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The theory I agree the most with is behavioral and social cognitive theory. This is due to the idea of how the environment heavily influences a child's development which is something I strongly believe in. For example, if a child or adolescent sees something, they could potentially mimic whatever was being demonstrated. This theory also puts emphasis on how certain things can impact you throughout all points of development, and not just in your early years. A theory I don’t necessarily fully agree on would be the ethological theory. My opinions on this come from its basis that the biological aspects of a human is what impacts their development without much emphasis on outside factors.This theory states that early development can occur because of early experience, which could be true but I feel like this theory focuses too much on biological nature aspects over nurture. Both of these theories however, are good and bad in their own right, as they are just theories. They are both very beneficial to the understanding of childhood and early adolescents and as someone who aspires to become a labor & delivery nurse, where I will work with laboring mothers and newborn babies, it is important to me to educate myself on the various things that can impact a child starting before, during, and after the birthing process. Something such as these theories could impact a babies and mothers life depending on how the healthcare providers perceive and understand it. For me, I will definitely research on the nature and nurture aspects of what is and what isn't beneficial for my patients during birth.

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Learning about Gene Linked Abnormalities and Chromosomal Abnormalities is important in a multitude of ways. It can be important to be able to differentiate between the two and understand the difference between them. One example of a Chromosomal Abnormality is down syndrome, which is caused due to an extra chromosome leading to some forms of disabilities. There are surgeries, treatments found if it is found early on, and the younger the mother, the higher odds of the child having down syndrome. In terms of Gene-Linked Abnormalities however, an example is diabetes. Diabetes is caused when the body doesn’t produce enough insulin, and therefore an abnormality of sugar. Both of these abnormalities can severely affect a child's life if not understood and talked about accurately. It is vital to understand these, so if your baby has them you can properly take care of and understand their development. In education, teachers should understand the various differences in terms of health their students go through, while they may not be experts on a topic, simply knowing these abnormalities can provide a safe space for the child. As someone who wants to be a labor and delivery nurse, it is extremely important to understand because I will be working with the babies as soon as they are born, and some of these things must be understood to adequately take care of their lives. Simply understand your friends, peers, other humans who may have been born different can make an important change in terms of how they grow up.

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The process of labor, birth, and pregnancy as a whole is not just difficult for the baby being born, but also a mentally and physically difficult process for the mother before, during, and after birth. Postnatal care however, focuses on the aftercare of the mother during the postpartum period (after birth)  which is around 6 weeks long. Things such as gaining enough sleep, taking it easy on your body and ensuring the mother takes care of herself can be helpful. Unfortunately, a very common occurrence when it comes to mothers is dealing with postpartum depression. Postpartum depression is a big depressive episode following birth that can include sadness, anxiety, and lack of motivation caused by hormones and emotional drops. For mothers experiencing this depression, many can do therapy in order to treat it, as well as support from the baby's other parent. This module for me was definitely one of the most interesting and most important when considering my field. As I plan on going into labor and delivery nursing, understanding more than just the birth and babies development can be vital to saving the mothers health and mental care. Things such as postpartum depression can affect the mothers care but can also affect the baby's care in the long run. So ensuring myself, and future colleges are well informed on the importance of paying attention to both the mother and the baby will allow for a better and more safe experience for the mother experiencing the postpartum stage of birth.

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When it comes to malnutrition, there are different types and reasons for each. The difference between infantile marasmus vs kwashiorkor is that marasmus is the wasting away of body tissues, caused by severe protein-calorie deficiency. However, kwashiorkor is a condition caused by severe deficiency in protein, which in turn causes the child's abdomen and feet to become swollen.  Malnutrition can have serious effects in developing children, and worldwide the numbers of wasting are much higher than many may think. Things such as nutritional care and psychosocial intervention can reduce the malnutrition numbers found in infancy. Policy makers have a very vital role in ensuring infants acquire the necessary nutrients and proteins needed to be healthy. In looking at this information and reports of malnutrition in infants, I can only begin to think of the places and people who are incapable of having food and nutrients to begin with. To bring up what I believe is a very important topic and connect it to our module, I think it is necessary to discuss the development of children who are growing up in wars. When we think about something such as the misfortunes taking place in Palestine, most children and even adults do not have access to sufficient food supply. Because of this, kids could have a risk in their overall health but beyond that, the malnutrition being faced could lead to effects in physical development as well as mental development. Therefore, it is so essential for other countries who are fortunate enough to help those in need.

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After watching the videos, we can recognize the influence that talking and communication with your infant can overall affect language development. While babies use their own “baby language” in their early months of life, they are still adapting and learning language everyday before verbally speaking. We see that babies can recognize that someone is communicating with them as we watched with the father and his son’s conversations. This recognition is super important as it can signify that language development is happening. Something that I think is a great connection to this is actually something that I saw for the first time online. Through tik tok I watched a video in which the two parents of the baby were speaking two different languages to the baby completely in that language. The overall effects of doing this had been super successful showing that by the time the baby could talk, it practically knew the two languages and could even decipher which parent to speak which language to. As of right now, I plan on having children and I only speak English, however my boyfriend speaks Urdu which is a very important language to himself and his family. This language will be super important to integrate into my future baby's life and language development, so I overall think that this sort of “trend” is very interesting as well as very influential on the baby. We see so many people unable to speak their families native language as they started learning after those early years of life which seems to be the sweet spot for language development of many kinds.

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As this past week we learned about socioemotional development, it is important to discuss the ideas and experiences that pertain to the topic. For example, temperament is an individual's behavior style and characteristic way of emotionally responding, and the temperament itself has three different classifications. An easy child, a difficult child, and slow to warm up child are all forms of temperament found in growing children. Something else in relation to temperament is the goodness of fit model which refers to the match between temperament and environmental demands which brings us back to the nature vs. nature mindset. In knowing how environment van affect temperament, it is important for parents and caretakers to be mindful that the child's development and behavior regarding temperament could be impacted by the environment. When learning about this topic, it reminds me of my everyday life at work. I work at an after school program for elementary schoolers and I am face to face with all sorts of different behavior and temperaments everyday. So, I take most of the behavior issues I receive from my students with a grain of salt. Whether a kid is super nice to me or not doesn't affect how I treat or care about them. Instead, I make sure to take care of them with respect and give them a space to be themselves while under my watch. Surprisingly, even the students who can have the most issues tend to come around by the end of the day because we allowed them a space to be themselves.

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In learning about physical development in early childhood this week, we have also learned about the importance of play in a child's development. To start off, there are many forms of play in terms of physical development, such as playing with hands, toys, running, building blocks, and learning to ride a tricycle. Things such as play can greatly influence a child's development because it allows for both motor skills and brain development to enhance a child's physical development process. Both parents and educators can involve forms of play at school or at home by ensuring the kids get sufficient time to expand their growth and development with allotted play time. In the article I found, there is a multitude of different detailed types of play for babies and growing children. Things such as peek-a-boo, singing and dancing provide opportunities for children to grow in ways while ensuring they are including the idea of fun into their days. The article describes play as a “toxic stress buster”, essentially explaining how children can feel less stressed when allowed time to play (an example could be the first day of school). Play can be helpful in physical ways of course, but the article digs deeper to find examples of play influencing mental development and looking at anxiety and stress children may be experiencing. Personally, I know that when I was a kid, playing was something I could look forward to and made extremely positive impacts on my life. This module just goes to show how play is extremely beneficial on physical development and we don’t even know it.

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Cognitive Development in Early Childhood

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Cognitive Development in Early Childhood

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As someone who is an after school program teacher, I think the idea of running and creating my own preschool sounds super cool. As a kid, I loved preschool, I loved the colors, games, teachers, and overall just everything. Going off of this. I think Piaget's theory is more of what I had experienced and what I would like future children to experience. While I respect and understand aspects of Vygotsky's theory, I don't believe strictly using all of his theory can benefit children in the best way possible. For my preschool, I would ensure that all of my staff are kind, respectful and especially understanding of children, especially children of such a young age. Teaching comes with a great deal of responsibility and teachers themselves make such a huge impact on a child's life that it is vital to fill schools with suitable staff. I would implement things such as, roles of the day, such as line leader, door holder, and teachers assistant. These roles allow for young kids to get excited to help out and perform well in the class to obtain such roles. I would make sure to mix playtime with fun, educational activities to make sure students are being safe and having fun. Overall, I think I have learned so much from my current job in how to interact with kids of all ages, the concepts I have for my preschool stem from my experiences as a teacher currently. My overall goal for my preschool would be to give kids a rich learning environment that allows them to explore the world around them, laugh, and make memories.

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Socioemotional Development in Early Childhood

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Socioemotional Development in Early Childhood

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In this chapter, we learn about socioemotional development in early childhood. We get to gain an understanding of self-concept, and how it shows children who they are, their capabilities, and how they think and feel. This can also bring us to the idea of self esteem, where we see how the idea of self concept can later lead to how we perceive ourselves in an "esteem" way. In this, we discuss Erikson's Initiative vs. Guilt, stating that if a child is put into an environment where they can explore, make decisions, and do activities they are deemed to be "initiative". Whereas, if a child is put into an environment opposite of that, repressed with criticism and control, they can have a sense of guilt. We can see a relationship between all three of these as self concepts can lead to self esteem, and in turn the feeling of it can cause guilt. In an effort to connect this to an older set of kids, I had an experience to this similar today. During my shift at work, I had a young girl in the sixth grade hit a boy in the face during a game of dodge ball, to which she ran out crying. After she calmed down, I had a talk with her about what was going on, in which she explained to me that she had just felt so bad and didn't mean to hurt him. While this story doesn't connect with self-esteem, I saw it as a way to explain how guilt can show goodness in people sometimes. Overall, I don't personally know or even think this guilt strained from the environment, I think it just came from how she cares for her friends and others.

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Physical & Cognitive Development in Middle Childhood

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Physical & Cognitive Development in Middle Childhood

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Personally, I find this topic, while hard to talk about, full of utmost importance especially when considering the development of middle childhood adolescents. With something such as eating disorders, there are a vast amount of explanations and reasoning as to why children feel pressured to be or look a certain way, and why it happens especially at this age. We see children, who are very free-spirited, full of no worries, and playful become more self-conscious and very aware of who they are. One part of this is definitely correlated to puberty, as it is almost impossible to not be aware of how you're changing and how those around you are changing. However, I think we can definitely find how things such as social media can influence children in ways they wouldn’t be influenced prior. As said before, I personally find it normal for kids to be somewhat self-conscious during times of puberty, however I believe social media is allowing for this stage of awareness to happen in much deeper and earlier waves than ever before. And, if dealing with these situations, I think it is necessary for parents to be involved in the content children are seeing in social media, television, or even in person. Having discussions with your child about physical changes, and how it may affect their perceptions or thoughts of themselves may seem scary but it can allow your child to have a safer space to go to if they eventually deal with those situations first hand.

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1. Overall, I would say that my understanding of Child Development has grown greatly since starting this course and completing practical application journals. I think that it was a great way to connect things we learn with real life, in a way that becomes easily comprehensible. To continue on, I notice how I used to write about my aspiration of being nurse, but now see my discussions focusing on teaching. This is a bigger deal for me as I never thought I would have an interest in teaching, yet, I see how my ideals and goals changed overtime.

2. My top 3 journals would include the first collage we did, as I got to express a lot of myself and begin making connections with how I grew up. I also really enjoyed the journal where we got to design a preschool, as I definitely think about what a school or classroom would look like if it was completely up to me. Finally, I really enjoyed the journal about the importance of play. This made me realize how beneficial play is in helping kids function and grow up, and it is much more than just drawing or building blocks.

3. I learned that Child Development and the complete understanding of it is so essential. Without it, there would be so much unknown about how children grow and develop, which can severely alter a child's life. There was so much I didn't initially think about but now will consider, especially with my students.