Child Observation

Child observation

Your Name (First M. Last)

School or Institution Name (University at Place or Town, State)

Child information

A child of three years has been selected for conducting this observation. The selected child is a male and most of the time his mother takes care of him. Before starting this observation, I took baby’s parents in confidence by ensuring them that I am not an expert who would be using the taken information in any professional report. I assured them that I am a student and needs to conduct an observation on the topic of “Lifespan Development". After guiding the parent about all the facts and taking them in confidence about things I am going to doing, I was permitted to conduct my observation. I started observation the child closely without letting him now that he was under my observation and research. After selecting this child, a made one thing clear to me that there are different domains of child development and early learning that I need to be focused on. Following are the main domains of my observation:

Physical domains

The domain of physical development means development of physical skills of the child commonly known as motor skills. In the child I was observing, I noticed, he was moving in the room by keeping his surrounding environment in considering. He was well- aware where and when to move.

For example:

When his mother showed him a ball and threw it, he started taking small steps in the direction where the ball was rolling. When he was moving towards the ball, I observed and found that his motors skills were well-developed. I witnessed a perfect coordination between his eyes and fingers while he was picking the ball. When he was throwing the ball towards his elder brother even at that time, he was having a strong grip. His control on reaching, grasping, releasing and turning his wrist was quite good. During this observation, I realized that his small muscles movement did not develop over the night rather with time and practice he got control on his physical movement. This child was moving and was depicting that he is trying to have full control over his body while moving from one place to another. He was taking small steps with full concentration on things he was doing.

Cognitive domains

This domain deals with the processing of information and learning. This domain includes imagination, language, reasoning, thinking, memory and problem-solving. He was playing puzzle-solving with his father and what I noticed was that he was unable to solve it smartly. Only one of the pieces rightly matched. What I noticed in this child was, being a three-year-old child, he was unable to understand concrete logic. Secondly, he was not able to manipulate the information as well as he started repeating words of his mother as it is. His elder brother was dictating him while they were playing but this child did not question him about anything or showed any resistance as at this stage of life, he did not develop critical thinking in him. He did not question his brother why he should do what he told him to do.

Social/emotional domains

Social and emotional development means change in the way how we interact with others and show our feelings. In the case of this child, I have observed that his expressions were the clear picture of his feelings. When I first entered this home, he was not happy as I was a stranger, he stayed away from me. After spending some time with me, he became little familiar and comfortable with me. He started showing me his toys after some time. What I noticed was, both cognition and emotions go hand in hand. Another important thing that I learned from this observation was that social and emotion domain helps children in understanding emotions of others as when this child was playing with his six years old brother who pretended being hurt by his ball that he threw, this child quickly hugged him, so I would say that social and emotional attachments teach a child how to interact and behave with others.

It has been witnessed that children start getting frank with others when they start spending time with them. Parents need to make their children confident so that they could interact well with others. Conversations, playing games and let them play with other children are best practices for making them socially connected. Once while playing, his brother snatched his toy, so he started crying which depicted that he is unable to control his emotions. Suddenly he started laughing when his brother started making funny faces to him, which showed he was not much stable emotionally.

Cultural influence

When I was noticing this child, I observed that children in the developing years mostly copy actions of surrounding people (parents in most cases). This child was repeatedly coping his parents. Children belonging to different cultures, follow and practice behaviors and actions of people who mostly spend time with them.

For example:

This child was looking at his parents and before taking food he prayed like his parents. Being at the development stage, he does not know what he was copying and what those actions meant but culture is being transferred to children when they simply follow or imitate their elders. When I first entered and met this child, he welcomed me by shaking hand and asked me "how are you" this showed his cultural influence as children receive specific inputs from their environment. He adopted a conversational style that resembled his parent’s style which was dependent upon culture. The way, this child was walking, talking, playing and treating me showed me a glimpse of the culture, he belonged to.