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Understand Children and Young Person Development

1. Explain the sequence and rate of each aspect of development from birth- 19 years
1.1 Development can be defined simply as: ‘A significant event, occurrence or change’. (www.thefreedictionary.com) When relating to a child, this development can be measured through several social, physical, emotional and intellectual milestones. Development by children usually occurs at similar stages with roughly the same pattern, however, each child will develop at varying rates and so it is important to analyse each area of development for each individual child in order to discover whether their development is occurring evenly across all areas. Key areas of development involve physical development (which includes movement, motor skills and eye hand co-ordination), social and emotional development such as relationship building, social skills, decision- making, feelings and the development of self-confidence and intellectual development which involves developing the skills for understanding information, processing information, memory development, reasoning and logical thinking patterns. Research has shown that a child’s development can be divided into roughly four age ranges. Between the ages of 0-3 years a child will have developed basic physical skills, social and emotional connections and the foundations of intellectual and language development. As a guide by the age of 6 months an infant will be able to turn their heads towards sounds and movement, recognise familiar faces and voices, look and reach for objects, hold and play with objects and place everything in their own mouths. Socially and emotionally an infant of up to 6 months shall be able to respond to familiar faces and sounds, smile, show affection and associate with simple games such as peek-a-boo. Intellectual and language development can be reflected through imitating others, developing self-confidence in their own abilities (aided by an adult), make a variation...