Child Development: Ages and Stages

Child development is the term used to describe the stages and milestones that a child goes through to grow and change. These stages and millstones are important for a child development to gain knowledge and skills to help them in the future. For example, important milestones for an average child should reach between the ages of birth to 5 years could be griping and holding objects, crawling which will then develop into walking, starting to communicate with a few words at a time these are all milestones that a child will go through in their first few years of life.

children should reach their milestones at their own pace and should not be rushed. There are five aspects of development; physical, emotional, social, language and cognitive which are all interrelated.

The two aspects that I focused on during my observation of my chosen child were social and cognitive development. Social development is the understanding of different attitudes, manners, and what is right and wrong through developing relationships with others and learning what is acceptable and not acceptable in developing children’s culture.

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While observing child A I found out that she has very good socials skills and tends to always be around her friends while at nursery and communicating with them. And according to child development: an illustrated handbook by Jacqueline Harding children her age should be beginning to understand how to cooperate with others and enjoying the company of other people. Harding also said that children love to show off their skills and throughout my observation, I noticed child A showed a lot of leadership skills while taking part in activities and although sometimes this leads to disputes between the children because she liked everything to go her way, this showed her enthusiasm towards the activity and boosted Her confidence that will help her in the future when she has the opportunity to take charge in at task.

While doing my observations I used two methods of assessing, first one was The checklist observation method which is a list of questions that is to be answered while you are observing the child doing a certain activity. The advantages of this method were that it was easy to use, I just had to tick the boxes whenever child A performed that certain aspects of that question and write down a few notes to help me understand and refer back to when I needed it. This method was also good because I was able to take part in an activity while I was observing as I only had to write down a few quick notes each time. The disadvantages of this method would be that I had to prepare the questions beforehand and although I was able to answer all the questions I had written down, I missed out important questions that would of helped me see more of child A’s development if I had written them don on the checklist.