As infants are developing, the parent is there to help and support the child’s growth and learning. Please answer both parts within your forum posting.

1- What do you see as the most important things that parents can do to help their children at this point in their lives?

2- Next, classify those things from question one into operant or classical conditioning, habituation and recovery, or

imitation. Then describe how those activities support the child’s development?

https://apus.realizeithome.com/RealizeitApp/Conten…

Minimum 250 words

Classmate #1:

Hello class!

The first 2 years of a child’s life are the most significant years of brain development and growth. There are so many factors that caregivers and parents can put into these important years to help aide and assist their child’s brain development and allow them to thrive. On the contrary, lack of care and the “absence of appropriate support may limit the child’s abilities to grow and develop properly.” (APU, 2019) Creating an enriching stimulated environment is crucial for a parent to do in order for their child’s prefrontal cortex to develop healthily and properly. Inadequate environmental stimulation can reduce a number of things in a child such as impulse, cognition, emotional control and more.

Proper nutrition is something that seems obvious but many parents do not know just how important it is in terms of healthy brain growth. Caregivers and parents must make sure infants are receiving enough calories because when they do not the brain will not grow and it will weigh less than a high functioning and healthy brain. From there more problems follow such as neurotransmitter productions not being able to occur correctly and can cause lifelong delays like behavior, intelligence and motor coordination.

Bedtime routines are something that parents and caregivers can do to help infants process and understand their world and tall the connections within it much better. For instance, a bath, a diaper, pajamas, going to the same rocking chair to feed all can be a simple approach to a nighttime routine. This would be classical conditioning because all of these steps within the routine can help the baby associate sleeping that follows. It allows infants to know what to expect. “Predictability and routine can reduce fussiness.” (APU, 2019)

References: APUS. (2019). CHFD308, Lesson 3: The Physical Development of the Young Child

Classmate # 2:

Hey everyone!

I feel that the most important things a parent can do during this stage of child’s growth and development are to stimulate them mentally and to establish routine such as bedtime. Exposing babies to new experiences, people, toys, colors, textures, and even reading to them all set up the foundation for successful development. Infants are born with several reflexes such as sucking and rooting. Classical conditioning is when a stimulus is paired with the reflex and is gradually associated with the response. An example of classical conditioning that most adults could relate to and further understand it better would be a situation when sight or scent of certain food causes nausea because it caused an upset stomach before. A negative example would be if an adult drank too much wine and they got sick from a particular brand, they would associate it with the feeling of vomiting and it would cause them to not want to drink that again. My daughter once got food poisening from tomatoes and this caused a classical conditioning with nausea for her and she will not touch tomatoes any longer after that experience due to her negative association and being conditioned to make the connection from her past experience. With an infant, there are many positive classical conditioning experiences such as establishing the bedtime routine, or bath time routine, or even breastfeeding or bottle feeding routines. Even at the infant stage, they can make connections. “Inadequate environmental stimulation stalls the proper development of the prefrontal cortex. This will reduce the child’s impulse control, cognition and emotional control, both positive and negative. In today’s world, these situations are often associated with abusive or neglectful parenting, or, in some cases, with orphanage”. (APU lesson 3, 2019). As lesson 3 mentions, If the parent does not properly stimulate during this developmental stage, there can be negative effects to the development of the prefrontal cortex. Establishing a bedtime routine would be considered classical conditioning, and is the process of neural development. Operant conditioning associates behaviors with a reward or punishment. I often use operant conditioning with my own kids. We do reward systems and we also do punishments as a consequence to poor decisions/ behaviors. For an infant, an example of operant conditioning is allowing the infant to cry themselves to sleep which in return will encourage independent sleep and get them on a normal schedule. This allows the parent to be able to sleep train so that they can actually get adequate sleep and it helps the infant establish that when they are laid down in their crib at nighttime, they will eventually associate it with sleep and the crying it out will become less and less. I personally used this method to sleep train my kids and it was effective.

References:

APU, The Physical Development of the Young Child (2019) https://apus.realizeithome.com/RealizeitApp/Conten…

Minimum 150 words answer each