Observation Settings
The first location was the Saddleback College Child Development Center, a care and education setting. I observed a small group of children in the classroom and the center’s outdoor playing environment. Child 1 is a five-year-old Caucasian boy, and Child 2 is a five-year-old African-American girl. The activities that took place included playing with toys and in-class discussions of pictures and other learning materials. Apart from Child 1 and Child 2, there were seven children from three to five years old. Among the adults present at the time of the observation, there were two teachers responsible for caring and supervision.
The second location was an informal setting in Mission Viejo – the La Paws Dog Park. Among other visitors, there was a Caucasian couple with a six-year-old daughter (Child 3) and a Pekinese dog. The observed activities included the child’s active games with her pet and conversations with both parents. The number of other visitors nearby is difficult to estimate, it varied from twenty to thirty people, with the majority of them being adults, and the child did not communicate with her peers during the observation.
Characteristic Behaviors of Young Children
- Focus on appearances
- Definition: a propensity to emphasize appearances and ignore other characteristics when forming judgments.
- Observation: Child 3 saw a Chihuahua and a Malamute dog and said, “Why do puppies play with adult big dogs?”
- Connection: the bigger dog was obviously a puppy, but the girl considered it to be older than the Chihuahua just because of its size, thus making conclusions based on appearances.
- Egocentrism
- Definition: a person’s inability to understand that people’s worldviews and opinions may differ from his/her ones.
- Observation: Child 1 offered another boy to play with his toy tank brought from home and was surprised when the boy preferred another toy.
- Connection: Child 1 tends to think that everyone shares his interests and preferences. From his viewpoint, he is offering another boy the unique opportunity to play with the best toy in the world, and the boy’s lack of interest makes him wonder.
- Theory-theory
- Definition: the way that children attempt to explore and understand the world by creating and testing their theories.
- Observation: Child 3 observed a man with a service dog and asked her mother, “Is this dog helping him to see?”
- Connection: the child becomes an eyewitness of an unusual situation (the man is the only person wearing glasses, he uses his stick from time to time to touch the ground and check for obstacles, etc.). To explain it, she proposes a theory and asks her mother (an authority) to evaluate her suggestion.
- Static reasoning
- Definition: children’s tendency to think that the things that they know do not undergo changes.
- Observation: during educational activities, a teacher asked all children to say their names, and one girl started by saying, “My name is X,” but Child 2 interrupted her and shouted, “No, X is me.”
- Connection: it seems that Child 2 was not aware of the concept of namesakes and thought that she was the only child named X. The fact that another girl had the same name became an unexpected change running counter to her static reasoning.
- Irreversibility
- Definition: children’s tendency to regard different things and actions as irreversible.
- Observation: each child was supposed to take only one toy and give it a name. One girl chose a doll in a hat and then took the hat off, and Child 2 told her that she was a cheater.
- Connection: Child 2 regarded a doll and her hat as two separate toys and did not understand that they were basically two parts of the whole that were easy to unite again.
- Gender constancy
- Definition: a child’s understanding that being a girl or a boy is something constant
- Observation: an adult person asked Child 3 if her dog was a boy or a girl, and she replied, “X and me are girls.”
- Connection: Child 3 had obviously received the information about her dog’s biological sex from parents and understood that the characteristic was stable in both people and animals, which explains her prompt and correct answer.
- Gender roles
- Definition: specific roles and behaviors that children in different cultures are taught to associate with women and men.
- Observation: children were asked to list things that they like and explain why, and Child 1 said that he liked cars because he was a boy.
- Connection: despite being very young, Child 1 associates boys and men with stereotypically masculine interests and demonstrates the knowledge of gender roles.
- Fine motor skills
- Definition: small movements of different muscles that allow achieving specific tasks and can be synchronized with perceptive organs’ activity.
- Observation: the mother of Child 3 was teaching her daughter how to comb the dog’s hair, and the girl managed to do it without difficulties.
- Connection: the girl demonstrated the fully developed coordination of hand movements and visual perception by completing the task.
- Syncretism
- Definition: the tendency to draw connections between disparate ideas to explain something.
- Observation: the group was discussing different pictures of animals, and Child 2 said, “They [birds] sing because they are beautiful.”
- Connection: from the picture, it was clear that the bird was singing to attract a mate, but the girl could not understand such intentions and lacked that knowledge about birds. Therefore, she used syncretic thinking to connect singing with what was evident to her at the moment.
- Private speech
- Definition: self-directed speech that allows children to improve their performance and control themselves.
- Observation: when combing her dog’s hair, Child 3 was repeating the fragments of her mother’s instructions in a whisper.
- Connection: the girl’s words were barely audible, thus proving that the speech was intended at herself and helped her to memorize the basic rules to be followed.
- Conservation
- Definition: a person’s ability to understand that changes in quantity can be illusory and misleading.
- Observation: Child 1 had two identical toy cars, and the teacher asked him to play together with another boy. He quickly grabbed one car and shouted, “Take the small one!”
- Connection: the boy was supposed to make an instant decision, and he mistakenly considered the toy that was farther to the right to be longer and bigger than the second car as a result of an optical illusion.
- Centration
- Definition: a child’s tendency to overemphasize particular aspects of situations while ignoring or excluding other aspects.
- Observation: Child 2 said, “You and X should play together because you are dressed in red.”
- Connection: the teacher asked Child 2 to play with another girl because both of them loved animals. Instead of dividing people into groups based on interests, Child 2 centered her decision-making around a superficial characteristic, thus demonstrating centration.
- Animism
- Definition: a belief that non-living objects have feelings and intentions.
- Observation: referring to herself and her plush cat, Child 2 said, “We don’t want to play with X.”
- Connection: Child 2 used the pronoun “we” as if her toy was alive and could form its own judgments, which is a clear example of animism.
Reflections
Young children’s abilities, actions and/or reactions that were interesting or new
The thing that became new to me is that young children can easily find “explanations” for things that they do not understand and even regard these suggestions as credible and justified. Interestingly, some scholars associate this “intuitive thinking” with creativity (Savoie 60).
The caregiver’s or the environment’s influence on development that was interesting or new
The observations helped me to realize that caregivers promote child development by encouraging children to challenge their views of the world and recognize other people’s right to have feelings, opinions, and rights. By emphasizing cooperation and communication, caregivers prepare children to exchange information and engage in joint action (Milward and Carpenter e12377).
Lessons learnt to promote positive development for young children
I have noticed that children in the educational facility were enthusiastic about playing with others and did not use stereotypes when offered to work with open-ended and gender-neutral tools, for instance, clay or construction blocks. Therefore, it might be helpful to focus on toys and tools that offer limitless exploration opportunities to promote positive development and raise open-minded children.
Works Cited
Savoie, Alain. “Aesthetic Experience and Creativity in Arts Education: Ehrenzweig and the Primal Syncretistic Perception of the Child.” Cambridge Journal of Education, vol. 47, no. 1, 2015, pp. 53-66.
Milward, Sophie J., and Malinda Carpenter. “Joint Action and Joint Attention: Drawing Parallels between the Literatures.” Social and Personality Psychology Compass, vol. 12, no. 4, 2018, p. e12377.