestones
▪ Lack of responsive care
Learning capacities
- Infants and toddlers need stimulating environments to learn and responsive caregivers to
meet their needs.
- They learn primarily through their senses: vision, hearing, touch, taste and smell.
- Cognitive development (Memory: caregiver’s faces, smell, sound); object permanence,
cause and effect)
- Language development (cooing, imitating sounds, making sounds, words)
- Social and emotional development (trust and attachment)
- Physical development (grasping, sitting-up, crawling, standing, walking, running)
Motor deevelopment
Gross motor skills
- Skills appear in a predicable order
- Milestones, tells pl its develpping as it should,
○ Averages, coul take time
Time frame
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○ Time frame
- Dynamic systems theory of motor development
○ Complex systems of action
○ Infant refine skills wit intense practices
○ Motivated by exploration and desire to learn new tasks
○ Hand eye cordination
○ Depth
- Fine motor skills
Preceptual development
- Hearing
○ Newborms can recognize familiar voices
○ 2-4 months, turns towards sounds - can tell tones-pitches
○ 4-7 months - recognizes musical patterns
- Speech
○ start to tune out sounds not in their language. They recognize familiar words and
phrases and begin to divide their babble into word like units
○ 6-12, can recognize name n simple words
- Vison
○ Newborns: can only see 8-16 inches away
○ 2-3 months: begin tracking objects and recognizing familiar faces
○ 4-6 months: depth perception
○ 20/20 vision by 6 months
○ 1 year: vision is nearly adult-like in clarity and color perception
- Depth perception
○ By 3 months, infants can recognize shapes in 3D
○ Need for depth perception increases as they move independently and changes with
each mode of transportation
- Pattern perception
○ 3 week olds like high contras patterns
○ 2 month olds like more complex patterns, faces r decoded as patterns
- Object perception
○ Discriminate size and shapes very early
○ Initially rely on motion to distinguish between shapes and later on colors' n textures
- Intermodal perception
○ Integrating info from multiple senses such as linking a sound to its source ora voice
to a face
○ So being able to tell that a barking sound comes from a dog they can see
- Amodal perception
○ the ability to perceive properties like rhythm, tempo, and shape that are common
across different senses, such as seeing the synchrony between a person's lip
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across different senses, such as seeing the synchrony between a person's lip
movements and their voice.
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