Child Development Case Study: 10-Year-Old Boy Analysis

Background and Family History

This case study examines a 10-year-old boy who has experienced pervasive relocations throughout his life, beginning at age 2, along with a challenging separation between his parents. Following the separation, he first experienced a 50% split parenting arrangement, living with his mother one week and then with his father and stepmother the next, until he reached school age. He then began living full time with his mother during the school week and visited his father and stepmother every other weekend. At age 7, his mother relocated to an area approximately seven hours from his father, at which point his mother also remarried. From that point to the present, he has stayed with his mother and stepfather the majority of the time and traveled to visit his father and stepmother during the Christmas holiday, spring break, and summer — usually totaling approximately two months per year.

Prior to age 7, he also changed schools four times, as his mother relocated several times within the same metropolitan area. He has two siblings through his mother — a half-sister (age 8) and a half-sister (age 3) — and two siblings through his father — a half-brother (age 3) and a stepsister (age 15). Prior to age 5, the half-sister (now 8) also lived with the father on the same 50% schedule, but since then the mother has barred her from spending time with the father's family, largely in response to the father's remarriage and attempt to have another child, which occurred when the subject was between ages 5 and 6.

Physical Development

The student's physical behavior is age appropriate. He is in the 60th percentile for weight and the 80th percentile for height. He has excellent fine motor and gross motor skills, along with good coordination, balance, agility, and strength. His body awareness is also age appropriate. He rarely falls, can lift heavy objects, and participates in coordinated physical activities such as sparring and play sword-fighting with his siblings and father. He is also very aware of his physical body, being able to move rapidly while simultaneously remaining quiet. He plays both gross motor physical games and demonstrates excellent hand-eye coordination, with a particular interest in computer and video games.

Analysis: By age 5, he could hop on one foot without falling. According to Janssen et al. (2012), the ability to perform complex, coordinated asymmetrical movements should be present in a child around age 8, and movement improvement generally increases with age, declining slightly for some boys just prior to puberty, when the rapidity of growth can accelerate to a degree that body awareness is temporarily compromised. The student does not appear to have been affected by such a period and his fine and gross motor movements are all age appropriate and within normal to advanced ranges, particularly given his ability to move rapidly and quietly at the same time and to perform complicated rapid movements during play, with only very occasional loss of balance.

Cognitive Development

The student interacts well with others his own age but is rather reluctant in settings where he does not know the other children. He engages comfortably with classmates but is hesitant to play with new students or unfamiliar children, especially in novel situations. When staying with his father, he has few friends to play with and only reluctantly begins play with unknown peers. He is a thoughtful child when alone and often makes observations about the feelings and needs of others. He frequently waits a long time before expressing his own needs, such as when he is hungry, thirsty, cold, or hot. When with other children, he tends to hang back and wait for others to articulate their needs, then follows suit by agreeing that he shares the same need.

He waits for others to make suggestions about play activities. If he risks directing activities and is not agreed with, he often disengages from play entirely. He can sustain attention on a single video game or computer activity for hours, but during physical play he loses interest as soon as conflict arises. He has a game he plays with his cousin involving zombies — a memory game in which they talk at length about the demographic characteristics of zombies, which often extends into physical play. He draws on a wide range of collaborative information about zombies from books he has read and movies he has seen.

He frequently connects conversation to his current thoughts, with his memory triggered by what he sees and by places that remind him of where he has been before. His language use varies depending on his conversational partner: he is very dominant in conversation with those he considers his equals and often corrects them when he believes they are wrong. He uses the computer for problem solving, frequently searching online for information on topics that interest him. When he is not emotionally invested in his own beliefs or needs, he is very capable of understanding other people's perspectives. For example, he plays well with his youngest brother and sister despite their differing needs and developmental levels, and he uses language to encourage them to ask for things he wants — indicating that he recognizes their perspective as distinct and as a useful vehicle for meeting his own desires.

He is extremely logical in his language and frequently corrects others when he feels they are wrong, yet he also listens and absorbs instruction well when in the right frame of mind. When playing with construction-based toys — such as a roller coaster toy belonging to his brother — he employs trial and error as well as balance skills to make the toy function. He appears to learn best through diagrams and pictures but also possesses excellent reading comprehension and can construct mental images from written descriptions. He excels in both math and reading.

Analysis: The student is clearly beyond the stage of egocentrism associated with Piaget, as he is fully capable of cognitively understanding the feelings and needs of others and does not regard himself as the center of his world. His awareness of others' needs is likely reinforced by sibling interactions, and he is able to place his own needs second when the situation calls for it. He is clearly well involved in the concrete operational stage and is in the process of mastering assimilation and accommodation, but has yet to fully accomplish disequilibration, particularly when the issue is emotionally charged or when he perceives a situation as unfair to himself (Meadows, 1986, pp. 33–38).

He is only rarely observed engaging in self-talk and is likely at the transition point between open self-talk and internalizing such thoughts and language. He rarely requires scaffolding to assist him in learning tasks and is a very independent learner; one could say that his zone of proximal development is widening, with few exceptions. He participates in reciprocal teaching with both peers and adults and exhibits selective attention, effortful control, elaboration, mnemonic strategy use, problem-solving strategies, and excellent long-term and short-term memory, along with strong memory retrieval strategies (Meadows, 1986, pp. 109–112).

With regard to Gardner's multiple intelligences, the student shows clear strengths and weaknesses. He is strong in visual-spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, intrapersonal, and logical-mathematical intelligences, but does not exhibit strengths in interpersonal intelligence (being quite standoffish and shy toward others) or linguistic intelligence (given a pervasive minor speech impairment). His musical intelligence level is unknown, though some of his computer games may support this aspect of his learning style (Gardner, 2000, pp. 41–45).

References

Gardner, H. (2000). Intelligence reframed: Multiple intelligences for the 21st century. Basic Books.

Janssen, A., Diekema, E., van Dolder, R., Kollee, L., Oostendorp, R., & Nijhuis-van der Sanden, M. (2012). Development of a movement quality measurement tool for children. Physical Therapy, 92(4), 574–594.

Light, P., & Littleton, K. (2000). Social processes in children's learning. Cambridge University Press.

Meadows, S. (1986). Understanding child development. Routledge.