A child is a
human who is not yet an
adult.
A female child is called a girl and a male child is a
boy
(though a small percentage of humans are
intersexual). Apart from the
genitals, young children do not differ much by
sex. Whether cultural and parental practices emphasize or weaken
gender identity is subject to debate. For instance, parents often
discipline boys more, which potentially weakens their inborn more
aggresive nature making them more similar to girls. In general, the
extent to which gender identity is formed during childhood or congenital
is a matter of much debate within
psychology and
genetics.
In
law, a person who is not yet a legal adult is known as a
minor
(known in some places as an infant or juvenile). For
example, in many countries a person under the age of 18 is a minor. Most
countries give additional legal protection to minors, and all countries
except the
United States and
Somalia have ratified the
United Nations
Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Child development is the study or examination of processes
and mechanisms that operate during the physical and mental development of
an infant into an adult.
Pediatrics is the branch of
medicine relating to the care of children. It encompasses ages from
prenatal to teenagers and even young adults.
Stages of development include:
A street child is a child that lives on the
street, in particular one that is not taken care of by
parents or other
adults, and also
sleeps on the street because he or she does not have a
home.
[1] (http://www.enfants-des-rues.com/pages/html/uk/enfants_plus.html)
Human development refers to all forms of development
above, often in the context of
clinical psychology[?] or as
human development theory (in
economics, an outgrowth of
welfare economics[?]).
Both the psychological and economic fields share a special concern
with
education and
language fluency including
literacy and
numeracy[?], and with identification and development of more unique
talents into the
economic variable known as
individual capital.
Earlier branches of economics see humans in terms of labour for
production[?],
means of persuasion or
protection, which tend to be skills acquired only in adolescence and
adulthood. The human development view is more evident in
sports,
music and other
performing arts, such as
acting where the
child begins
training often as early as three years of age.
While there are problems with such early "streaming",
child murder,
child abandonment,
military use of children and other major social ills are thought to
be reduced by a human development approach - as as there is a
high value assigned to children by the state.
The
UN Human Development Index is a means of
measuring well-being used to rank states by these criteria. Although
child abuse is thought to be lower in countries with a high ranking
on this Index, that is not easily proven.
