Factors Influencing Childhood Development

This essay describes several aspects that affect a child’s development from birth up to the age of 5 years. The development if a child can be influenced emotionally, socially and psychologically.

Running head: CHILD DEVELOPMENT 1
Factors Influencing Childhood Development
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Introduction
This essay describes several aspects that affect a child’s development from
birth up to the age of 5 years. The development if a child can be influenced emotionally, socially
and psychologically. The child’s social development is described as his/her ability to interact
with both adults and other children. In the essay, there is a discussion of emotional development
which a child encounters within the environment which involves related emotional components
such as physiological patterning, physical contexts, expressive behaviors, motives, action
tendencies, and experiential feelings. As the children develop psychologically, they gain their
individuality within the community. They gain skills to handle conflict with peers, communicate,
develop friendship and process their actions.
Social development in a child at the age of below five years impact on skills to a child enable
him/her learn vocabularies as a toddler, navigate adulthood challenges and to resist peer pressure
at high student level (Keenan, Evans & Crowley, 2016). The healthy social development around
a child helps him/her in the following ways:
Develop communication skills: This is the ability of a child to interact with
other people and other children and allows for more opening to learn and practice language and
speech skills. This helps the child to improve his/her language skills for better relationships with
the people around him/her.
Establishment of positive attitudes: When a child develops a positive attitude
while at the age between birth and five years, it ultimately makes him/her have better ways to
relate with others and have high levels of self confidence.

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The building of self-esteem: The interaction of the child with other children
helps him/her to have the most exciting time and fun experiences. The situation where a young
child is not able to make friends is very painful frustrating to the parents. Healthy social concept
of friends strengthens the child’s comfort level in his/her individuality.
Resolution of conflicts: Well built self-esteem and improved language skills
will ultimately lead the child to better ways of resolving misunderstanding or common
differences with other peers.
Strengthening of the child’s learning skills: Many other researchers believed
that creations of healthy relationships with other peers from the preschool to the schooling level
help the child to adapt in the different school environment and settings. The researches have
shown that some children have a difficult time in adapting and accepting the interactions with
other children as early as in their preschool and are most likely to have future academic
difficulties (Black et al, 2017).
Emotional aspects start at the young age of children as they discover a wide
range of emotions and this evolves as they grow. A child at the age of between 0 to 12 months
develops a sense of self-soothing, and start learning how to modulate reactivity. The child at this
age depends on the caregivers for supports during stressful circumstances. The child behaves in a
synchronal way with others and may increase the discrimination of others. At this period the
child behaves in a way to create attention in service coordination. For example, use instrumental
signals or ‘fake’ crying to attract the attention of the caregiver. At toddlerhood (12 months to 2
and half years) the child develops a state of self-awareness and consciousness due to own
emotional responses. At this stage, the child develops Irritability due to the pressures of

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autonomy expansion and exploration. The child expresses the behavior which is accompanied
by pride shame and coyness (Bridges, 2017).
The child starts early forms of pro-social actions and empathy. There is
increased discrimination of others due to emotions and their meaningfulness. When the child is
at the preschool age (2 to 5 years), demonstrate symbolic access which facilitates emotional
regulation. At the preschool age, the child communicates with others effectively which
elaborates his/ her understanding of social transactions and comportment expectations. As the
child approaches five years, he/she develops adaptive and self-efficacious goals in emotional
functioning. The skills of the children emotional competence are influenced by their learning
environment, past social experience and individual’s relationship history (Jones, Greenberg &
Crowley, 2015).
The psychological development in human beings involves cognitive,
intellectual, emotional and social functioning and capacities within the course of the life span
from infancy to mature age. Apart from the child’s inherited reflexes which help he/she to
acquire cognitive nourishment and react to risky situations, they are equipped with a preference
for particular vision patterns such as a human face, sounds, and the human voice. After a few
months, the child is capable of identifying his/her mother by sight and also develops the striking
sensitivity towards rhythmic flow, tones and their sounds which make up the human speech
(Cheong et al, 2017).
Infants develop quick advances in both recall memories and recognition
which later increases their ability to anticipate events and understand the environments they are.
The interactions of an infant with their environment develop from simple unsynchronized

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reflexes to a more coordinated movement which is deliberately repeated for they can be useful in
obtaining external goals. When a child reaches 18 months, he/she begins to try to solve physical
problems through mental imaginations of outcomes and certain events instead of using simple try
-and- error experiments (Weare, 2015). The average age where the infants begin to produce
his/her first simple words s between 12- 14 months, and at around 18 months the child can
converse in about 50 words.
For the cognitive abilities, the child develops from depending solely on the
concrete reality to the creation of logic operations on symbolic and abstract material. At the age
of three months, the infants’ starts to display suggestive behavioral reactions of emotional state
for example relaxation, excitement, and distress. At a year old, it is when the child begins
developing new emotional states like sadness, fear, and anger. Between the period of 2 to 5
years, the child behaves in a way to manipulate the environmental issues symbolically and can
solve the new types of problems through mental operations that ate fully reversible in thought
(Kroger, 2015).
There are several philosophers and psychologist who have analyzed and handled the
notion of self- identity, but there are theories of great thinkers that discussed and analyzed the
stages, techniques, and challenges for developing self-identity from childhood. One of the
current great thinkers is Erik Erikson.
Erik Erikson is a psychologist who worked much in the 20th century in developing the
psychosocial theory of self-identity development. Erikson argued that the development of human
being begins from childhood to maturity and occurs in stages and is influenced by the person's
environmental interactions. The theory suggested that there are eight developmental stages that a

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person undergoes in his/her lifespan. Childhood involves five stages. Erikson outlined that there
is a crisis that occurs at every stage. The ways of resolving these crises affect one’s development.
In every stage, a child is struggling with his/her identity and can spring back and forth within
extremities (Winnicott, 2018).
In the second developmental stage, a child may feel autonomous concerning things like
the capability to feed themselves. Nevertheless, if a child encounters something scary and new
he/she may feel much doubt regarding such ability. A healthy sense of self-identity helps the
children to be free and open in the community and reduce fear from differences (Britto et al,
2017).
Early childhood educators are always advised to provide young children with access to an
enriched and high-quality environment which will in future enable positive growth, knowledge
and environmental results for all the children.
Social settings refer to the child’s social environment which includes the child’s physical
and the relationships that a child makes as he/she grows. As a child grows while learning new
things within his/her surroundings, it's important for the parents to provide a safe, supportive,
focused and caring environment so that their children may healthily develop in their physical,
mental, social, and emotional (Zeanah, 2018). The good social environment provides support to
the parents and other child’s caregivers and enhances the parental capacity to take care of their
children thus promoting better child health and development. The physical surroundings within
the social environments include the healthcare, recreation spaces, and employment, housing, and
education facilities. The nature of such physical surroundings influences the health and
wellbeing and also the quality of parenting in children (Newland, 2015).

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Children do copy or imitate what they observe within their surroundings. Therefore, for
the children who have been brought up in settings characterized by high quality education and
childcare have quality and essential services like recreation facilities, social cohesion, and better
development outcomes. The community resources such as the political governance and the
extent, by which resources are available, have greater influence in the health and development of
a child (Green, Kalvaitis & Worster, 2016). For instance, some socio-economically deprived
environments have a negative impact on childhood development. The social environment of a
child either positive or negative is largely dependent on the parent or other caregivers. Those
who grow in a context characterized by inadequate resources, low quality education, and social
antagonism will have low access to a variety of essential services. Children who have good
social interactions or relationship develop greater self-esteem as compared to those who do not
have (Bitsko, 2016). Those who do not have good social relationships are most likely to
experience psychological health problems such as anxiety and depression. It is also evident that
pro-social behavior of the children results in positive psychological health in adulthood.
Young children and babies under the age of 5 tears have a high capacity to learn fist
through observing, hearing, touching and doing. Young children learn more as they grow. The
parents or any other external caregivers are the closest and the first educators to the young
children. They are the first who can unfold or alter such potentials in the child through
interactions and communications. Educators help children to organize their feelings and to make
sense in their actions (Breeman et al, 2015).
At the age of 5 years and below, a child may develop long term effects either socially,
emotionally and psychologically. Early stress and scary events in life can lead to long term
impact on the emotional, mental and physical health of children. Life stressor like physical

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abuse, unsafe neighborhood, poverty, and family instability can lead the children to have
difficulty in regulating their emotions, have reduced social functioning and inadequate coping
skills. Early childhood development programs such as education programs help in fostering
children’s physical, social, emotional and psychological development. Most of the early
childhood education is through playing. Learning through play meets the physical, emotional,
language, intellectual and social needs. Early childhood educators have greater effects of the
children achievements in future in that through early childhood education the child is able to
develop a social relationship with teachers and other children. Children who attend pre-school
learning programs perform better academically and have minimum possibilities of repeating
grades than those who had not. Children who have been brought up in disadvantaged
neighborhoods have less cognitive development and low education attainment than those who
grew in a well-sourced advantaged environment with facilities (Jennings et al, 2015).
Conclusion
In conclusion, the essay has described, analyzed and discussed how the social,
psychological and emotional aspects have a greater impact on the children development during
their childhood age of between births to five years. The essay has discussed one of the modern
theories on how young children and infants develop individuality and self-identity. Several ways
in which children development either emotionally, socially or psychologically have been
analyzed and discussed in the essay.

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