Early Childhood

No two children are exactly alike. One grows tall quickly, another is very sharp, one is calm and another cannot sit still. These individual differences affect the whole of a child's development. So anyone who studies child development needs to know two things. The first is how children differ from one another. The second is the stages a child passes through as they grow older.

Child development is divided into age stages. Three of them are early childhood, later childhood and adolescence, and each has its own pattern of development. Early childhood matters most to anyone studying education, because it is the stage in which a child gets ready to start school.

Early childhood comes straight after infancy. In this stage the mind and the feelings develop much faster than the body does. A child's height may change only a little in a year, yet in that same year the child learns a great many new words, understands many new things, and finds new ways to show happiness, anger and fear. This is also the age at which a child prepares to enter school.

Different people look at this stage from different angles, so they have given it different names. Parents, who deal every day with a small child's stubbornness and tantrums, call it the problem age. Educationists see it as the time of getting ready for school, so they call it the pre-school age. Psychologists, who study how children behave, call it the pre-gang age, the curious age, and the age of imitating others.

Until now the child has grown up at home among parents and family. Now the child has to step into school, a new place with new friends, new teachers and new rules.

Psychologists do not all describe the physical, mental, emotional and social features of early childhood in the same way. Each stresses a different side of the child. Taken together, their views give nine main characteristics of this stage:

• The age of slow growth and rapid development
• The foundation-pillar age
• The pre-school age
• The creative age
• The toy age
• The imitative age
• The pre-gang age
• The problem age
• The age of exploration and curiosity

In this stage a child's physical growth is slow: height and weight do not shoot up. Development, on the other hand, is rapid in the mental, emotional, social and motor sides of life. Both the working skill of the body parts and the processes of the mind improve very fast. A two-year-old walks unsteadily and says only a few words. By five, the same child runs, jumps, eats with a spoon without help and speaks in long sentences. The body is not much bigger, but the skill of using it and the power to think have grown a great deal.

In this stage children form their patterns of social and emotional behaviour. These patterns decide what kind of social behaviour they will show in the later stages of development. How creative a child becomes, and how the child treats other people, also take shape now. A house stands firm only when its base is strong. In the same way, a person's later personality stands on what is laid down in these years.

Children of this age are getting ready to enter formal education. To help them, they can be sent to a pre-primary school. There, through songs, games, pictures and stories, they learn to wait for their turn, to work together with friends and to recognise simple letters and numbers. In this way the skills and ideas a child needs before formally joining school develop during this stage.

Children at this stage are curious by nature. They keep gaining experience of new things and new activities. They ask endless questions about the objects and events around them: 'Why does water flow?', 'Where does the moon go?', 'What is this?' By recognising objects, events and materials, they build their own ideas about the world. For example, after seeing a stone sink and a leaf float, a child forms an idea of heavy and light things.

Children at this stage spend most of their time with the toys they love. They want to play and have fun with children of their own age. They build an imaginary world, talk to their dolls and toys, and even give them jobs to do: 'You cook the rice, I am going to the shop.' Toy cars, toy guns, kites and bicycles give them great joy too. Because toys are their main way of spending time, this stage is called the toy age.

Children at this stage try to copy the words they hear from family and neighbours, both the good words and the bad ones. They copy the language and the actions they see and hear and try them out in their own behaviour: pretending to use a mobile phone, washing dishes, sweeping the floor, dancing or singing. By copying what others say and do, they learn a great many things.

In this stage children begin to develop the skills of socialisation, which means learning to live and get along with other people. Through daily contact with older and younger brothers and sisters they learn the skills a children's group needs, such as waiting for a turn, sharing toys and settling small quarrels. A 'gang' here simply means a group of children who play together. Because the preparation for forming such groups starts now, this stage is called the pre-gang age. The basis on which a child's group forms is decided by:

• the development of language
• the development of play
• interests
• physical and mental maturity

Parents see this stage as the problem age, because children of this age create many problems for their mothers and fathers. At this stage behaviour problems appear far more than health problems. The main behaviours seen are these:

• being stubborn
• not listening to what elders say
• sulking and getting angry quickly
• being jealous of others
• wanting to be independent
• wanting to do things they are not yet able to do

A four-year-old tries to tie a shoelace alone. The child cannot manage it and gets angry, yet when someone tries to help, pushes the hand away and says, 'I'll do it myself!' In that one moment we see the wish to be independent, the wish to do something not yet possible, and a quick temper, all together.

Children of this age want to explore the world around them. When they find something new they touch it, shake it, open it to see what is inside and ask questions about it. Their curiosity, the strong wish to know new things, is what drives this exploring. This characteristic is closely tied to the creative age, because the child builds ideas out of what exploring reveals. That is why early childhood is also called the age of exploration and curiosity.

A child in early childhood has several developmental tasks to master. The main ones are:

• (a) eating their own food without help
• (b) controlling when they pass urine and stool
• (c) walking about and playing games
• (d) beginning to get ready to go to school
• (e) telling others what they want to say and understanding what others say
• (f) doing their own small jobs, such as putting on clothes
• (g) telling apart simple differences between boys and girls

Looking at these tasks, one pattern stands out. In early childhood a child moves from depending on others for everything towards doing things alone. A child who can eat, dress, control the toilet and say what they need is ready to settle into the new world of school.