Read the following text and draw a diagram showing development of perceptual, emotional, intellectual and behavioral capabilities in childhood

The term childhood denotes that period in the human lifespan from the acquisition of language at one or two years to the onset of adolescence at 12 or 13 years.

The end of infancy and the onset of childhood are marked by the emergence of speech at one to two years of age. Children make enormous progress in language acquisition in their second year and demonstrate a continually growing vocabulary, an increasing use of words in combinations, and a dawning understanding of the rules of grammar and syntax.

By their third year children tend to use sentences containing five or even six words, and by the fourth year their sentences sound like those of their parents.

Five- and six-year-olds demonstrate a mastery of complex rules of grammar and meaning.

Early childhood (two to seven years) is also the time in which children learn to use symbolic thought and language to manipulate their environment. They learn to perform various mental operations using symbols, concepts, and ideas to transform information they gather about the world around them. The beginnings of logic, involving the classification of ideas and an understanding of time and number, emerge in later childhood (7 to 12 years).

Children's memory capacity also grows continually during childhood and conditions their further intellectual progress. As both short-term and long-term memory improve, children demonstrate an increasing speed of recall and can search their memory for information more quickly and efficiently.

Young children's growing awareness of their own emotional states, characteristics, and abilities leads to empathy--i.e., the ability to appreciate the feelings and perspectives of others. Empathy and other forms of social awareness are in turn important in the development of a moral sense. The basis of morality in children may be said to progress from a simple fear of punishment and pain to a concern for maintaining the approval of one's parents.

Another important aspect of children's emotional development is the formation of their self-concept, or identity--i.e., their sense of who they are and what their relation to other people is. Sex-role identity, based on gender, is probably the most important category of self-awareness and usually appears by the age of three.

The beginning of the physical and emotional changes of puberty and the acquisition of the logical processes of adults mark the end of childhood and the start of adolescence.

5. Act as psychologists and on the basis of your diagrams and the information from the text give advice to parents as to what they should focus on in different years of their child’s development.

6. Why is it important to teach children responsibility? Here are some recommendations aimed at teaching responsibility. Do you think they may be effective? Add your own recommendations to the list.

- Responsibility can not be imposed on children. It must grow from within. Children who are always told what to do may do their tasks very well but they have little chance to develop a sense of responsibility. Children must have the opportunity to take decisions and to make choices themselves and bear responsibility for them. Children who are never challenged to make choices have difficulty in adjusting when they are presented with a new situation.

- Children should not be criticized. If they are constantly criticized about their actions, they do not learn responsibility.

- A child should be given the responsibility of choosing his friends. Parents should not tell their children who they can make friends with and who they can not.

- Parents should not interfere with how their children spend their pocket money, even if they believe their children waste it on the wrong things.

7. Read the following text to find out about the role adults, especially parents, play in bringing up children:

In moral and character education (the training of spirit and mind toward good) example takes the central place. For children to take morality and character development seriously they need a significant adult in their life who takes morality and character seriously. They need to see adults live out positive character traits and moral characteristics.

Children are emotionally attached to parents and teachers. Therefore, they are usually willing to do what adults ask them to do and to believe anything adults say unless adults have shown themselves to be untrustworthy or if children are asserting their independence.

Children develop a sense of belonging, competence and worth as they experience love and acceptance from parents, teachers and peers. The secure feeling of being loved is the foundation on which a child can build love towards others. The happiest homes are those in which parents are frankly honest with their children without moralizing. Fear does not enter these homes. Father and son are pals. Love can thrive. The happiness and well-being of children depend on a degree of love and approval adults give them. Parents and teachers must be on the child’s side. Being on the side of the child is giving love to the child – not possessive love – not sentimental love- just behaving to the child in such a way the child feels you love him and approve of him.

Children need affection. The stresses and strains of growing up in modern urban society make parental love and attention even more essential for children.

In all societies, past and present, parents have played a major part in caring for children. Modern parents delegate some of their traditional responsibilities to teachers sending their children to nursery schools, kindergartens and later to school.

In Western societies there is a tendency toward social equality. Wealthy parents rely less than in the past on nannies to raise their children, and lower- and middle-class parents have greater access to preschool facilities than formerly. As with marital roles, there seems to be a trend toward the reduction of differences in parental roles. In the non-Western world, too, modernization and economic development are now creating a situation of greater freedom and responsibility for children. The temporary absence of fathers who take jobs as migrant labourers, for example, may place teenage children in a position of responsibility over their families. At the same time, other young people in these countries often seek employment and independence in urban areas.

Paradoxically, however, from a child's point of view, Western parents are often regarded as inhibiting independence, particularly during adolescence. In most modern societies, parents show an interest in and concern for the sexual activities of their children, something they do not do in most "primitive" societies. In modern Islamic societies and in modern India, as in some other parts of the world, parents have the duty to ensure that their children find suitable wives or husbands, and even the children recognize this. Yet in modern Western societies the practice of parental matchmaking is regarded by children as interference in their affairs.

8. Give arguments to support the following:

- In moral and character education example takes the central place.

- A child's happiness depends upon his/her parents.

- Children need affection.

- There is a tendency today towards the reduction of differences in parental roles.

- Parents today give their children more freedom than in the past.

9. What can you say about the traditional degree of parents’ interference with their children’s affairs in Ukrainian families? Have there been any changes in the recent decades? Have you ever personally suffered from your parents interference?