Self-control of one's thoughts, feelings and behaviors is one of the personality traits that makes a child ready for school. And, it turns out, ready for life as well. A large study tracking 1,000 people from birth through age 45 has determined that people who had higher levels of self-control as children were aging more slowly than their peers at age 45. Their bodies and brains were healthier and biologically younger. The formative years or the early stages of childhood are between 0-8 Years of a child’s life where they learn more quickly than at any other time in life. These are the years in which a child experiences rapid cognitive (intellectual), social, emotional, and physical development.

The most beneficial learning and development process for a preschooler is play.

It is often recognised that play is an essential part of life and not just childhood. For children in their formative years, play encourages all areas of development, from cognitive and physical to social and emotional. Young children pose a special problem for the legal system. They are often the victims of crimes, sometimes truly horrible crimes of a violent or sexual nature. But as witnesses, they are often terrifyingly unreliable (e.g., Sharps, 2017). This can pose a huge problem. In research in my laboratory, more violent, horrifying crimes predisposed potential jurors to believe in the guilt of any given suspect, and to ignore flaws in any evidence presented (Sharps et al, 2013). In the case of a horrible crime against a child, we can see how these effects might be stronger, whether the accused was guilty or not.

Does this mean that children are lying? Students sometimes suggest that young children cannot lie. These students have not encountered very many children. Of course children can lie; but the lie may have different meaning to the child than it does to you. I mean, if only Batman really had broken in and fed the entire cheesecake to the dog, as your child maintains, it would be so beautifully true, if only you’d believe it.A lie may mean something different to the young child than it does to you, and frequently this is the key to children’s eyewitness accounts. They see the same things that you do, but those things may mean something utterly different to the child’s developing brain.

You believe, correctly, that there’s nothing under the bed but shoes and expanding dust bunnies. Your child believes that there are vampires, dinosaurs, and possibly woolly mammoths under there, and that they all intend to eat your child at the earliest opportunity. Part of this, of course, has to do with the lack of time your child has had to accumulate knowledge; you know that mammoths are extinct and ate plants, whereas your child may think they’re still here and that they eat first graders. But there’s more to the story than that, and it lies partly in abstraction, the power to derive accurate meaning from what we see and believe.

Regards

Adria Jackson

Managing Editor

Journal of Childhood and Development Disorders

Whatsapp: +32 25889658