Study sheet: Physical and Sensorimotor Development

📋 Course Outline

1. Prenatal Development and Pregnancy
2. Birth and Perinatal Care
3. Growth, Nutrition, and Motor Development
4. Sensory Development and Brain Plasticity
5. Sleep, Crying, and Regulation
6. Health, Safety, and Family Support
7. Developmental Perspectives and Models
8. Learning, Attachment, and Personality

📖 1. Prenatal Development and Pregnancy

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Teratogen : an exposure that can disrupt prenatal development, with its effects depending on timing, duration, dose, and developmental vulnerability

📝 Essential Points

• 🔄 Prenatal development proceeds through these stages:

  1. Zygote migration toward the uterus
  2. Implantation around 6–7 days
  3. Organogenesis
  4. Fetal growth and maturation from around the ninth week

• Organogenesis includes:

  • Organ and system formation
  • Placenta and umbilical cord formation
  • Neural tube formation
  • Cardiac activity around 22 days
  • Appearance of the head, eyes, and limb buds

📌 Prenatal screening estimates whether a problem may be present, whereas diagnosis establishes or clarifies the condition through further assessment such as amniocentesis.

💡 Memory Hook

Zygote → implantation → organogenesis → fetal growth

📖 2. Birth and Perinatal Care

★ Must-know

• Childbirth is:

  • Biological
  • Emotional
  • Familial
  • Institutional

• Possible interventions include:

  • Vacuum extraction
  • Forceps
  • Episiotomy
  • Cesarean delivery

Further detail

• On arrival at the hospital or birthing setting, contractions and fluid loss are assessed, and the person may be admitted, sent home temporarily, or asked to wait depending on the clinical situation.

• A birth plan expresses preferences for childbirth, but it may change according to clinical reality.

💡 Memory Hook

Birth is biological, emotional, familial, and institutional—not only medical

📖 3. Growth, Nutrition, and Motor Development

★ Must-know

• During the first year, infant weight approximately doubles by 4–5 months and triples by 12 months, while length increases by about 50% by one year.

• 🔄 Feeding progresses through:

  1. Breast milk or formula during the first six months
  2. Iron-rich foods around six months
  3. Cow’s milk at 9–12 months in certain conditions
  4. Family foods progressively from one year

• Primary teeth begin to appear between 3 and 12 months, usually around 6 months, and children generally have 20 teeth by 3 years.

Further detail

• Children aged 1–2 years need approximately 180 minutes of physical activity per day, including opportunities to play on the floor and spend time on their stomachs when awake.

💡 Memory Hook

Feed → grow → move → align

📖 4. Sensory Development and Brain Plasticity

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Myelination : supports faster and more efficient communication between neural regions

📝 Essential Points

• At birth, vision is functional but has low acuity; infants are especially sensitive to contrasts, contours, and large shapes, and they see effectively at short distance with some visual tracking.

• 🔄 Visual development progresses through:

  1. Contrast, contours, and large shapes at birth
  2. Binocular vision and stereopsis at 3–5 months
  3. Distance and movement perception at 6–12 months
  4. Visual guidance of reaching and walking from 1–3 years

• Brain development results from the interaction of maturation and experience, including myelination, synaptic pruning, and increasing specialization of neural circuits.

💡 Memory Hook

Maturation + experience → specialized neural networks

📖 5. Sleep, Crying, and Regulation

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Co-regulation : the adult’s support of the infant’s physiological and emotional regulation, which progressively contributes to self-regulation

★ Must-know

• Newborn sleep is fragmented and polyphasic; infants aged 0–3 months sleep about 14–17 hours per day, while children aged 1–2 years sleep about 11–14 hours per day.

📌 Safe sleep requires placing the baby on their back, on a firm surface, in a clear and separate crib, initially in the parents’ room.

Further detail

• Crying functions as an alarm and a primary distress signal that communicates a need; infants cry and fuss for approximately 126 minutes per day on average.

💡 Memory Hook

Co-regulation by the adult gradually becomes self-regulation

📖 6. Health, Safety, and Family Support

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Percentile : a child’s relative position, but the growth trajectory over time is more important than a single measurement

★ Must-know

• Routine growth monitoring includes:

  • Weight
  • Length or height
  • Head circumference

• Baby blues are frequent and transient, affecting approximately 30–85% of people and generally lasting less than two weeks, whereas postpartum depression is intense, persistent, and disabling.

Further detail

• Vaccination follow-up in the course is identified at 2, 4, 12, and 18 months.

💡 Memory Hook

Screening is not diagnosis; support is not parental control

📖 7. Developmental Perspectives and Models

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• PPCT model : Urie Bronfenbrenner — explains development through Process, Person, Context, and Time, with proximal processes playing a central role
• Zone of proximal development : Lev Vygotsky — the range of what a child can accomplish with support, including scaffolding from a more capable person

★ Must-know

• Piaget described four stages (Jean Piaget):
  • Sensorimotor
  • Preoperational
  • Concrete operational
  • Formal operational

Further detail

• Tinbergen’s four questions concern:
  • How the behavior functions
  • How it develops in the individual
  • Its possible adaptive value
  • Its evolutionary history

💡 Memory Hook

Cognitive, ecological, evolutionary, transactional, and cultural perspectives

📖 8. Learning, Attachment, and Personality

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Constructivism : Jean Piaget — the child actively constructs understanding through schemes, assimilation, accommodation, and equilibration
• Vicarious learning : Albert Bandura — occurs when children learn by observing and imitating other people

★ Must-know

📌 Classical conditioning associates events and produces an involuntary response, whereas operant conditioning changes the probability of a voluntary behavior through its consequences.

📌 Reinforcement increases the probability of a behavior, whereas punishment decreases the probability of a behavior.

Further detail

• Freud’s psychodynamic approach emphasizes unconscious processes and internal drives, while Erikson described psychosocial development across the entire lifespan.

💡 Memory Hook

Classical conditioning links events; operant conditioning links behavior to consequences

📊 Synthesis Tables

Major Developmental Perspectives

Perspective	Central idea	Associated theorist
Cognitive	Children process information and develop increasingly effective strategies	Piaget
Sociocultural	Development is shaped by culture, language, and scaffolding	Vygotsky
Ecological	Development reflects process, person, context, and time	Urie Bronfenbrenner
Behavioral	Learning occurs through associations, consequences, and observation	Pavlov, Watson, Skinner, Bandura