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Stages in child development
Stages of development of a baby from conception to birth
Stages in child development
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The French documentary Babies shows the first year of development of four different babies who live in four completely different environments. The film follows Ponijao, a little girl from Namibia, Bayar, a little boy from Mongolia, Mari, a girl from Tokyo, and Hattie, a girl from San Francisco. Even though the babies live in very dissimilar parts of the world, their physical, cognitive, and social development seem to all follow a set pattern. On the other hand, the babies learn to do some activities distinctive to their environment by watching their parents and siblings. Therefore, Babies provides evidence to support both the nature and nurture sides of the debate. All four babies followed a similar pattern of gross-motor development. They …show more content…
On the nature side of the debate, every baby cried when they were trying to communicate to their caregiver. Crying is universal because it is the only way that babies can alert their caregiver that something is wrong. Furthermore, each baby cooed, babbled, and cried without prompting. Ponijao babbles when her mother pats her on the back because she likes the sound it makes. Bayar’s brother keeps putting a strip of fabric in his face, making him cry out of annoyance. Mari babbles and has a “conversation” with another baby on one of her visits to the park. Hattie also starts saying syllables on her own. However, nurture plays a huge role in language development as well. Each baby was read to, spoken to, sung to, or a mixture of the former. Without prompting from his mother, Bayar would not be able to copy the sounds that she makes to try to get him to speak. Hattie can say “no” and “uh oh”, which are English phrases. Her parents would have taught her how to say those words. In fact, her mother reads to her, and she imitates the sounds her mother makes while reading. This proves that without both heredity and environment, language would never develop in an infant. They need to have an inborn ability to quickly and easily learn vocabulary and grammar during the critical periods, but they also need to hear and interact with language in their …show more content…
Each of the babies could be classified into one of Chess and Thomas’ categories of temperament. First, Ponijao could be considered an easy baby since she is usually in an upbeat mood. She enjoys playing with others, she is curious, and she is happy to explore on her own. An example of this is when she crawls through the mud puddle just because she wanted to. Next, Bayar seems like a slow-to-warm-up baby. He is very tolerant of his surroundings, including his older brother and all the farm animals that live around him. In one scene of the film, a rooster jumps into his bed and walks around, but Bayar does not even seem to care. He is not very active and is content just being alone, and he rarely gets upset but also rarely gets very excited by anything. Finally, both Mari and Hattie seem like difficult babies. Mari seems to cry more often than not. She throws a massive tantrum when she cannot complete the puzzle and cries loudly when she sees a zoo animal. Hattie is less irritable but still presents many challenges to her parents. She seems to dislike any change and desires to be more independent. She tries to feed herself well before other babies try to do the same. During a class with her parents, when they are in the middle of singing a song, she just gets up and walks to the door as if she is ready to leave. Babies presents temperament as influenced mostly by nature, but it is possible that nurture is a
“Babies”. Is a documentary made by the Thomas Balmés. It offers a window on the lives of four infants in four completely different cultures. This is not a usual kind of documentary; there are no narration, no subtitles and actual dialogue was very minimal. The film explores childhood rituals, enculturation, socialization and parenthood. I will try to explore each of these themes and try to make the case that behaviors, values and fears are learned not something congenital. It has, in my opinion, comparative perspectives and different methods in rearing children in different societies. It achieves this by cutting the scenes in certain ways to show the differences between these different children. For example, in one part of the film, both Bayarjargal (the Mongolian child) and Mari (the Japanese child) were playing with their pet cats and then the two scenes were edited to a shot of Ponijo (the Namibian child) looking interested in flies. The four children developed in somewhat similar ways. However, there are differences in their behaviors due to the enculturation by seeing their parents or siblings who were doing what they thought to be the norms and the obvious landscape in which they are brought up. Two of the kids were born in rural areas (Namibia and Mongolia) and two were born in urban areas (the United States and Japan). The mothers of these infants were interviewed and chosen to be in the film
The mind of an infant and toddler is a sponge to language. Whether or not the child is able to speak, their brain is rehearsing and affirming the linguistic structures they hear, and the period of baby talk—called “babbling”—is a crucial time of experimentation with sound. During this time, the child will babble while in social situations in order to see which phonological structures receive positive responses from their parents—i.e. which combinations of sounds elicit responses. If a child cannot hear the sounds that their language offers, the child does not have the opportunity to babble. A child with significant hearing loss will still make sounds in infancy, but will quickly cease due to the lack of response and the fact that they cannot hear the sounds they are making and so cannot affirm them for themselves.
I. Social Context & Topic: Every work exists within a social and cultural framework. Analyze the contemporary social elements that this work is reacting to. Explain the topic and the contemporary issues surrounding your product.
When most people think of the process of language development in “normal” children, the concepts that come to mind are of babies imitating, picking up sounds and words from the speakers around them. Trying to imagine that a child who cannot hear one single sound a person makes can learn to speak a language is absolutely fascinating. These children range from amazin...
Because the film Babies just shows the first years of life. This stage is centered on the fact that infants have a limited knowledge about their world. They have to use skills they were born with to gather facts and information about the environment. These skills include looking, sucking, grasping, listening and any other reflexes. In sensorimotor stages, infants gain knowledge through sensory experiences and manipulating objects(Cherry, Piaget 's Stages of Cognitive Theory Development). This stage is also divided into six substages: reflexes, primary circular reactions secondary circular reactions, coordination of reactions, tertiary circular reactions, and early representational thought. Object permanence is one of the accomplishments during this stage of development. Object permanence is when an object continues to exist even if you cannot see it or hear it. We can see this stage developing in all these babies. One thing that I notice was when Bayarijargal saw his feet for the first time. He could not stop touching them. He wanted to put them in his mouth. For a child in this stage of life, they understand their environment through reflexes such as putting things in their mouths. Ponijao does the same thing when we see her putting rocks and sticks in her
In every country of the world, different cultures are seen. Each culture has a different way of raising children and that is seen in the film Babies. Kids are raised differently depending on the resources available and the economic situation of the country and that is clearly seen in this film. The methods of childrearing are completely different in each of the countries covered in the film, but that is because in each country the kids are being raised for different types of futures. Babies are raised differently depending on the culture and location, however, the one thing that does not change throughout the film is that the mothers care extensively for their babies.
Babies is a documentary that centers around four diverse infants throughout their first year on Earth. These four babies are born in four different areas of the world. The film demonstrates how people from different parts of the world can grow up completely different than other parts, while still sharing many similarities. Ponijao is an African baby who is born in Opuwo, Namibia. Mari is a young Japanese girl who was born in Tokyo, Japan. Bayar is a baby who was born in Bayanchandmani, Mongolia. The fourth baby’s name is Hattie, born in San Francisco, California. While viewing the documentary, many theories and concepts in psychology are portrayed.
The film Babies is a film that follows four babies from San Francisco, Tokyo, Mongolia, and Namibia through their first year of life. The film has no talking or narrative. In many scenes, you don’t even see adults. This helps you get to see a baby’s perspective on the world. This movie showed how different cultures are when it comes to raising children.
Babies should be able to understand adult speaking and are able to after speak it but it cannot be told what to speak or hear. Crying is an important way of communication for infants. Infants have different styles of crying, and many mothers are able to differentiate what each cry indicates (UMM, 2013). Cognitive aspect
The concept of injustice has always been something to which has infuriated me, however, one aspect of this concept in which has always struck a nerve with me is when juveniles, in particular, experience a lack of fairness or justice. One particular example, in which ignited my passion to stand up for injustice policies and laws against juveniles occurred when I was sitting in my juvenile delinquency class, during my undergraduate career, watching a documentary known as When Kids Get Life.
These babies have different homes, different lives and far different cultural traditions that they follow. All four babies will still develop motor skills and talking around the same time period. Interaction with family, where they were born and the environment they live in will only effect them so much. No matter our place in the world science has always proved that we will all grow up from being that newborn
Babies begin to develop language skills long before they embark on speaking. The foundation for learning language begins before birth by the baby listening and recognizing his/her mother’s heartbeat and voice in the womb. “In a study, researchers played a 2-minute recording of a popular Chinese poem to 60 pregnant women and their unborn babies while monitoring total heart rates. Heart rates rose while the babies listened to their own mother's voice, but they fell and stayed lower while the stranger recited. Obviously, the babies were paying close attention, leading the researchers to suspect they were not only recognizing morn, but beginning to learn the ins and outs of language” (Dawidowska and Harrar (2003))....
Child growth and development is a process that consists of some building blocks, which are components that combine in an infinite number of ways (Cherry, n.d.). As a result of the variations of building blocks in a child’s development, educators, psychologists, and philosophers have been constantly engaged in the debate of nature versus nurture debate. Many researchers agree that child development is a complex interaction between his/her genetic background (nature) and his/her environment (nurture). In essence, some developmental aspects are strongly affected by biology whereas other aspects are influenced by environmental factors. From the onset of an individu...
Still today, it is the commonly held belief that children acquire their mother tongue through imitation of the parents, caregivers or the people in their environment. Linguists too had the same conviction until 1957, when a then relatively unknown man, A. Noam Chomsky, propounded his theory that the capacity to acquire language is in fact innate. This revolutionized the study of language acquisition, and after a brief period of controversy upon the publication of his book, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, in 1964, his theories are now generally accepted as largely true. As a consequence, he was responsible for the emergence of a new field during the 1960s, Developmental Psycholinguistics, which deals with children’s first language acquisition. He was not the first to question our hitherto mute acceptance of a debatable concept – long before, Plato wondered how children could possibly acquire so complex a skill as language with so little experience of life. Experiments have clearly identified an ability to discern syntactical nuances in very young infants, although they are still at the pre-linguistic stage. Children of three, however, are able to manipulate very complicated syntactical sentences, although they are unable to tie their own shoelaces, for example. Indeed, language is not a skill such as many others, like learning to drive or perform mathematical operations – it cannot be taught as such in these early stages. Rather, it is the acquisition of language which fascinates linguists today, and how it is possible. Noam Chomsky turned the world’s eyes to this enigmatic question at a time when it was assumed to have a deceptively simple explanation.
Nearly every member of the human race learns a language or more to the degree of proficiency only in the first few years of life. How children achieve this astonishing skill in such little time has sparked controversial debates among linguists, psychologists, and scientists throughout centuries. Some believe that language is an innate ability possessed by all human beings due to the remarkable function of the brain, while others maintain that language is learned from childhood experience. However, many are beginning to realize that nature and nurture go hand-in-hand when explaining how children develop their language(s). Despite the claims that language is either pre-learned or environmentally learned alone, the combination of both genes and experience better explains the aspects of first language acquisition.