Children Are Not Little Adults - Essay Example

Children have frameworks in which adults must approach issues for their health and well being. Because children are not small adults, they must be approached with recognition of the differences in development on all levels of human experience. Physiology The physiology of a child is very different than that of a full grown adult. These differences can be observed through three distinct areas of concern. The first area is through developmental changes, the second area through dependency, and the third area is through patterns of illness and injury (National Research Council Board on children youth and families & Institute of Medicine (U.S.), 1996).

Children and adults are very different in the way in which their bodies interact with the effects of life on their health. Children have a higher rate of susceptibility to toxins and viruses because their bodies are still forming and have not accommodated for environmental exposures (Ginsberg, G., Slikker, W, & Bruckner, J. (Feb. 2004). Children’s bones are more pliable than adults, thus much more force is required to break them, injuries in a child different than those in an adult as the space in physiology that allows for growth in all systems creates additional problems (Mooney & Ireson, 2009).

Cognitive Development Infants and toddlers have limited capacities for realizing that objects and people exist outside of their immediate interaction with them. However, they still form attachments and are better when there is a consistency in the care that they receive. Children in the age range of three to five develop higher levels of attachment and have a cognitive awareness of the existence of people and things beyond their immediate interaction. Between the ages of six and ten, there is an observable expansion of relationships for children, with the beginning of an understanding of the world in relationship to their own place within it (Zemmelman, 2010).

Children between the ages of ten and twelve will have a firm belief that the world is precisely the way they have envisioned it. However, in the teen years the world changes dramatically as children begin to form concepts of abstraction, seeing that the world may have differences within it that are not in line with their earlier point of view (Oestreicher & Rubin, 2009). Brain-training games can be useful in helping children to learn and gain knowledge so that they can use the level at which they able to learn to its fullest capacity.

One example of a brain-training game can be seen in song-experience games. Children learn to “wait, participate, listen, think, move, time their response, learn to become interested in others, organize, strategize, predict, self-monitor and learn compassion and empathy” through folk songs that are chosen for their capacity to evoke identifiable parts and then relationships between the parts (Harris & MENC, 2009, p. 40). Children are given an opportunity to learn problem solving and to learn complex information through discovering the associations between visual and auditory experiences.

Brain-training games are intended to create methods for children to make increasingly more sophisticated connections through games that indirectly stimulate those connections. The example of the song-experience g