Chapter 13. Infancy and Childhood Textbook Solutions

NIOS Class 12 Psychology Chapter 13 Answers

INTEXT QUESTIONS 13.1

Fill in the blanks-

1. Changes in height, weight and body proportions are termed as ……………..

Ans: Physical Development

2. Large and small muscle movements are required for …………. motor and ………….motor skills respectively.

Ans: Gross, Fine

3. Middle and late childhood is the time when physical development slows down but is rather ……………………

Ans: Consistent

4. Increase in body weight during middle and late childhood is mainly due to increase in size of …………..and …………..system.

Ans: Skeletal and Muscular

INTEXT QUESTIONS 13.2

1. Match the following

a. Organization	i. Adjusting existing schemes to fit new information and experiences
b. Assimilation	ii. Back and forth movements between states of equilibrium and disequilibrium
c. Accommodation	iii. Incorporating new information into existing schemes
d. Equilibration	iv. Grouping and reorganizing information

Ans: 

a-iv

b-iii

c-i

d-ii.

2. State which of the following statements are ‘true’ or ‘false’

1. Piaget believed that children actively construct knowledge about the world around them.

Ans: True

2. 4 months old infants can imitate actions that they cannot even produce.

Ans: False

3. Preoperational thought is egocentric.

Ans: False

4. Children in the concrete operational stage can perform concrete operations or mental actions on real, concrete objects.

Ans: True

INTEXT QUESTIONS 13.3

Fill in the blanks:

1. Infants show fear for persons they do not know. This is called __________.

Ans: Stranger anxiety

2. Infants cry and resist separation from mother. This is called ______________.

Ans: Separation anxiety

3. Socio-emotional development means managing the ____________ of oneself and others.

Ans: Emotions

4. Children gradually develop evaluative emotions in response of people’s reactions to children’s behaviours. These emotions are called ______________.

Ans: Self-conscious emotions.

TERMINAL QUESTIONS

1. Discuss physical development from infancy through late childhood.

Ans: 

• Weight: An average newborn is 49-50 cm long and weighs 2.5 kg. By the age of 4 months, infants have ordinarily doubled their birth weight and have nearly tripled it by their first birthday. In the second year of life, infants weigh approximately 10 kg.
• Length/height: Infants grow approximately 1 inch per month during the first year. By the age of 2 years, an average infant becomes 71.3cm tall. 
• Motor skills: Infants grasp anything that touches their palm and turn their head, opens mouth and begin to suck when their cheeks are stroked, or the side of their mouth is touched. Some of these reflexes, such as grasping reflexes, eventually become incorporated into more complex voluntary actions. 
• Posture: Newborns cannot control their body postures voluntarily. But within weeks, they begin to hold their heads erect, and soon they can lift their heads while prone. By age 2 months, infants start sitting while supported on their lap. But until 6 or 7 months of age, they cannot sit independently.
• Movements: By about 8 months of age, infants usually learn to pull themselves up and hold onto a chair, and many can stand alone by 10 to 12 months of age. By 13 to 18 months of age, they move all over the place. By 18 to 24 months, toddlers can walk quickly and run a short distance. By the age of 2 years, toddlers become more skilled in exploring their environment using their newly acquired motor abilities.

2. Define the processes that children use to construct knowledge.

Ans: 

• Adaptation: This occurs when children adjust their current information about the world to new environmental demands. This involves two processes-
  • Assimilation: When children incorporate new information into their existing schemes, they are said to be assimilating information.
  • Accommodation: In this second process, the above-mentioned child learns that motorcycles and trucks are not cars, and hence modifies his schemes of what cars are, based on this new information.
• Organization: All children organize, i.e. group and categorize information (and schemes) to make a better sense of the world. This is called organization.
• Equilibration: This is a mechanism which explains how children shift from one stage of thought to the next. All children experience cognitive conflict or disequilibrium in trying to understand the world, but eventually they resolve this conflict about new information and reach the state of balance, or equilibrium of thought.

3. Discuss the limitations of preoperational and concrete operational thought.

Ans: Limitations of Pre-operational thoughts

• Egocentrism: Unable to distinguish one’s own and someone else’s.
• Animism: It is the belief that inanimate (non-living) objects have life-like qualities.
• Centration: Children in the pre-operational stage can ‘centre’ their attention on only one aspect or characteristic of the object and exclude all other aspects.
• Lack of conservation: In this stage, children fail to understand that altering an object’s physical appearance does not change its basic properties.

Limitations of Operationsal thoughts

In this stage, children start applying logical reasoning to problems, but their thinking is tied to specific or concrete examples, i.e. children can perform concrete operations or mental actions on real, concrete objects.

4. Trace the development of emotions in children from birth to childhood.

Ans: 

• Crying is the most basic mechanism newborns have for communication. It is the way through which they express their emotions. Emotions such as joy, sadness, anger, surprise and fear that are present in the first months of life are called primary emotions.
• Babies interact and connect socially with other people in their own environment through smiling. After 2 to 3 months of age, infants begin to smile in response to external stimuli. 
• Another significant emotion in babies is fear, which typically appears at about 6 months of age and peaks at about 18 months. The most frequent expression of an infant’s fear involves stranger anxiety, in which infants show a fear of persons they do not recognize. Along with stranger anxiety, infants also experience fear of being separated from their mothers or primary caregivers. This leads to separation protests, where the infants cry out aloud and resist separation from the mother or primary caregiver.
• Around 2-year-old children start recognizing themselves in the mirror or in a photograph. This indicates the beginning of understanding of self as distinct and unique. During this period, they also use words like ‘I’, ‘me’, and cry for things, ‘it’s mine’.
• In early childhood, they develop emotions such as empathy, jealousy and embarrassment along with pride, shame and guilt. 

5. Define object permanence, imitation, stranger anxiety and separation anxiety.

Ans: 

• Permanence: Infants begin to understand that objects and events continue to exist even when they are out of sight. This is called object permanence.
• Imitation: Around 4 months of age, infants copy or reproduce someone’s act or language, which is called imitation.
• Stranger anxiety: Infants show a fear of persons they do not recognize. 
• Separation anxiety: The fear of being separated from their mothers or primary caregivers.

6. Discuss in brief the role of parents in dealing with the issues and concerns of the  following stages of childhood-

a. Infancy

b. Early childhood

Ans: 

Infancy: 

• Early stimulation may be given in all domains of development, such as physical and motor, language, and cognitive. 
• Infants may be supported to sit, crawl and walk. 
• Promote their earlier attempts at the usage of speech. 
• Provide a rich and stimulating environment to explore objects and play around without fear. 
• Be more receptive to their attempts at using speech. 
• Introduce strangers to the infant in a non-threatening way, and also brief the visitors about the child’s anxiety issues. 
• The child is to be fed well and kept clean, and the child learns to trust her/his environment as predictable and believes in the caretakers for being there for her/him.

Early childhood:

• One of the major tasks at the beginning of early childhood is toilet training.
• Help children settle down in schools through a positive and caring environment. 
• Allow the child to take control of their bodies by allowing them to take a bath on their own and be patient with them while they are competent. 
• Give them autonomy and encourage them for the initiatives they are taking to make them feel secure and confident in doing things for themselves.

7. Define cognitive development. According to Piaget what processes do children use to construct their own cognitive worlds?

Ans: Cognitive development refers to how children think. 

Piaget believed that children use the following processes to actively construct their own cognitive worlds-

• Adaptation: This occurs when children adjust their current information about the world to new environmental demands. This involves two processes-
  • Assimilation: When children incorporate new information into their existing schemes, they are said to be assimilating information.
  • Accommodation: In this second process, the above-mentioned child learns that motorcycles and trucks are not cars, and hence modifies his schemes of what cars are, based on this new information.
• Organization: All children organize, i.e. group and categorize information (and schemes) to make a better sense of the world. This is called organization.
• Equilibration: This is a mechanism which explains how children shift from one stage of thought to the next. All children experience cognitive conflict or disequilibrium in trying to understand the world, but eventually they resolve this conflict about new information and reach a state of balance, or equilibrium of thought.

8. How socio-emotional development does takes place in early childhood?

Ans: Early childhood is the period of childhood when children develop an understanding of

themselves and begin to see social comparisons.

• They develop emotions such as empathy, jealousy and embarrassment by about one and a half years of age.
• Development of evaluative, self-conscious emotions is influenced by parents’ and other people’s responses to children’s behaviour.
• The ability to understand and talk about one’s own and other people’s emotions increases in children in the early childhood stage. 
• Between the ages of 2 and 4, children acquire more words to describe their emotions. 
• They also start relating the causes and consequences of feelings.
• By ages 4 to 5, children start understanding that the same events can elicit different emotions in different people.
• They express their emotions, keeping the social implications of those expressions in mind.

9. Explain different concerns and issues during middle and late childhood?

Ans: 

• ‘Industry versus inferiority’: During this stage of life, two of the important developmental concerns are practicing future adult roles and responsibilities and learning to become industrious in whatever one does. This gets reflected most in the games that they play with their peers. Activities such as sports or simply taking care of their siblings become the practice ground for children to believe in their capacities. Those children who are not able to show their competence and often ‘lose’ to others in games sometimes develop feelings of inferiority about themselves.
• Bullying: Bullying means situations where children face verbal and non-verbal aggressive advances and threats from children of their age or older than them. These can include hurt, humiliation, and or use of abusive language.. The children who bully and those who get bullied; both need attention and help from their parents, teachers and sometimes experts in the field.

10. How does cognitive development during concrete operational stage.

Ans: The concrete operational stage lasts approximately from 7 to 11 years. In this stage, children start applying logical reasoning to problems, but their thinking is tied to specific or concrete examples, i.e. children can perform concrete operations or mental actions on real, concrete objects.

• Conservation: Children in this stage can conserve liquid, length, number, mass, of objects and substances by taking the height, weight and parameters. 
• Classification: Concrete operational children can divide and categorize objects into sets and subsets by understanding their relations. For example, they can categorize fruits and vegetables of different types in multiple ways, such as those based on their colour, taste, size and so forth.
• Seriation: It is the ability to order objects along a quantitative dimension. When children of this age are asked to order sticks by length, they can put the sticks in correct order, either ascending or descending whatever is asked for.

Additional Study Materials

• NIOS Class 12 Psychology Syllabus Bifurcation
• NIOS Class 12 Sample Question Paper
• Thinking and Problem
• Life Span Perspective on Development