poor mental and physical growth in children. give appropriate biological term
Answers
Explanation:
In industrialized societies, school-age children are generally the healthiest segment of the population. In general, they are not exposed to the nutritional deficiencies and infections that plague so many children in developing countries, and they have not yet experienced the myriad changes of adolescence or the increased risks of major diseases that adults face.
For children ages 6-12, health issues are best defined in the context of the developmental tasks of this period. Whereas acute illnesses are generally brief and followed by the resumption of normal routines, chronic impairments and catastrophic diseases demand sophisticated medical treatments in conjunction with attention to the child's personal and social development. Moreover, although more research is needed on socioeconomic class differences in health status and use of health services, and although poverty continues to pose a major threat to the physical and mental well-being of children in the United States, the most far-reaching basic research concerns from a public health perspective go beyond the domain of the organized health care system and involve the more pervasive matter of life-style. Accidents accounted for half the deaths of children ages 5-14 in the United States in 1978, and more than 50 percent of them were related to motor vehicles (Bureau of the Census, 1982). Multiple risk factors for the most common adult diseases have been shown to include a number of behaviors whose antecedents are germinated, if not sprouted, during middle childhood. Exercise and attitudes toward physical fitness, coping with stress, tobacco and alcohol abuse, and dietary habits are some of the life-style characteristics that appear to warrant particular preventive attention during this age period.
This chapter provides an overview of the current research regarding health and illness during middle childhood. It reviews existing knowledge of the biological substrate of human function during this period. It also explores the problem of conceptualizing health and illness and analyzes it in the context of the child's emerging life-style and sense of his or her own health status both during the school years and in the future. An agenda for further study is proposed