Development and Accommodation of Young Children

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Believe it or not the seemingly helpless, limb flailing, drooling, and whining infant that you pass by in the grocery store or in the parking lot at your favorite restaurant is not so helpless after all. There is probably a lot more going on in their mind than you can imagine. A wealth of new research is leading child psychologists, educators, and parents to rethink their long-held beliefs about the emotional, physical, and intellectual abilities of young babies and infants. It is important to continue this new research while the children develop and eventually enter school. The more the developments in children become evident, the better we can accommodate the structures of classrooms and the curriculum to teach them. The accommodations and structures should maximize their growth and development. In 1890, psychologist William James famously described an infant's view of the world as "one great blooming, buzzing confusion". It was a notion that held for nearly a century: infants were simple-minded creatures who merely mimicked those around them and grasped only the most basic emotions - happy, sad, angry (cited in Wingert and Brant, 2005). Reading Your Baby’s Mind, by Pat Wingert and Martha Brant present and summarize current research that prove psychologist William James’s notion outdated and conflicting to new research. In fact, “Science is giving us the picture that long before they (infants) form their first words or attempt the feat of sitting up, they are already mastering complex emotions-jealousy, empathy, frustration-that were once thought to be learned much later in toddler hood” ( Wingert, Brant 2005, 72). Empathy is one of the first complex emotions that babies show toward each other. To show empathy is to identify with another’s feeling. Empathy is to emotionally put yourself in someone else’s shoes and experience or feel the way they do. Research

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