Child Development: Emotional Growth and Caregiver Sensitivity

Caregiver Sensitivity

Caregiver sensitivity is the extent to which a parent responds to a child's signals appropriately and promptly, is positively involved during interactions, and provides a secure base for exploration.

Emotional Development

Emotions are key to understanding a child's interpretation of a situation.

Emotional Regulation

The ability to regulate emotions is crucial for healthy development.

Temperament

Temperament styles include easy, slow to warm up, and difficult.

Emotions in Communication

Emotions act as a two-way channel for adult-infant communication, establishing intersubjectivity through social referencing.

Empathic Attunement

Attunement describes how reactive a person is to another's emotional needs and moods. A well-attuned person responds with appropriate language and behaviors based on the other person's emotional state.

Empathic Failures

Empathic failures involve a lack of understanding of another person's feelings, perceptions, and thoughts.

Empathy

Empathy is sharing the perceived emotion of another.

Cognition

Cognition is the mental process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses.

Vocabulary

• Jubilant: Feeling or expressing great happiness and triumph.
• Hiraeth: Homesickness for a home you can't return to, or that never was.
• Taradiddle: A petty lie.
• Acceptance: The action of consenting to receive or undertake something offered.
• Aspiration: A hope or ambition of achieving something.
• Sonder: The profound feeling of realizing that everyone, including strangers, has a complex life.
• Resilience: The capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.
• Psychosexual: Of or involving the psychological aspects of the sexual impulse.
• Psychosocial: Relating to the interrelation of social factors and individual thought and behavior.

Kohlberg's Stages of Moral Development

• Young Children: Morality guided by parents.
• Teenagers: Morality guided by law.
• Mature Individuals: Morality guided by values and beliefs.