What Is the Sensitive Period?

A certain period of the child's psychological development is easier to learn a certain kind of knowledge and behavior than other periods, and one aspect of the psychological process develops most rapidly. This period is called the "sensitive period".

Refers to the child's inherent needs for development during the age of 0-6 years. During a certain period of time, the child has an enthusiasm for trying or learning about specific things that he is interested in, until the internal needs are met or the sensitivity is weakened. ^[1]

If you miss the sensitive period, the development speed will be slower and it will be more difficult to learn certain knowledge skills. The sensitive period is proposed relative to the critical period. It is generally believed that in some aspects of children's psychological development, there is a critical period that cannot be compensated if the opportunity is missed. But more aspects are not absolutely impossible to remedy, but just miss the opportunity and make more efforts to make up for it. Many researchers believe that there are many sensitive periods of psychological development in the pre-school period. For example, 0 to 4 years is the fastest period of intellectual development; 2 to 4 years is the sensitive period of phonetic learning; 5 to 5.5 years is the sensitivity to master the concept of numbers. Period; 5-6 years is the sensitive period of vocabulary expansion and so on. In the education work, using the favorable time of the sensitive period to provide targeted education for children and provide corresponding environmental stimuli, you can get more results with less effort. ^[3]