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Read this article to learn about the Physical Growth and Development of Child during Second Year. After reading this article you will learn about: 1. Introduction to Physical Growth and Development of Child during Second Year 2. Muscular and Nervous Systems of Child during Second Year 3. Motor Development 4. Development of Senses and Perceptions 5. Development of Language.
Contents:
- Introduction to Physical Growth and Development of Child during Second Year
- Muscular and Nervous Systems of Child during Second Year
- Motor Development of Child during Second Year
- Development of Senses and Perceptions of Child during Second Year
- Development of Language of Child during Second Year
1. Introduction to Physical Growth and Development of Child during Second Year:
The second year of the child is also a period of rapid physical growth and development though the growth is not so rapid as it is during the first year. During this period, the child gains 4 inches in height, and 4 to 5 pounds in weight; while his gains during the first year of his life are 6 to 9 inches in height, and, 14 to 15 pounds in weight.
A child of 2 years, on an average, has the height of 32 to 33 inches, and weighs approximately 28 pounds. In general, a positive relation between height and weight continues up to 12 years of age [NCHS standards are given in Table 5.1].
Bones also increase in size and number. They become modified in texture. More bones have become calcified now, than was the case during the first year. Somewhere between the age of 12 and 18 months, the bones become hardened and fused. The soft membrane spots in the skull, which we call fontanelles, generally, close. The second year is also the period when the deciduous teeth erupt.
Body proportion:
During this period, the upper part of the body happens to be heavier than the lower. The head happens to be the heaviest than any other single part of the body. It appears to be too large for the body. Skull (cranium) is much larger and so out of proportion to the face. Arms are too long; legs, hands and feet are too short.
Various parts of the body develop at different rates. They develop in such a way that, in due course, proportion between different parts of the body, may grow the adult level. Now, the head grows much more slowly in comparison to other parts of the body.
Facial skeleton grows relatively larger. The rate of growth of arms and legs happens to be more rapid than in case of other parts of the body. This is especially the characteristic of growth between birth and two years of age. The arms become larger than the legs.
2. Muscular and Nervous Systems of Child during Second Year:
During the second year, muscular and nervous systems gain in strength marvelously. The potentiality of their movements and function develop with great rapidity. The child can make new movements; his movements become finer and more precise. With the development of the nervous system, potentiality for such movements also increases.
Brain is the crucial part of the central nervous system. At the time of birth, it weighs 350 grams. By the end of second year, its weight is 1,000 grams, which is three-fourth of its weight in an adult. The nervous system, as a whole, grows complex and highly differentiated. The nerve fibres develop from a state of immaturity to the one when they are having better protective fatty shield—the process is called Myelinisation.
3. Motor Development of Child during Second Year:
Walking:
The child continuously gains in physical strength as he grows in body size, and this development is essential for his being able to perform the motor activities that are initiated or refined during this period. ‘Walking’ is an important locomotors activity which the child learns during the second year.
The child has to pass through a number of phases before he achieves the skill of walking independently; sitting, crawling, creeping, standing and walking with support are the stages which precede ‘walking’. A child cannot walk without support until he has achieved the needful neuromuscular maturation for the same; even for the accomplishment of the preceding phases, maturation of a different kind is required.
“Changed body proportions, advanced neural development, and increased muscle strength” along with proper practice, are crucial for progress in all these locomotors activities. Dennis’ says that absence of complete practice may retard locomotors development.
The average age, when a child can stand and walk with support is 12 months. A child of 14 months can stand alone. By 15 months, he starts walking, though still awkwardly and cautiously but without support. In this respect, individual differences are so much that, some start walking as early as 10 months, and, some not until 2 years of age.
There are many factors which may delay the development of locomotors ability. Severe illness is one of them. By 20 months of age, a child can walk up and down the stairs with assistance, and without assistance by the time the child is 2 years old. Bayley et al studied 61 children through repeated measurements, to know the amount of development during the first three years of the child.
Any attempt made to advance the development of these skills, before the needful neuromuscular maturity for the same has been achieved, is bound to fail. Practice, no doubt is important. It can enhance the pace of development but only if neuromuscular maturity, in case of each locomotors skill, takes its own time to be achieved.
With age and practice, co-ordination between walking and climbing improves; waste movements are eliminated, steps become longer and more rapid, they become stronger also. A variety of motor skills develop during this period—reaching to things, grasping them, self-feeding and handling objects of different shapes and sizes.
A child of 2 years, may also be interested in block building, and may do pretty well. Through experiments and observations, it was established that even children, 15 months of average age, could build a stable tower of 2 cubes; insert a pellet into a bottle, and place a round block into a farm board, while by the age of 12 months, none of these skills were found to be there.
By the time a child is 18 months old, he can throw a ball and construct a tower using three blocks.
A two-year-old child can kick a ball; mm the pages of a book, insert 3 blocks in a farm board, and, build a column six to seven cubes high. Children ranging between the age of 1 to 3, have been described as notorious handlers of objects; it is the way to satisfy their curiosity, and thus to go on learning rapidly [see Table 5.2].
Illingworth, while tracing the development of motor skills since the very beginning, confirms that a child of 18 months, automatically reaches out with much accuracy, to the near objects; can put one block on top of the other.
A child of 2 years may also start scribbling with a pencil, crayon or paints; may enjoy smacking and rolling bits of clay or dough. However, a behavioural problem arises during this period, the child picks up dirty, tiny objects by this time, the eyes and hands have learnt to work together with co-ordination.
Thumb Sucking:
Thumb sucking is another behavioural problem, which may not be apparently so serious at the beginning, but later on parents, generally try hard to wean the child from it. Affectional insecurity may be a cause for it. By the time a child turns 4, and if he has learnt more satisfactory use of the hands, he would give up thumb sucking.
“The habit will phase out as time passes on, and the child learns ‘grown-up’ ways to find his security and his place in the world.” Contact with his parents may also prove helpful.
Thumb sucking may cause protrusion of the front teeth. The observed instances make us believe that malocclusion spontaneously corrects itself when thumb sucking is stopped early. Parental interference may prolong the period of thumb sucking, and increase the intensity of the force of sucking.
Preference in the Use of Hands:
During the second year, a child starts feeding himself; and his skill in doing this increases with age. More accuracy is witnessed with no falling of any food particle of food, or dirtying of the mouth area. It is only when a child is thus seen feeding himself that the parents can learn if the child is using left hand in the activity rather than the right one.
Some parents try to force the child to use the right hand. There is a difference of opinion, regarding the forcible use of right hand. Glaser (1953) and some others are against such an interference. They consider the cause to be neurological.
According to them, there is a certain hemisphere in the brain which controls this and if the working of it is interfered with, this may adversely affect the development of speech and other fine motor activities of the child, which so rapidly develop, especially, during the ensuing period up to 5 years of age.
Some are of the view that to conclude anything with definiteness in this regard is not possible. Social and cultural factors may also affect people’s opinion regarding it.
Hildreth, GH opines:
…. “there is more of ambidextrality (use of both hands) and left-handedness among boys than among girls since girls are more tractable, and less resistant to adults and cultural pressures”—the social pressure to eat and write with right hand, happens to be more in case of girls.
Accordingly, to one opinion, the side to which infant, generally, moves while assuming neck tonic reflex position may be the side of his handedness.
A fairly vast majority of a population uses right hand because of the genetic neurological factors, and the social and cultural pressures. Though Trankell, in a study, found that the left-handed children worked in the same manner as the right-handed children; nevertheless, it has been suggested that children should be encouraged to use the right hand but they must not be forced to do it.
Thomson warns: “A decision to change a left-handed child to a right-handed should be considered a major readjustment for the child, and a programme not to be instituted without serious caution and psychological planning.” Jersild, AT also cautions against the unfavorable after-effects which such a shift involves.
4. Development of Senses and Perceptions of Child during Second Year:
When a child is born, it has its sense organs: eyes, ears, nose, tongue and skin, with full potentiality to develop constantly, rather rapidly, so as to enable it to grow into the most sensitive and sensible being on earth. It reaches to that stage, only after passing through a series of developmental processes and stages.
Murphy writes: ‘The transformation of an apparently dimly seeing, chaotically moving, avidly sucking, yet sleepy neonate into a smoothly co-ordinated alert and constructive adult involves many processes, not all of which we understand.’
In this article, our objective is only to see how a child develops its senses during the second year of its life. The neonate’s sense organs initially lead to no perceptions that are no meaningful interpretations of the impressions got at the sense thresholds. It is only gradually that the accumulating sense-impressions in the central nervous system, start giving meanings.
The sensations become perceptions when they convey meanings. Along with the development of nervous system, the sense organs, too, become more operative and their functions grow more meaningful.
The development of the physical organs, and, of those which are related to motor activities, helps the child further in coming with contact to a wider world, thereby enriching the accumulation of sense impressions into the central nervous system.
The intelligence of the child depends upon this accumulation, upon the quantum and nature of sense impressions, more and more of which develop into perceptions as the child grows into age.
During the first few postnatal weeks, the child learns the use of sense organs which are for seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling and for tactile impressions. By the time the child attains the age of 1 year, his sense organs are not only fully operative but are also serving as thresholds to the conduits for the transmission of the sense impressions into the central nervous system or the brain.
As the child advances in age, the number of stimuli from the external world— both physical and social—increases. The sense organs continuously grow more and more skillful in their responses to these stimuli. The baby, thus, reacting to the stimuli, develops intellectually.
An organism is moved to behave in a certain way because of stimuli received from the external environment, as well as because of internal needs of the body such as caused by hunger, fatigue, thirst and a lot of others. The acuity of sense organs increases because of their responding to the external stimuli as well as to the impressions made by the internal needs of the body.
Organs of functions, such as, hands, feet, and so on, become operative as a result of stimuli, which the sense organs receive. The functions of organs help in their rapid development. The feelings of hunger, of fatigue, of need for movement, for well-being and security or of discomfort or insecurity—all are internal impressions which too evoke bodily reactions.
Though reactions go on being modified continuously, yet the inter- sensory development does not happen to be perceptible before the age of three. It is only later, that an equivalence relationship is established among visual, haptic and kinesthetic sense modalities.
The perception of size is not still fully developed; a one-year-old child would pack up his tiny doll’s nursing bottle, preparing his muscles in the same way as he would do in case of his own full-sized bottle. Still, he is so young that he may hold out his hand to catch his ball—the perception of distance has still not been developed. This also shows that his perception of shape has still not achieved maturity.
The child cannot make correct perception of size, shape, height and the like. He may be seen trying to put an object into something hollow, though the hollow space is too small for the object to be put into it.
Likewise, he may do the mistake of trying to put a round object into a hollow which is square in shape. Still, he does not have the conception that a bigger object will occupy more space; nor, he can recognise the shape of an object, in reference to the shape of the hollow where it is to be put into.
A child who is almost two years old, would like, and, be greatly benefited playing with toys such as blocks of different shapes and sizes; hollow cubes which fit into each other. Such toys, accidentally, and later purposefully, give chances to the children, to compare sizes of different toys, and also their shapes.
They help in the development of perception as to which object is bigger and which is smaller; which toys are of the same shape and which differ in shapes and how.
The overall impact of the development of sense organs and of perception may be seen in the motor activities of the child, which continues to grow finer, accurate; the self-confidence of the infant also continues to grow. Though, as already mentioned above, it would be too early to expect a child of 2 years to have achieved too much of maturity as regards sense organs and perceptions.
5. Development of Language of Child during Second Year:
The development of language and the development of intellect are co-related, but this relation is evident at a later stage. Up to two years of age, no significant co-relation between the two could be found by the researchers, this is why, the development of language is being dealt with, in this very article.
The development of language starts with the production of PHONEMES by the child. The phonemes are the basic single sounds which individually convey no meaning or sense. The production of MORPHEMES by the child, marks the second stage of language development.
Morphemes are such meaningful words, which can convey some sense or meaning. Each morpheme has some phonemes which together make some sense; and if any of its phonemes is dropped, it would cease to give any meaning.
A child begins with the production of phonemes, and learns to unite them in different patterns, in imitation to his elders, in such a way that they become meaningful—organisation of phonemes which we call morphemes. During the second year, the repertoire of phonemes increases rapidly.
The researchers have reached to a general conclusion about the age-wise average number of phonemes, that the repertoire of a child contains: 18 phonemes can be pronounced by a one year old child; 25 phonemes, when the child is 23 months old.
Throughout the first year, the vowel sounds dominate, during the second year, the situation is reversed—the average number of vowels pronounced by a child of 23 months, is 11, while he can pronounce 14 consonants. Among the number of consonants, the nasals (m, n, n)— have a greater proportion; the proportion of fricatives (f, v, s, z,………………..) decreases.
Sounds produced, restricting the air with the two lips (bilabials); and those produced by touching the front tongue to the teeth ridge (alveolars), become more frequent; while those produced from throat or by touching the back of the tongue to the velum (velars), decrease in number.
These changes are attributable to physical maturity. As during the last quarter of the first year, the child starts using solid food which makes the jaws do a lot of experience in chewing, and the same helps in the development and stimulation of jaw muscles and dentition.
The physical changes, thus involved, result in enabling the child to utter such sounds more and in a better way, in which the role of the jaw muscles, is greater. During the second year, when the child has got the four upper and the four lower teeth erupted, he is in a better position to utter dental and post-dental consonants.
McCarthy writes:
“It is only after respiration has been satisfactorily established, after the child has assumed the erect posture, has ceased to be nursed, has begun to use solid food, after the frontal incisors have erupted, that the onset of true speech is observed.” (See Table 5.3).
Language is affected by the social environment of the child. For example, when the child hears his name pronounced repeatedly to call him, he starts comprehending what that particular word stands for—though he himself may not utter that word till the time he is also physically matured enough to do the same.
Likewise, he grasps the meanings of the words ‘milk’, ‘water’ and others—which are so repeatedly spoken, though he can speak out these words only much later.
The number of words, he can comprehend happens to be greater by far than the number of words he can utter; this is why a child who is only a little older than a year can follow the directions and commands given by the elders, though his own verbal expression is very limited as yet.
In many cases, his single word—monosyllabic or disyllabic at the most, stands for the whole sentence; when he utters the word “Ma-Ma”, he may mean, “Ma-Ma, lift me up in the lap”; or “Ma- Ma give me the toy”; or, “Ma-Ma, feed me”: so on and so forth.
When my granddaughter was about 2 years old, she could speak a few full sentences with a correct syntax— (Papa dant-te hain— Papa is rebuking); (for “dalia”—porridge) muje dai khanna hai—I am to eat the porridge.) etc. In the beginning, the child uses words which represent a single object or event.
When he uses the word “apple” it indicates his learning that it is something edible, having a definite shape, a red or green (with parts of it yellow) in colour. When he says— (papa gaya—Papa has gone), he is communicating a complete sense— representing some event.
A little later, he can use words which represent some class of objects or events; examples may be (khana khana, hai—the food is to be eaten); here the first (khana—food) is noun which represents a class of objects.
Thus, the child’s ability to communicate with others goes on increasing. His greatest prize is that others are understanding him, his needs or desires are readily fulfilled because of his speech—it proves to be the highest motivation to the child to further improve his speech, capability to communicate. “The second year is marked by swift and dramatic improvements in language ability”.
The child has an average vocabulary of 272 words by the time he is two years old. Of course, individual differences are present. These may be congenital or environmental.
Some may get very motivating environment, where they get to listen and imitate with due encouragement provided, while some other parents or elders, may not be able to spare much time, may not be having the mood for playing with and talking to their children with a cheering up spirit.
Counting words used by children, 2 years of age, in their spontaneous talks, during periodic routine examinations, revealed the fact that individual differences may be as wide as some using 126 words while the fewest used by a child, were only 6 words.
The context in which a word is used helps the child to learn its sense. When the child is engaged in doing something and his mother says — “Stop”; and the way she utters this word, makes it comprehensible to the child.
Though initially, it would not be grasped as a discrete word, yet later on, it joins the child’s repertoire of passive vocabulary. It is natural that the passive vocabulary exceeds in number, by far, to the active vocabulary of the child. At two years, the child can comprehend a great number of words while, at the time, is unable to use the same. [See Table 5.4].
