Example Evaluation Of Emotional Development In A Child

In the following example, ‘TC’ is ‘The Child’, ‘C’ is an older ‘Child’ playing with ‘TC’, and ‘A’ is ‘Adult’.

Evaluation-Emotional

The purpose of this observation was to observe TC and determine whether her emotional development is inline with the milestones setdown for her age group. TC is in freeplay with both adults and children interacting with her.

Emotions are categorised into primary emotions and self-concious emotions. In the first 6 months the self-concious emotions do not show, but the primary emotions do, such as; joy, fear, disgust, anger, sadness and surprise.

During this observation some of the primary emotions were observed for example joy and anger, but not all. In all of the samples above except for one, TC shows a happy emotion and she does this by smiling, cooing, giggling, high pitch squeals and waving arms. She displayed anger when she wanted the keys and they were out of reach, ‘A’ misunderstood her cry as wanting the bottle, but quickly realised that the keys were the focus of her gaze, TC became content when she was handed keys and showed this by waving keys around in her hand and smiling.

I would categorise TC in the ‘Easy baby’ temperament type(Stella Thomas and Alexander Chess(1977)) as she displays mostly positve attitude as is demonstrated in the above samples, she is mostly smiling and giggling and only becomes frustrated once, when she cannot reach the object of her desire.

The sample at 14:25, show the mother interacting with TC and TC reacting positively to her by reaching out to her and saying mama. This would indicate that this baby is ‘securely attached’ (Mary Ainsworth(1979)).

Overall TC seems to be emotionally secure in her relationships with the people around her. She is easy going and a happy baby. There was no signs of stunted emotional development observed, and one could conclude that from the brief time we did observe TC, shows all the signs of secure and happy baby.

Emotional Observation-Time Sample