How children experience their environment

Children see, hear, smell, taste and feel different from adults and perceive the world in different ways. Depending on the age, the individual senses are not yet fully developed or work intensively, and mental development also plays a role in how children experience their environment.

Even in the womb, the senses begin to develop. The child can do everything it needs at this time. So now it can feel, hear, see, smell and taste and already at the 35th week of pregnancy it can distinguish different pitches and recognize individual voices. Immediately after birth, the sense of smell is needed first. In the course of its development, all senses are refined and the child perceives an ever-larger environment.

The sense of sight

The first eye movements can be observed in the 16th week of pregnancy. Even if the sense of sight has not yet been used, the embryo already trains the eye muscles from this point in time. After birth, the sense of sight is still undeveloped, the visibility is about 20 to 30 centimeters. Newborns look blurry and without depth of field. However, they can already recognize faces. In the first year of life, the sense of sight develops steadily. The child learns to focus the eyes in such a way that it sees in three dimensions. Compared with adult humans, the field of vision is limited by about 30 degrees. The so-called peripheral vision, which allows us to look something out of the corner of the eye, is not available to the child. Due to their size, children see the world from the perspective of a frog. Everything looks bigger and has different proportions because of the angle of view. The change between near and far vision is slower in children. That's why it often feels like children are staring into space.

Only at about nine years does the so-called stereoscopic depth perception develop. From then on, children can realistically estimate distances. Toddlers who have not achieved this ability automatically see what is bigger closer.

The hearing

The hearing begins in the 24th week of pregnancy. The closer the childbirth approaches, the more differentiated the child can distinguish between individual tones and thereby also recognize the voice patterns of the parents or siblings. In the first year of life, hearing continues to develop and the child increasingly reacts to external noise. Adult hearing is reduced by about 10 dB, and until the age of 8, noises coming from behind are difficult to localize and hear.

Smelling, tasting, feeling

The sensitive senses are also present in their plants and evolve over time. The sense of smell develops towards the end of the pregnancy and is vital for the child, because it helps him to find his first food source - the maternal breast. Newborns can already distinguish the sweet, sour and bitter flavors. At the age of about four months, the detection of salty. The development of the taste buds is completed and the child has the opportunity to taste and evaluate all possible flavors. Feeling, tactile perception is one of the first senses the child uses. It enjoys the touch and caress of the mother, understands things and explores his environment. The skin is our largest organ and has many nerve endings that are already well-formed in children. However, the transmission of stimuli is initially delayed: a child who burns himself at the hot stove will start screaming only a second later, because only then does he feel the pain. Different nerve cells are not fully developed in children. As a result, children can not always locate pain. They cry and talk about abdominal pain, although in reality their head hurts. The ability to pinpoint the location of the pain is around six years old.

The child as the center of the world

At the age of three, the child has attained its own self-awareness. It speaks of itself in the first person, evaluates its own actions and develops feelings such as pride, shame or embarrassment. As a result, it relies only on its own perceptions and assumes that what it can not see is not there. On the other hand, the child transfers his own feelings and observations to others. The best example is when a child's eyes shut and think, then the adult would not see it either. Because of this way of feeling the world, a child can only judge dangers, for example in road traffic, very badly.

Your child perceives the world with his own senses and with his own experiences. This leads to limitations and can create problems, for example, in traffic, while playing or even in case of illness. But all this also gives you the opportunity to get involved in it and to remember how it felt when you were still a child.

Did I forget something? Can you think of any more points?
I´m looking forward to your experiences and additions.