Back to: Jss2 Basic Science (BST)

Introduction

During puberty, the body goes through a lot of changes, which makes a lot of waste. When these things leave the body, they end up making people’s hygiene worse. Puberty is a time when a child changes into a teenager.

The Characteristics of Developmental Stages

Sensorimotor (birth to around 2 years old)

In this first stage, babies can see, hear, and move around. At this age, a child’s knowledge of the world is limited, but it is always growing as a result of what the child sees and does.   Piaget said that when a baby is between 7 and 9 months old, he or she starts to develop what he called “object permanence.” This means that the child can now understand that things still exist even when they can’t be seen. For example, if you hide the child’s favourite toy under a blanket, even though the child can’t see it, they still know to look under the blanket.

Preoperational (Starts around age 7, when the child starts to talk)

During this stage of development, young children start to use mental symbols to make sense of their surroundings. These symbols are often made up of words and pictures, and the child will start to use them as they come across different things, events, and situations in their daily lives. But Piaget’s main focus on this stage, and the reason he called it “preoperational,” is that children at this point are not able to do things like mental math. In addition to playing with symbols, kids start to play make-believe, where they pretend to be people they are not (teachers, superheroes). Also, sometimes they use different things to make it seem more real. At this stage of development, children who are 3–4 years old often have a problem called egocentrism, which means they can’t see things from someone else’s point of view. Instead, they think everyone else is going through the same things and feeling the same way they are. But by age 7, a child’s thoughts are no longer centred on himself or herself. Instead, they are more intuitive, which means they think more about how something looks than how it works.

Concrete (around 7 years until early adolescence) 

During this stage, children ages 7 to 11 use appropriate logic to develop cognitive operations and start to apply this new way of thinking to different situations they may face. In this stage, children use inductive reasoning, which means they draw conclusions from other observations to make a broad statement.   In contrast to the preoperational stage, children can now change and rearrange mental pictures and symbols to form a logical thought. One example of this is reversibility, where a child can now undo an action by doing the opposite of what was done.

Formal operations (between early and late adolescence)

Piaget’s last stage of cognitive development says that a child can now “think more rationally and systematically about abstract ideas and hypothetical events.” Some good things about this time are that the child or teen starts to figure out who they are and why people act the way they do. But there are also some bad things about it, like the child or teen thinking too much about himself or herself because of the imagined audience and the personal fable. An imaginary audience is when a teen thinks that the rest of the world cares about and judges everything they do as much as they do. A teen may feel like they are “on stage” and everyone is giving them feedback while they are the ones getting feedback. A personal fable is when a teen thinks he or she is special and that everything he or she does is special. They think they are the only ones who have ever been through what they are going through. They also think they are invincible and that bad things only happen to other people.

Emotional Changes at Puberty

At puberty, the following emotional changes happen:

feeling uncomfortable because of how quickly your body is changing

Fear of being turned down and left alone

Secrecy

someone wants more privacy

They ask a lot of questions and want to know a lot of things.

Being aware of oneself

Egocentric tendencies: putting more attention on oneself.

When one’s hopes aren’t met, it can lead to anger and disappointment.

Growth and Developmental Stages

A child’s growth and development can be divided into stages.

Infancy

This is the time from birth to 18 months. It is the fastest time for physical growth. During this time, people are also growing quickly in their minds. In the first 12 months, the average baby’s weight triples and its body size grows by about half. Early schooling 18 months to 5 years old, middle childhood: 6 to 12 years old.

Adolescence

12 to 18 years old. This is a stage in which a person is neither a child nor an adult. The person struggles with moral questions and tries to find his or her own identity. It is a time of learning to be independent, of growing up emotionally, and of coming to terms with being an adult.  Mood changes happen to teenagers, and this can be a hard time for them.

Adulthood

Adulthood starts when the body has reached its full height and gone through the sexual changes that make adolescents physically mature. It is the stage between 16 and 20. It happens slightly earlier in women than in men, who may still be growing in their early twenties.

Factors Needed for Growth

The following things are necessary for human growth.

1. Food: The most important thing for growth is food. Food is needed for energy, repairing worn-out cells, and making new cells for growth.

2. Heredity: A man’s growth can be affected by the genes of his parents. If one parent’s gene carries the trait of being tall or short, some or all of the children would be tall or short by nature.

3. Glands: Glands are special organs in the body that secrete hormones.

Two of the most important glands for growth are the pituitary gland and the thyroid gland The pituitary gland is located in the head below the brain. It makes the growth-stimulating hormone, which determines how tall a person can be. If it is too much, it causes giantism, and if there is not enough, it causes dwarfism. The thyroid gland is in the neck, and it makes a growth hormone called thyroxin. The lack or reduction slows down growth and leads to a condition called cretinism. This is a condition in which the arms and legs are short compared to other parts of the body.

4. Disease: Diseases slow growth because they make it hard to eat well, so the body doesn’t get enough of the nutrients it needs for growth and development.

5. Exercise: Exercise makes muscles big and strong, which makes them better able to fight off diseases.

i) Exercise helps us grow because it relaxes and builds muscles

ii) it speeds up cell division

iii) it keeps us in shape, and

iv) it keeps us from storing too much food in our bodies.

6. Rest: When you rest, you stop your body from doing physical things for a while. It helps the body grow as it.

i. Helps the body recover from stress. 

ii. Allows the body to do more work afterwards. 

iii. Allows the body to get stronger faster and grow in the right way.