HDE 100B Chapter Notes - Chapter 11: Childhood Obesity, Permanent Teeth, Embodied Cognition
10 Jan 2019
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“Developing Person…” (10th edition)
CH. 11: MIDDLE CHILDHOOD: BIOSOCIAL DEVELOPMENT
• A Healthy Time
o Middle childhood: the period between early childhood and early adolescence,
approx. ages 6-11
o Middle childhood is a healthy period because:
▪ Genetic diseases are more threatening in early infancy or old age
▪ Infectious diseases are kept away via immunizations
▪ Fatal accidents are rare until teens
o Slower Growth, Greater Strength
▪ Teeth
• Permanent teeth begin to grow in around age 6
• Oral health has improved overall
▪ Children’s Health Habits
• Poor health habits during childhood can predict poor outcomes in
adulthood
• Habits are affected by peers and family influence
o Physical Activity
▪ Exercise reduces risk of depression, improves physical health and
academic achievement
▪ Embodied cognition: human thoughts are affected by body health,
comfort, position, etc.
▪ Neighborhood Games
• Flexible, active, interactive, and inclusive
• Also teaches ethics
o Not playing by the rules = social exclusion
• Outdoor play has decreased over time in favor of supervised indoor
play or organized community sports team
▪ Exercise in School
• Recess and P.E. are not offered in every school
• Health Problems in Middle Childhood
o Chronic health conditions worsen during school years and can impact child’s self-
esteem
o Childhood Obesity
▪ Childhood overweight: BMI above 85th percentile
• Correlates with asthma, high blood pressure, high cholesterol
▪ Childhood obesity: BMI over 95th percentile
• Increasing worldwide
o Asthma
▪ Chronic inflammatory disorder of the airways that makes breathing
difficult
▪ Tripled since 1980
▪ Hygiene hypothesis: “the immune system needs to tangle with microbes
when we’re young”
• The idea is that children may be overprotected from bacteria and
viruses, leading to weaker immune systems
• Brain Development
o Coordinating Connections
▪ Hubs: locations where massive numbers of axons meet
• Tend to be near corpus callosum
• Damaged hubs leads to brain dysfuction
▪ Brain connections formed in middle childhood are crucial for healthy
brain functioning
• Specifically, development of amygdala and hypothalamus
(emotion regulation)
• Stress can impair connections
▪ No brain areas are dedicated to reading, which is why the need for brain
connections is so crucial
▪ Think Quick; Too Slow
• Reaction time: the time it takes to respond to a stimulus, either
physically or cognitively
o Increasing myelination reduces reaction time
• Children with reading problems also have slower reaction times
▪ Pay Attention
• Selective attention: the ability to concentrate on some stimuli while
ignoring others
o Improves around age 7
▪ Automatization
• The process by which a sequence of thoughts and actions is
repeated until it becomes automatic
o Example: reading
o Measuring the Mind
▪ Aptitude, Achievement and IQ
• Aptitude: the potential to master a specific skill or learn certain
body of knowledge (in theory)
o Measures intelligence
o Not a fixed characteristic (Flynn effect: the rise of avg. IQ
scores over decades)
• IQ between 85 and 115 = average
• Achievement is what has actually been learned vs learning
potential (aptitude)
o Achievement tests: compare scores to norms established for
each grade in school
