“Kiddy Thinks” In “Kiddy Thinks”, Alison Gopnik discusses the stages of thinking abilities of babies and young children. Using examples from her personal experiences as a parent and her experiments as a developmental psychologist, she defines these stages and explains the learning processes that take place during them. Through process analysis, Gopnik develops her thesis that babies and young children use the same learning strategies as scientists. Gopnik explains the stages of cognitive development for children from birth to the age of 4 years old. At birth, babies already know they are similar to other people.
She didn’t have any of the pregnancy symptoms before 8 weeks, but after 8 weeks, she started having morning sickness, and her breast felt sore. Her appetite has also changed. She lost 5 pounds at the first trimester of pregnancy because her stomach felt sick. Gina felt much better after the 4th month of pregnancy and gained almost 20 pounds at the end of her pregnancy. Gina knew that prenatal care should start before getting pregnant, but she did not know the medical system in the U.S.A.
She explains the typical behavior, starting from when they can imitate facial expressions at birth, and then proceeding to discovering and differentiating others’ and their own emotions. They go on to learning and perfecting the concept of hiding. Gopnik was able to experiment with kids in the different age groups and provides the results to back up her theories. Another significant point that was brought up was the comparison of the thought process between babies and scientists. Babies and scientists “think, observe, formulate theories, make predictions, and do experiments.
They spent a good amount in the store but it was just because they weren’t prepared. A few weeks after, Meredith was rushed to the hospital to give birth to her 8 pounds 7 oz. baby boy named Luke. A month later she had to attend the physician’s office to make sure everything was doing well with her and her infant. A couple of months after she realized her child had no toys to play with so she took him to the toy company to pick out a few toys, and ended up getting a ton!
Gopnik first uses a personal experience to captivate her audience then proceeds to provide scientific evidence on the psychological abilities of children, beginning with newborn babies to toddlers about the age of four. The author informs readers on the thought capabilities of children by providing examples of the changes in mind development in different age categories. She suggests that "newborn babies (the youngest tested was only 42 minutes old) can imitate facial expressions" (Gopnik, 238) and how children that are nine months old can already distinguish between internal feelings such as happiness, sadness and anger. Gopnik recaps experiments that discover how children have learnt about people's wants and how they may conflict with their own in this portion of her writing. Two year old children seem to turn intentionally difficult and challenge their parents constantly, letting desire take control.
As a child I had a book called "Where Did I Come From?" It offered a full biological explanation, in cartoons, to answer those awkward questions that curious tots ask. But the book is now out of date. Replacing it is, for example, Mommy, Did I Grow in Your Tummy? : Where Some Babies Come From, which explains the myriad ways that children of the twenty-first century may have entered their families, including egg donation, surrogacy, in vitro fertilization, and adoption.
Also, models in first two groups were divided by gender. There was also a fourth variation group where children were not exposed to the aggressive behaviour at all. Child, one at a time, was exposed to 10 minutes aggressive acts towards inflated Bobo doll. Afterward they were moved to a second room, which was arranged to mildly frustrate them by not letting them play with chosen toys. Finally, the child was moved to a third room, where the Bobo doll and other toys were available for 20 minutes of freely playing and where the child’s action were observed (Oates, 2012, p.110-11).
Due to a growing interest in infants’ ability to perceive the surrounding world in the early 20th century various research studies and experiments aiming to observe and investigate newborns’ nature were conducted. One of the first to engage in newborns’ observational studies was Bower (1965) who found they are capable of perceiving depth cues at the age of 3 months. What he did was to present babies with a cube in a distance of one meter and examine whether they would suck a pacifier while viewing the cube. After a couple of trials, infants realized that every time they suck the pacifier when the cube was shown they will be rewarded. Although cubes of different sizes and larger distances were used to test the babies, a relatively little sucking was produced by them, which suggests the hypothesis that infants may have prior knowledge of depth and size constancy.
I will explain my research about a normal six year old as well as, a feral child with some argument for and against the question that I will try to conclude by the end of my essay. Many argue that we are a product of nature. This could be argued by showing what six years old can do. This can be proven as we are sure that a three year old can start to speak and learn few words and then start to get on their two legs with their own strength to start walking. Six years old can; eat with utensils, speak, read and write (ABC), have a religion and values which comes from their primary communication such as, family.
Mothers in the district were noticed to have access to nutritional information and health personnel were also acclaimed to be the major source through which this information is distributed. Partially exclusive breastfeeding was found to be the main mode of breastfeeding practice among mothers who had children below six months at the time of our research. A high percentage of mothers were found to breastfeed on demand. Most women continued breastfeeding whiles feeding children with complementary food. Complementary foods were mostly prepared form foodstuffs which were locally available and prepared by mothers.