Child Development Observations

The Algoma Health Unit Christmas Party was a fun day to interact and observe children through their development. Throughout our course, we learned very well the five areas of development and how crucial they are within a child’s life. By knowing the five areas of development, it has helped me observe the children at the party and apply my knowledge and really see it in action. Crafts engage multiple brain areas simultaneously and improve bilateral coordination between both sides of the brain, leading to future cognitive development. Within our craft, there were many materials that required kids to use both their hands to do something (ex: putting glue on an eye). Within my observations, most kids had an easy time using both their hands and …show more content…
The parent-child interactions I had witnessed were both positive and negative. There were many good situations with parents where they would gently scaffold and would only help the child when needed instead of just doing it for them. They would get down to the kids eye level when helping. On the other hand, there were some parents that would simply just leave their child at our station and not even care if they needed help. There were also some parents that would just stand behind their child and would reach over them to get stuff for them and not even get down to help. Another poor example is a parent who did the craft all for themselves and left their kid in the stroller not really paying attention to them. The parent then went to the cookie station and decorated a bunch of cookies for herself, and again, not paying attention to her child. As a student, I responded to poor parent-child interactions kind of shockingly but I knew there wasn’t much I could do. I understand that in a community like Sault Ste Marie with high drug rates and pregnancy rates, that there will always be poor parenting. The attachments to the parents were both positive and negative as well. There were cases where the child never wanted to leave their mother and always looked up to them for when they needed help. However, I did notice other cases where some children seemed to be happier with talking to our group than to be surrounded by their mother or even sometimes where the child would run away from their caregiver. When our group gave positive feedback, the child felt happy and would definitely be more open to