We won't be covering Chapter 5, on health and physical development, and so we don't talk very much about motor development. This is not because I think it's not interesting, because it is, or because it's not important, which it also is, but because in the 3 month time span we are given to cover the entirety of human development, some things get cut. And that's my cut.
So, I want to talk a bit here about motor development, specifically, about the relationships early motor development has with development in other areas. But before I do I want to digress here for a moment and talk about an important concept - the interrelationships between domains of development.
There are many ways to think about development. You might conceptualize development as quantitative or qualitative, and you might study it using a variety of different research methodologies designed to capture change over time. But those aren't the only ways. We can also focus on development either as happening in concert across all areas simultaneously and focus on age as the relevant variable, or we can think about development in one area and focus on that particular area and how it changes over time. Neither is right or wrong, they are just useful for different reasons.
You may have noticed our book is topically oriented. That means that it is organized by topic area (e.g., cognition, language) rather than chronologically (i.e., by age). Generally, the argument for chronologically oriented books is that you cannot understand how one area develops without understanding what other areas are doing at the same time. I myself prefer the more linear organization of the topical approach for teaching, but I think the concept of interrelationships is really really important.
So, going back to motor development, let's talk about interrelationships. I think it's a particularly apt area to illustrate the point. When an infant is born it can be likened to "a three-pound bag of loose corn; the baby has about as much motor control as the sack of kernels" (Wingert & Underwood, 1997). Newborns are all clumsy movement and flailing limbs and slobber; they have a variety of reflexes designed to help them adjust and adapt to life on the outside, but when it comes to voluntary motor movements, they are pretty helpless. What happens when they gain control of their bodies?
Think about cognitive development. One of the things that is good for cognitive development is exposure to new things and experiences, and an environment that affords exploration and discovery. But if the only motor movement you can actually do is to lift your head for a few brief seconds, the amount of exploration and discovery you can access is limited.
By contrast, if you can do this there's a lot more you can explore in your environment, and a whole lot more you can learn. So, advances in motor development lead to advances in cognitive development because they open up a whole new world of exploration.
Now let's consider language. There are lots of components to language, but one of the ways that we break those up is in into receptive (what you understand) and expressive (what you can say) language. Once children can speak and be understood, they can use language to frame questions about the world and ask for answers to those questions. But to be able to speak they need to be able to manipulate their lungs, throat, mouth, tongue and nasal cavity, and to continually modify this as their body changes and grows. While certainly all the cognitive machinery needs to be in place before the child can know what he or she wants to say, it's also true that the motor component of language is a challenge. It's no surprise that many toddlers have lisps or leave sounds off words or simplify their speech - talking is hard. But once you have the motor coordination to speak intelligibly, then you can ask questions and learn from the answers. And once you can learn from your answers, then this feeds into cognitive development too.
What about emotional development? Motor development, as it happens, seems to be related to the development of a number of very specific fears. In particular, the advent of self-propelled locomotion - most typically crawling - is important. For example, at about the age of 6-9 months or so, many babies start showing stranger anxiety (a marked wariness or fear in response to strangers). Why at this time? Well, generally, stranger anxiety is tied to the attachment system. And, another component of the attachment system - indeed the primary function of it - is proximity maintenance (that's just a fancy way of saying "stay close to mommy"). What happens is that just at the same time that babies become capable of crawling away from their caregivers, all of a sudden they are strongly motivated not to do so. And, a consequence of the attachment system being turned on in this way is stranger anxiety. So, being scared of strange people is therefore linked to being able to crawl, even though it seems like those things are miles apart on the surface.
I could go on and on with more examples, but I'll stop there. I think the point is made. These interrelationships between domains, in my opinion at least, are most salient at the beginning of life, as children increase in complexity and organization, and at the end of life, as abilities sometimes decline in concert. But they are always interacting and changing and feeding into each other in big loops of causal effects, like a giant spiderweb growing out in widening circles, where one rung of development is necessarily constrained and affected by what is going on in the rest of the web. It's really quite amazing.
No comments:
Post a Comment