Why Environment Plays a Significant Role in Child Development
Does environment really play a significant role in child development? Environment plays one of the most important roles in the development of a child. There are many ways that environment can play a role in developing in a child. What does it mean when we say “environment”? In this case, environment can be any place that children live in or spend time interacting in. The environment that a child is placed in while growing up will affect their physical, social, language, emotional, and cognitive development. The toll that certain environments place on a child can be damaging or beneficial depending on the atmosphere of the environment. Different environments such as the home environment, school environment, and childcare environment are where most children will spend their time as they develop and grow older. These environments will be vital in shaping a child’s development. These 3 things are arguably the most important influences in the way a child develops.
The environment inside of your home is possibly the most influential environment a child will ever be in. Children will spend the majority of their time inside of the family house. The environment at home is crucial on how your child will develop physically, socially, and emotionally. The way your child develops in learning will also be affected by how the parents work with the child at home. Environmental factors at home can be something as simple as “does
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the child have room to play” or “is the child safe from injury while at home”? These two questions are important to make sure the child is out of the way of any harm that may affect development. For an extreme example, if a child finds a gun sitting around the house and the child accidentally pulls the trigger and shoots himself/herself. Now, we have to worry about if this child will ever be able to learn anything again since the child has a bullet wound to the brain. If the child doesn’t have room to play then most likely he is not in a safe environment because the child will find a way to play in that small space and hurt himself/herself. The relationship that a child has at home with their parents plays a major role in how the child will develop as well.
The Institute of Medicine (US) and National Research Council (US) Committee on the Science of Adolescence states, “parents who form warm relationships with their children and have minimal conflict with them, provide adequate monitoring and supervision, and do not provide models of drug use can protect youth from developing substance use disorders. Lack of strong positive relationships with parents increases involvement with deviant peers, which increases adolescents’ risk for a variety of problems, including precocious transitions, such as early pregnancy, premature independence from parents, and school dropout. Parental monitoring and positive parental relationships have been linked with later sexual debut, fewer sexual partners, and increased condom use.” The bond between children and their parents is something like no other. This alone can change the outcome of the way a child develops and reacts to certain situations while growing up. It is very important for the relationship to be close knit in order to build trust between the child and parents. As the institute stated above, if the relationship is not a positive one, then it creates a greater risk for the child to become associated with more deviant peers and that can lead to many terrible things.
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The second environment is the school your child attends. This environment will be vital to the child’s learning, emotional, language, and cognitive skills. This is the environment where the child should receive most of their learning from. It is important for the child to be enrolled in a school where the teachers are providing the right information for the child to learn and develop grade skills.
According to the article Child Psychology, the ability to communicate and to understand language is a major achievement of human beings. An amazing feature of language development is the speed with which it is acquired: The first word is spoken at about 12 months; by two years of age most children have vocabularies of about 270 words, and this increases to 2600 words at the age of six. It is almost impossible to determine the number of sentence constructions that can be generated within a single language. Children, however, use syntactically correct sentences by the age of three and highly complex constructions by the age of five. This extraordinary phenomenon cannot be explained by means of simple learning theory. The American linguist Noam Chomsky postulated that the human brain is especially constructed to detect and reproduce language; the mental system does not require formal learning and will function perfectly when language is available to the child. Although developmental psycholinguists do not agree with all of Chomsky’s concepts, they do accept the idea of special mental language systems. Today theorists are concerned with the relationship between cognitive growth and language. It is now assumed that language reflects children’s concepts and develops as their concepts expand.
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If there is a language barrier in the school that is preventing the child from learning language then the child will be behind on language skills. Referring back to the quote, scientists are now concerned about the relationship between cognitive growth and language. Language and cognitive go hand in hand because in order to develop the cognitive skills then you will have to have language skills. Also, School plays a role in a child’s emotional development in many ways. When a child goes to school, the child will be making friends and different relationships with other people. If a student isn’t having the appropriate relationships with teachers and other students then this student could end up stressed and depressed due to lack of social life and the feeling of not fitting in.
Lastly, the role that childcare plays in child development falls hand in hand with school and home life. There are many factors that can affect a child’s development while being taken care of. Everything that was possible from the home life and school life fall into this category as well. One major obstacle that is important in caring for a child is nutrition. A child must get the proper nutrition or he/she can be affected severely. “Under-nutrition, both protein-energy malnutrition and micronutrient deficiencies, directly affects many aspects of children's development. In particular, it retards their physical and cognitive growth and increases susceptibility to infection and disease, further increasing the probability of being malnourished. Under-nutrition also affects cognitive and motor development and undermines educational attainment; and ultimately impacts on productivity at work and at home, with adverse implications for income and economic growth (Gragnolati, Shekar, Gupta, Bredenkamp, and Lee).” Nutrition is a huge part in the development in a child and that is not only in childcare, but
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in everywhere the child will go. Under-nutrition as stated above will affect learning, cognitive, and physical growth.
In conclusion, I do believe that environment plays a significant role in child development. After multiple days of research, I have concluded that the environment in which a child is normally in, can play a major role in every aspect of his life. Everything aspect from home life, school life, and child care can affect the child’s cognitive, learning, language, emotional, social, and physical development. I believe that the environment in which a child is placed should not be looked over lightly, but a child should be placed in safe environments where he/she will receive proper learning, play, and nutritional practice.