Essay Sample on Child Development

Physical development in children has two different types of skills that show growth within adolescence. These two skills are Fine and Gross motor skills. Fine motor skills have been defined by the textbook “Child Development from Infancy to Adolescence An Active Learning Approach” as the skills that “enable us to make small movements, mostly of the hands and fingers, but also of the lips and tongue.” while Gross motor skills are defined as what “call on the large muscle groups of the body (for example, the legs and arms.)”(Levine & Munsch, 2020). In my observation, I witnessed my focal child display many behaviors and actions that fit well into the category of physical development. For most of the observation, the child was seen sitting on his knees with his arms behind him and all five fingers placed on the back of his shoes. The sitting position that he was in shows how he is capable of controlling the muscles within his legs, as well as his upper body to be able to hold up his body weight. The child was also seen swinging his arms back and forth from in front of him, which shows his ability to control his arm movements. For Fine motor, the focal child displayed these skills through the gripping of the back of his shoes, grabbing the pumpkin off of the shelf with two fingers from each hand, using his pointer and thumb on his left hand to unzip his bookbag, using his fingers to help pump the soap and wash his hands, and using his fingers on both hands to put his mask around his ears and onto his face. These different actions that this child performed are important developmental skills for him to learn and practice, as they will help him learn independence and develop even more skills as he gets older.

In language development, it is so much more than just words and phrases. For some children, it is hand movements or body movements to gesture for something they want and/or need. In observing my focal child, I discovered that he often didn’t speak, but still used language through head gestures and hand gestures to communicate. An example from my observation is when he was told to go find a pumpkin around the classroom. After looking around the room and not finding the pumpkin, he looked up at an adult who was following him around and shrugged he shrugged his shoulders. He used that body movement to indicate to the adult that he couldn’t find the pumpkin he was told to find and then the adult pointed in the direction of the pumpkin, which then the child turned his head in that direction and found the pumpkin. Though the child may have not been vocal and used words, he still was able to communicate his wants and needs to the adults and was understood. In the same article that defines motor skills, they went on to define the concept of receptive language as “The ability to understand words or sentences”, which can be applied to the focal child in this observation (Levine & Munsch, 2020). He also used receptive language when he and the other children were listening to the story the adult was reading to them. While reading she asked the students “Do you like pumpkin pie?” which then the focal child responded with “Yes please”. This shows how the child was able to hear what the adult asked, understood it was a question, and was able to register it in his mind to elicit a response to that question. A theory that I can connect to the focal child’s level of language is a theory called the Social Cognitive Learning Theory, which is “The idea that language is learned through imitation” and this theory is connected to theorist Albert Bandura (Levine & Munsch, 2020). The child was observed many times throughout the observation using imitation in his language, just as when the teacher began counting and he would say the number she said right after her. This theory of Social Cognitive Learning is important in language development because it begins to set the grounds for future language and communication abilities. So though he may not be extremely verbal, he still uses language in his own effective way to express his wants and needs. 

Cognitive Development is defined as “changes in the way we think understand and reason about the world.”(Levine & Munsch, 2020). My focal child displayed many behaviors that fit into the cognitive domain, one of those behaviors being the fact that he was able to associate the fact that the food he ate during snack time was to be picked up and brought to his mouth. That is him displaying body awareness, which is “Conscious knowledge of one’s own body parts and movements” (Levine & Munsch, 2020). The focal child also displayed behaviors of proprioception when he was able to walk around the classroom without looking at his feet when he would swing his arms back and forth and didn’t have to look at his arms, and also when he was able to eat his snack, he didn’t have to look at his hands to move his food to his mouth. A theory that I can connect to the focal child is Scaffolding. In the text, they explained that Vytsofsky saw scaffolding as “a sensitive process of providing the support that helps the child achieve what is just out of reach” (Levine & Munsch, 2020). In the situation where the child had to wash his hands before snack time, he waited for an adult to come over and help him. The adult came over and guided the child on how to pump the soap and wash his hands. A little later in the observation after the snack, the child was able to go over to the sink and wash his hands without any adult guidance. This is showing how scaffolding has given the child the support he needs at that certain time, and he used that guidance he previously received to be independent the second time around. Scaffolding is important to development because it sets the child up with the necessary steps to learn how to be independent with their actions. It takes guidance from an adult at first, but eventually that support and guidance allow them to be successful as an individual.