strength as well as lung capacity. Children make gains in coordination as the parts of the brain responsible for sensory and motor skills develop, permitting them to play harder and engage in more complicated play activities that include running, jumping, and climbing. Coordinating complex movements, like those entailed in riding a bicycle, is challenging for young children as it requires controlling multiple limbs, balancing, and more. As they grow and gain competence in their motor skills, young children become even more coordinated and begin to show interest in skipping and balancing. They enjoy playing games that involve feats of coordination, such as running while kicking a ball. By age 5, most North American children can throw and catch a ball, climb a ladder, and ride a tricycle. Some 5-year-olds can even skate or ride a bicycle (Gabbard, 2012).
Young children’s motor abilities are also influenced by their context. For example, young children of some nations can swim in rough ocean waves that many adults of other nations would not attempt. Advances in gross motor skills help children move about and develop a sense of mastery of their environment, but it is fine motor skills that permit young children to take responsibility for their own care.
Fine Motor Skills
As children grow older, their fine motor skills improve. The ability to button a shirt, pour milk into a glass, assemble puzzles, and draw pictures all involve eye–hand and small muscle coordination. As children get better at these skills, they are able to become more independent and do more for themselves. Young children become better at grasping eating utensils and become more self-sufficient at feeding. Many fine motor skills are very difficult for young children because they involve both hands and both sides of the brain. Tying a shoelace is a complex act requiring attention, memory for an intricate series of hand movements, and the dexterity to perform them. Although preschoolers struggle with this task, by 5 to 6 years of age, most children can tie their shoes (Payne, Isaacs, & Larry, 2016). Recent research suggests that children’s fine motor ability influences cognition—specifically, their ability to use their fingers to aid in counting predicts their mathematical skills (Fischer, Suggate, Schmirl, & Stoeger, 2018).
Climbing requires strength, coordination, and balance.
Michele Oenbrink / Alamy Stock Photo
Young children’s emerging fine motor skills enable them to draw using large crayons and, eventually, pencils. Drawing reflects the interaction of developmental domains: physical (fine motor control) and cognitive (planning skills, spatial understanding, and the recognition that pictures can symbolize objects, people, and events) (Yamagata, 2007). Although toddlers simply scribble when given a crayon, by 3 years of age, children‘s scribbles become more controlled, often recognizable, pictures. A human figure is often drawn as a tadpole-like figure with a circle for the head with eyes and sometimes a smiley mouth and then a line or two beneath to represent the rest of the body. Tadpole-like forms are characteristic of young children’s art in all cultures (Cox, 1993). Most 3-year-olds can draw circles, squares, rectangles, triangles, crosses, and Xs and they begin to combine shapes into more complex designs. Between 3 and 4, young children begin to understand the representational function of drawings, and even when drawings appear to be nothing more than scribbles, young children often label them as representing a particular object and remember the label. In one study, children were asked to draw a balloon and a lollipop. The drawings looked the same to adults, but the children were adamant about which was which (Bloom, 2000), suggesting that it is important to ask a child what his or her drawing is rather than guess, because children’s creations reflect their perspectives. Between ages 4 and 5, children’s drawings loosely begin to depict actual objects, demonstrating the convergence of fine motor skills and the cognitive development of representational ability. As shown in Figure 7.1, human figures typically include a torso, arms, legs, faces, and soon hands. As cognitive and fine motor skills improve, children create more sophisticated drawings of the human form. Table 7.1 summarizes milestones of gross and fine motor skill development in young children.
Figure 7.1 A Typical 2- to 3-Year-Old’s Drawing of a Person
Source: Claire Marley, 2009.
Table 7.1
Thinking in Context 7.1
1 Children who suffer brain injuries often regain some, and sometimes all, of their capacities. How might you explain this, given what you have learned about brain development?
2 How might contextual factors such as neighborhood, family, school, and culture influence the development of motor skills?
Cognitive-Developmental and Sociocultural Reasoning in Early Childhood
Four-year-old Timothy stands up on his toes and releases his parachute toy, letting the action figure dangle from a parachute drift a few feet from him and collapse on the floor. “I’m going to go up high and make it faster,” he says, imagining standing on the sofa and making the toy sail far into the clouds. He stands on the sofa and releases the toy, which sails a bit further this time. “Next time he’ll jump out of the plane even higher!” Timothy thinks, excitedly. His friend Isaiah calls out, “Let’s make him land on the moon! He can meet space people!”
Timothy and Isaiah can plan, think of solutions to problems, and use language to communicate their ideas. They learn through play by interacting with people and objects around them. From the cognitive-developmental perspective, young children’s thought progresses from the sensory and motor schemes of infancy to more sophisticated representational thought.
Piaget’s Cognitive-Developmental Theory: Preoperational Reasoning
According to Piaget, preoperational reasoning appears in young children from about ages 2 to 6. Preoperational reasoning is characterized by a dramatic leap in the use of symbolic thinking that permits young children to use language, interact with others, and play using their own thoughts and imaginations to guide their behavior. It is symbolic thought that enables Timothy and Isaiah to use language to communicate their thoughts and desires—and it is also what allows them to send their toy on a mission to the moon to visit with pretend space people.
Characteristics of Preoperational Reasoning
Young children in the preoperational stage show impressive advances in representational thinking, but they are unable to grasp logic and cannot understand complex relationships. Children who show preoperational reasoning tend to make several common errors, including egocentrism, animism, centration, and irreversibility.
Egocentrism
“See my picture?” Ricardo asks as he holds up a blank sheet of paper. Mr. Seris answers, “You can see your picture, but I can’t. Turn your page around so that I can see your picture. There it is! It’s beautiful,” he proclaims after Ricardo flips the piece of paper, permitting him to see his drawing. Ricardo did not realize that even though he could see his drawing, Mr. Seris could not. Ricardo displays egocentrism, the inability to take another person’s point of view or perspective. The egocentric child views
