Prenatal Development: Physical, Cognitive, and Psychosocial Growth

Running head: PRENATAL DEVELOPMENT
Prenatal development
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1PRENATAL DEVELOPMENT
Table of Contents
Introduction......................................................................................................................................3
An overview of prenatal development.........................................................................................3
Discussion........................................................................................................................................4
Prenatal physical development....................................................................................................4
Prenatal cognitive development...................................................................................................5
Prenatal psychosocial development.............................................................................................5
Conclusion.......................................................................................................................................6
References:......................................................................................................................................8

2PRENATAL DEVELOPMENT
Introduction
An overview of prenatal development
Prenatal development refers to the development of the fetus that occurs before birth. It
may be defined as the process during which an embryo, which is the product of fertilization,
develops and grows during the gestational period. The process of prenatal development begins
with fertilization which is the first stage in the process of embryogenesis. Prenatal development,
in various forms, continues throughout the period of nine months right until birth. In human
beings, the fetus begins to remotely resemble a baby at the end of the tenth week of pregnancy.
Gradually, all the bodily organs begin to develop, which is known as fetal development. The
average period of prenatal development is approximately 38 weeks. During this period, the
single cell, which is called zygote undergoes a series of stages and development in order to grow
into a full term baby (Semple et al., 2013). Usually, there are three stages of prenatal
development. They are:
 Germinal stage
 Embryonic stage
 Fetal stage
Discussion
Prenatal physical development
The physical development of the fetus may be divided into three phases, in order to study
them properly. They are, as mentioned above, germinal stage, embryonic stage and fetal stage.