The physical and cognitive development in lifespan development differs between the stages of development. The stages of development start from infancy (birth to 1 year) and end at late adulthood (60 + years). The stage I would like to focus on is the second stage. The second stage is early childhood (2 to 6 years). I wanted to focus on this stage because my 2 year old daughter is in this stage of lifespan development, so I would like to know more. My main areas of focus are on factors that affect physical and cognitive development, while considering heredity and environmental influences. The second stage of lifespan development is early childhood, which ranges from ages 2 to 6. Early childhood …show more content…
The motor development is mainly relied on by the natural maturity of the child in early childhood. Heredity can the environment influence can affect the motor development in a child. The heredity aspect of it is that the child can have a heredity disorder that disables or slows down motor development. Lastly, in early childhood of physical development is the sensory development. Sensory development begins in newborns, being able to differentiate certain smells. Also, their sense of touch and pain is exceedingly developed from the infancy stage to the early childhood …show more content…
The cognitive stage of lifespan development for early childhood is the preoperational stage. In the preoperational stage, children start to use symbols to represent concept and their language advances. There are three main characteristics of the preoperational stage of cognitive development. The preoperational stage was given that name due to the adjustable mental process or the lack of operations, which is the first characteristic in this stage. The second characteristic of cognitive development is egocentrism. A child in the preoperational stage has limited ability to discriminate between their own perspectives and others. This basically means that the child has difficulties accepting the point of opinions from other rather than their own. The children in early childhood of cognitive development assume that others hear, see, think and feel the same way they do. The third characteristic of cognitive development is animism. This characteristic brings up the fact that children believing that all things are animated or alive in some way, shape, or form. These are the reason why the cognitive development is such an important aspect of the lifespan development