Children who receive the best possible education can flourish and reach their full potential. That means providing high-quality learning opportunities in safe, equitable, inclusive environments and supporting them with the critical skills, mindsets, emotional supports, stable relationships and comprehensive support they need to thrive.
Child education is the structured process of educating young children, typically from birth to eight years old.
Social and Emotional Development
Children’s social-emotional development influences their overall growth and learning. It involves developing a healthy relationship with self and others, understanding their emotions and those of others and building a strong foundation for social relationships that can support success throughout life.
During early childhood, kids develop their sense of self through their experiences with parents and other adults. They also learn how to interact with other people, no matter their age or gender. They can express themselves with gestures, smiles, and words. They learn how to play with other children and form friendships.
Children who have positive social-emotional development are more likely to be happy, willing to learn and have a greater capacity to respond to challenging situations. UNICEF works with local and global partners to promote ECCE as an important part of a child’s right to education, life and dignity. It provides child education programs by setting up classrooms, distributing books and other learning materials, training teachers and providing support for families.
Cognitive Development
Cognitive development involves children’s reasoning, problem-solving and understanding the world around them. Children begin by learning about the world by observing and experiencing it. For example, they may play with toys to find out what happens when you push them or watch the way a pendulum swings to see how it affects the weights attached to it.
Jean Piaget, a Swiss psychologist who studied cognitive development, divided child cognitive development into four stages. The first is the preoperational stage, which encompasses infants from birth to age 2. He believed that children process information by balancing assimilation and accommodation. This means that they take in new information and try to fit it into their existing mental schemas, or beliefs about the world.
During the concrete operational stage, which lasts until age 7, children can think more logically and show clearer reasoning. They also understand conservation, which is the idea that something remains the same in quantity, even though it may look different.
Physical Development
Physical development refers to the growth and maturation of children’s bodies, as well as their ability to move around and interact with their environments. It includes both gross motor skills (like jumping, hopping, skipping and throwing) and fine motor skills (like the precise use of muscles in the hands and fingers for tasks like stacking small blocks or handling tools).
UNICEF’s child education work focuses on healthy physical, social and cognitive development and access to quality early learning. Providing safe spaces and resources, training teachers and establishing educational systems are all ways we help children learn.
Evidence shows that a range of approaches can improve children’s physical development outcomes, including movement and handling skills. For more information, see the Physical Development theme in the Evidence Store. Some evidence suggests that physical development approaches also benefit children’s cognitive development outcomes, especially self-regulation and executive function. These themes are explored more fully in the Course Guide.
Language Development
By about the age of two, children begin to use words to get things they want, tell stories and express thoughts and emotions. Their language skills continue to improve as they grow up, including through school and into their early teen years.
Infants may initially mix up their parents’ languages when they talk to them, but they generally learn to separate their parents’ speech sounds by two and a half years of age. The ability to do this is attributed to “statistical learning,” in which the infant unconsciously detects statistical properties of sound sequences that vary between different people, such as the frequency with which particular sounds occur within or between words.
The Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky proposed a socio-cultural theory of learning that suggests teachers can enhance students’ cognitive development by providing them with knowledge and skills that are relevant to their environment. He called this the zone of proximal development. A warm, mutually respectful, low-stress exchange between a child and a teacher is ideal for this purpose.