Children S Development During Their Early Years

¶ … Children's capacity to choose appropriate behaviour is influenced by their developmental ability, temperament, interactions, life experiences and environmental factors." (Government of South Australia, 2004) Children are known to accumulate a great deal of information in their early years and to use this information in situations when they believe it would be required for them to do so.

Society thus created educational tools with the purpose to control the information being provided to children and to make it more likely for them to develop into moral individuals who are able to integrate the social order properly. The developmental changes occurring in children during the ages of 6 and 14 are especially intriguing, considering that it is during this time that they come to gain a more complex understanding of the world and their role in it.

A child's behavior can be a collection of actions in and as a result of the environment he or she is present in. While some of these actions can be voluntary (with the child being well-aware of the consequences of his or her actions), lots of them can actually be involuntary -- the child behaves in a particular way but he or she has a limited understanding of why they are doing this.

"Play and interactions with other people and objects within the environment are important in cognitive and behavioral development." (Stanton) There are a series of milestones that a child typically comes across as he or she develops their personality. One of the first behaviors that a child is likely to put across during the first few months of his or her life involves observing people's faces and attempting to replicate facial expressions.

It is also during these months that a child is probable to develop an understanding of events that happen regularly and start to use correct responses to these respective events. By twelve months a child is already aware of his or her family and begins to develop a fear of strangers. By twenty-four months a child is likely to gain an understanding of defiance and even to show defiant behavior.

During this period he or she is also probable to replicate behaviors seen in his or her parents or in other children that they interact with (Stanton). From three to five years a child begins to differentiate items and to separate them in several categories. At this point he or she is likely to be able to complete inter-locking puzzles. Time becomes a clearer concept and the child is likely to question his or her parents with regard to a series of ideas that he or she comes across.

Parents thus step in at this point and shape the child's thinking, making it possible for him or her to share their opinions. Imaginary play can also develop significantly at this moment in the child's life and he or she is also likely to identify aggression as a form of achieving his or her goals (Stanton) Children's behavior is largely the result of the environments they come across in their early years.

This respective set of environments can be considered to be a fragmented collection of ideas that each influence the child in a particular way. "Cognition is conceived in terms of context-specific behavior complexes, or skills, and development as the progressive coordination of previously dissociated skills." (Perlmutter 179) As children are beginning to see the connection between two or more concepts, they get actively involved in using all concepts involved with the purpose to express their thinking.

Children's behavior is thus owed to situation-specific actions that result from their understanding of the world -- they choose to behave in a particular way because they were provided with the impression that it would only be natural for them to put across such ideas (Perlmutter 179). Although one can easily see the connection between an idea that a child comes across and a behavior observed in the respective child, it is actually especially difficult to associate between particular events that children come across and their later behavior.

This is why many parents are inclined to blame a certain event that their children came across when they observe children performing an act considered to be harmful. By carefully analyzing a child's development, one can be more certain with regard to the events that led to the child behaving in a certain way (Perlmutter 180) An intriguing concept regarding children's development involves linking ideas and taking on behaviors that they have not actually seen in others.

For example, a child can observe two different ideas and use these two with the purpose of developing a concept that would seem completely different from the previous two. This is done by gaining a more complex understanding of the relation between several ideas and using this information in order to engage in a completely new activity.

Children's behavior can thus be influenced by the environments that they interact with without adults around them being able to identify the specific concepts that led to children behaving in a particular way (Perlmutter 180). Parents obviously play an important role during a child's early years, as they project their fears onto them and struggle to provide them with an environment that is as safe as possible.

The way that children behave is thus a product of the environments they interact with, as it reflects ideas that they have come across throughout their lives. One of the most important moments in.