Child Development

their quality of life. In addition, the results of research
have demonstrated that when children with special
needs receive early intervention services, they tend to
live more productive lives, score higher on standard-
ized assessments, and contribute more to society.
Often, the effects of their disability are lessened while
new skills are learned. Children with disabilities who
receive early intervention are less likely to develop a
secondary disability as a result of not attending to the
primary disability. For example, a child with a visual
impairment is often delayed in cognitive and motor
skills because he does not use the environment as a
learning tool. Early intervention services can mini-
mize these secondary delays by teaching the child to
explore the environment and learn.

Public Support for Early Intervention

Programs

While the level of public support for early inter-
vention programs is sometimes in dispute, primarily
because of their cost, the effectiveness of such pro-
grams is not. Children who have participated in an
early intervention program tend to spend less time in
special education, tend to be retained a grade less
often, and tend to stay in school and graduate. Al-
though U.S. society was not funding early interven-
tion programs for children at-risk to the extent that
would make them commonplace in communities,
early intervention programs and the effectiveness of
them were beginning at the dawn of the twenty-first
century to gain recognition in the public’s eye.

Politicians often place increased funding of these
programs on their political agendas. In addition,
some states are now moving toward offering state-
funded preschool programs to all four-year-olds in an
effort to follow the national trend of getting children
ready to learn. Early intervention programs such as
the one included in the High/Scope Perry Preschool
study illustrate that the cost factor over time appears
to outweigh the cost of funding these programs. Early
intervention programs have, over time, proven to
make a difference in the lives of children and their
families.

See also: HEAD START

Bibliography
‘‘Children Champions.’’ In the National Association for the Educa-
tion of Young Children [web site]. Washington, DC, 2000.
Available from http://www.naeyc.org/default.htm; INTER-
NET.
Peterson, Nancy L. Early Intervention for Handicapped and At-Risk
Children. Denver: Love Publishing, 1987.
Shonkoff, Jack P., and Samuel J. Meisels. Handbook of Early Inter-
vention. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Erin L. Smith-Bird

EGOCENTRISM

According to Swiss developmental psychologist Jean

Piaget, egocentrism is the tendency of children to

cognize their environment only in terms of their own

point of view. Piaget theorized that the degree of ego-

centrism is directly related to the child’s level of cog-

nitive development. In the infant stage (birth to age

two) children are just learning to recognize and inter-

act with the environment and are thus completely

egocentric. In the toddler and preschool stages (ages

two to six) children are able to represent the world to

themselves in symbols and images but are unable to

distinguish their point of view from that of others. In

the middle childhood stage (ages six to twelve) chil-

dren develop greater cognitive abilities and therefore

have declining levels of egocentrism and are able to

visualize a situation from another’s point of view. In

the adolescent stage (ages twelve to nineteen) egocen-

trism further declines as individuals develop the abili-

ty for fully abstract thought and are thus able to

analyze a situation from many perspectives.

See also: COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT; PIAGET, JEAN

Bibliography

Piaget, Jean. The Construction of Reality in the Child. New York: Basic

Books, 1954.

Richard J. Castillo

EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT

When you’re drawing up your list of life’s mir-

acles, you might place near the top the first

moment your baby smiles at you... Today,

she looked right at me. And she smiled...

Her toothless mouth opened, and she

scrunched her face up and it really was a grin

... The sleepless nights, the worries, the cry-
ing—all of a sudden it was all worth it... She
is no longer just something we are nursing
and carrying along—somewhere inside, part
of her knows what’s going on, and that part
of her is telling us that she’s with us (Greene
1985, pp. 33–34).
In his journal of the early years of his daughter’s life,
reporter Bob Greene depicted the important roles
that emotions play in children’s development. He
noted the impact that his daughter’s first smile had
on him, washing away the worry and fatigue of early
parenting. He also revealed the belief that emotions
make us human and contribute significantly to the
meaning of relationships. His daughter’s smile was
interpreted to mean that she was gaining awareness
of her environment. Moreover, her smile meant that

132 EGOCENTRISM