| animism | Children's preoperational activity in which they consider inanimate objects to possess human thought, feelings, and actions.
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| authoritarian parenting | Baumrind's term for parents who are demanding and want immediate obedience as the most desirable trait in a child.
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| authoritative parenting | Baumrind's term for parents who respond to their child's needs and wishes; they believe in parental control and attempt to explain the reasons for it to their child.
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| centration | Feature of preoperational thought; the centering of attention on one aspect of an object and the neglecting of any other features.
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| classification | Ability to group objects with some similarities within a larger category.
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| conservation | The understanding that an object retains certain properties even though surface features change.
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| constructivism | The belief that children create, organize, and transform knowledge through active engagement in their environment.
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| constructivist approach | Learning approach in which children are encouraged to be active participants in constructing knowledge and learn by interacting with their environment.
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| day care | Services and care for children provided outside the children's home.
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| deferred imitation | Children's preoperational behavior that continues after they witnessed the original action or event.
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| egocentrism | Piaget's term for the child's focus on self in early phases of cognitive development.
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| expressive language | The language children use to express their ideas and needs.
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| fine motor skills | Small muscle skills involving hands and fingers that result from physical development.
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| gender | Social/psychological aspects of being male or female.
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| gender identity | The conviction that one is either male or female.
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| gender role | Culturally defined expectations about how females and males should act.
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| gender stereotypes | Rigid beliefs about characteristics of males and females.
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| gross motor skills | Large muscle skills resulting from physical development enabling children to perform smooth and coordinated physical acts.
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| Head Start | Government-supported early childhood program that provides education, health, and parenting education services to low-income families.
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| myelination | Process by which speed of information traveling through nervous system increases, due to a fatty layer of cells on nerve cells in the brain.
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| organization | Memory strategy that entails discovering and imposing an easy-to-remember structure on items to be memorized.
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| overextensions | A language irregularity in which children apply a word in a broad manner to objects that do not fit.
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| overregularization | Children's strict application of language rules they have learned.
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| permissive parenting | Baumrind's term for parents who take a tolerant, accepting view of their child's behavior and rarely make demands or use punishment.
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| play | Activity people engage in because they enjoy it for its own sake.
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| preoperational period | Piaget's second stage of cognitive development, extending from about 2 to 7 years.
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| receptive language | The ability of the child to understand written and spoken language.
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| rehearsal | Mnemonic strategy that describes a person repeating target information.
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| representation | A child's application of abstract thinking during the preoperational period.
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| retrieval | Memory strategy that enables obtaining information from memory; includes recognition and recall.
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| reversibility | A cognitive act in which a child recognizes that she can use stages of reasoning to solve a problem and then trace the steps back to the original question or premise.
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| scaffolding | The systematic use of support to assist a child in his or her performance on a given task.
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| sensitive periods | Montessori's term for periods of children's development marked by sensitivity/readiness to learn.
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| sex | Biological maleness or femaleness.
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| sex cleavage | Youngsters of the same sex tend to play and do things together.
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| sibling underworld | Familial subsystem, or coalition, of brothers and/or sisters.
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| social constructivism | The belief that children construct knowledge through social interactions.
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| symbolic play | Children's mental representation of an object or event and reenactment of it in their play; one object may represent a different object in the play scenario.
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| theory of mind | Children's understanding of their own thoughts and mental processes.
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| uninvolved/neglectful parenting | Term for parents who are undemanding and emotionally unsupportive of their child.
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| zone of proximal development (ZPD) | The range of ability a child possesses on a given task, from working independently to working with assistance from adults or older children.
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