Child and Human Development Questions and Answers

Answer: C

This is an example of pro-social behavior.

Pro-social behaviour is any voluntary action meant to benefit others, such as sharing, helping, comforting and caring. Sunil's sharing and his care for an injured friend fit this description.

Altruism is a narrower kind of pro-social behaviour, helping out of concern for others without any expectation of reward and often at some cost to oneself; the stem does not say this, so the broader term is the answer. Anti-social behaviour harms others, and cooperative participation means working together towards a shared goal.

Answer: A

The most important component is warmth, safety and security for children.

Young children learn best when they feel safe and cared for. A warm relationship with teachers, a physically safe setting and an emotionally secure atmosphere are the base on which every other part of a preschool programme, such as play, language and social learning, depends.

An international curriculum and expensive equipment are not necessary for good early education; simple, local materials serve well. Parent involvement is valuable, but it supports the curriculum rather than being its most important component.

Answer: A

Discipline and clear limits help a child to provide security and clarity about boundaries.

Clear, consistent rules tell children what is expected of them and what will happen if they break the rules. Knowing where the limits are makes children feel safe and gives them a framework within which to develop self-control.

Discipline is not meant mainly to display parental authority or to produce unquestioning obedience, which authoritarian parenting aims at and which can harm a child's development. Labelling the child as a 'good boy or girl' is not its purpose either.

Answer: B

The cross-sectional method is good to understand how children play at different ages with one another.

A cross-sectional study observes different groups of children of different ages at the same time, for example three, four and five-year-olds, and compares them. It shows quickly how play patterns differ with age.

Studying the same group of children at different times is the longitudinal method, described in option C. The cross-sectional method is not always better than the longitudinal one, because it cannot show how individual children change, and it has no built-in bias towards a favourable picture of play.

Answer: C

It is known as gender identity.

Gender identity is a person's sense of himself or herself as male or female, masculine or feminine. In Kohlberg's account, children first acquire this basic gender identity at about two or three years of age, then gender stability and gender constancy (consistency), the understanding that gender does not change over time or with appearance.

Gender roles are the behaviours a society expects of each sex, gender consistency is the understanding that gender stays the same in different situations, and gender intensification is the increased pressure to conform to gender roles in early adolescence.

Answer: C

The one that is not a focus is protection from anxiety related to college admission and career choice.

Street children live and work on the streets, usually without education or family care. Institutions that serve them concentrate on their immediate risks: sexual exploitation and substance abuse, exposure to traffic, weather and pollution, and disease from poor sanitation and nutrition.

Worry about college admission and career choice belongs to school-going adolescents in families; it is not a protection need of street children, so it is the odd one out.

Answer: A

The answer is the Early childhood care and education policy.

The National Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) Policy, adopted by the Government of India in 2013, is concerned with children under six. It commits the State to providing institutional arrangements, such as anganwadis, preschools and creches, with quality standards, a curriculum framework and a national and state ECCE council, so that young children's rights to care, health, nutrition and early learning are met.

The domestic violence law protects women in the home, the right to food security concerns subsidised grain for households, and 'Child care and child right policy' is not the name of an actual policy, so none of them fits as well.

Answer: A

A child has achieved conservation when she knows that change in appearance of an object does not affect number/weight/volume.

In Piaget's theory, conservation is the understanding that a quantity stays the same when its shape or arrangement changes: water poured from a short wide glass into a tall thin one is still the same amount. It is attained in the concrete operational stage, from about seven years.

The other options describe the pre-operational error, that a change in appearance changes the quantity, or confuse the idea by making appearance part of volume and weight. Conservation means quantity is independent of appearance, not that weight and volume are independent of each other.

Answer: B

This represents parallel play.

In Mildred Parten's stages of play, parallel play is when children play beside one another with similar materials, such as in the same sand pit, but each plays independently without interacting. It is typical of children around two to three years.

Solitary play is play alone, away from others, and cooperative play involves shared goals and roles, as in a group game or make-believe. 'Cultural play' is not one of Parten's categories.

Answer: C

Chitra faces the risk of being born with the physical and cognitive abnormalities of fetal alcohol syndrome.

Alcohol crosses the placenta freely and is a teratogen. Drinking in pregnancy can cause fetal alcohol syndrome: low birth weight and poor growth, characteristic facial features such as small eyes and a thin upper lip, a small head, and intellectual disability with learning and behaviour problems.

Emotional disturbance, insecure attachment or later drug addiction may or may not follow from the home environment, but they are not the direct, well-established prenatal effect of the mother's drinking that the question describes.