Aisha Ellis

Edu 145
Child Development 2
April 15, 2009

My Child Case Study

To develop my case study I will inform you on the child that I have

been studying. This is a female child and she is eight years old. She is an

African American child and she has characteristics all her own. In my

research I found things about the child that were kind of normal for this day

and age. I found that Chasity, we will call her, has classification and

conservation skills. She has the ability to collect objects and sort them in

categories. Chasity has a collection of Barbie dolls that she puts in order of

the year that they were given to her. She has also learned the skill of

conservation evidence by her mother asking her where were her shoes that

she had just purchased and he gathered aspects of where she had them last.

She has spatial reasoning of direction and cognitive development.

The focus of my study is to study a child usually emphasizing

developmental issues and relationships with the environment, especially in

order to compare a larger group to the individual case study. Her mother is a

single mother who works two jobs while her sister keeps her and her brother
after they get off the school bus. Her mother usually gets home around six

and does not have a lot of time to give her the adequate attention she needs

until the weekend. Her mother is a bus driver for the high schools and a

nurse during the day. Chasity’s mom was never married to her biological

father and he died when Chasity was four years old. She has an aunt, cousin,

and a brother that leaves in the home. She spends approximately fifteen to

twenty hours with her mother a week and twenty- five hours with her aunt.

Chasity had no complications during pregnancy and after. Her mother said

that she was potty trained at the early age of thirteen to fourteen months.

She developed all of her motor skills, speech, and language at the correct

milestones of other toddlers her age except for the thumb sucking. Chasity is

still in the thumb sucking stage that challenges Sigmund Freud’s theory on

not passing her next stage of development. This theory states that if oral

needs are not met appropriately, the child may develop such habits as thumb

sucking, fingernail biting and pencil chewing in childhood and overeating

and smoking later in life. She is now overweight for her age and height.

Chasity is very loving and always willing to help. She attends Benvenue

Elementary School. She has great social development with her schoolmates

by making friends easily and she is not shy. On the other hand, she has

serious behavioral problems. She is very disrespectful to her teachers when

she talks back and interrupts the class. Her attitude may be due to what she

gets because of what she sees at home. What she sees and hears determines

on what example she will follow. In her home environment, she is really

good in doing her chores with no complaining. She is a great reader and she

is a leader. She is interested in basketball, cheerleading, and step team in

school. As a family they play board games. Go walking, watch television,

and go to church together.

For discipline solutions, Chasity will have items taken away from her,

will not be able to have outdoor privileges, and she will get a one on one talk

to her mother about her behavior. Chasity’s mother said she believes her

parenting styles are old fashion and not effective due to the fact Chasity still

misbehaves. In her cognitive development, she grasps to all things that are

new and explores them. While opening a new game that her mother had just

purchased for her, she began to organize the pieces and read the instructions

to see how to play it. In her fine motor skills, in writing and drawing

pictures, she is very well trained or taught. During this observation, I did see

that her writing needed a little more practice. She does not take her time to

write complete sentences. We went over some phonemic and phonics as the

book Infant and Children by Laura E. Berk states, not only do school age

children know the objects in detail, but also relate them to one another as
part of an organized whole. In her gross motor skills, Chasity did some

running, jumping, catching, kicking and playing softball as I observed her

during the weeks of the case study. She was able to do all these things with

no problem.

In her social and emotional development, Chasity has good manners,

and she deals with sometimes feeling left out. She feels that she does not

have her mother’s attention at certain times due to her mother’s work

schedule. Chasity and I did activities that dealt with her social/emotional

growth. Chasity has a low self-esteem because she tells me that sometimes

she does not feel pretty at times. We played a mirror game that boosts a

child’s emotional skill. Every time we would look at our selves in the mirror,

we had to say something positive about ourselves in the mirror. She enjoyed

this game.

In her physical development, I have that all her physical abilities were

in tact. For activities in this area we played kickball with her brother and

cousins. She was able to kick, throw, roll, and run for her development. She

is excellent in these areas. On the other hand, she does not exercise enough.

She does a lot of video games and sitting in the living room in front of the

television.
 In chapter seven, we discussed the easy, difficult, and slow-to-warm

child. In the case of Chasity, I find her to be difficult child evidence by, not

having a set bed routine, always getting angry when her mother says the

answer is no. She does not accept new experiences well, especially when she

found out her mother would be marrying someone. Even in moving to

another home, she was very upset about having to change schools and

making new friends.

I have learned that there are a lot more reasons to just seeing a child

act out than meets the eye. You have to go deep into the theories and

behaviors of what makes the child behave in such a way. I would like in

future studies to be able to find out if the child is in a single parent home and

the parent makes decent money and the child gets all their needs and wants

met but still acts out, what could be the problem such as the environment

versus genetics. This case study was very complicated for me but, eye

opening to know how to format a study week by week and learning new

things on how children transform from infants to adolescence. I have

learned strategies that will help me in future classroom settings to help my

children deal with certain situations and understand why certain abilities

affect certain children such as, environment, nature, and genetics and how

they tie into our theorist’s conclusion.

 Citations

1. http://www.pbs.kids.org/arthur/parentteacher/activities

2. Barclay, K.D. (1991) What Children can Teach Us About

Emergent Literacy Illinois School Research and

Development

3. Pitts, Bridget. Personal Interview 12 February 2009

4. Berk, Laura E. (2008) Infants and Children Sixth Edition

Illinois State University