tical for the achievement of eye-hand coordination and for the higher-level skills required for many sports activities.The ability to communicate and to understand language is a major achievement of human beings. An amazing feature of language development is the speed with which it is acquired: The first word is spoken at about 12 months; by two years of age most children have vocabularies of about 270 words, and this increases to 2600 words at the age of six. It is almost impossible to determine the number of sentence constructions that can be generated within a single language. Children, however, use syntactically correct sentences by the age of three and highly complex constructions by the age of five. This extraordinary phenomenon cannot be explained by means of simple learning theory. Today theorists are concerned with the relationship between cognitive growth and language. It is now assumed that language reflects childrens concepts and develops as their concepts expand.Theories of personality are attempts to describe how people behave in satisfying their physical and psychological needs. An inability to satisfy such needs creates a personal conflict. Personality formation is viewed as the process by which children learn how to avoid conflict when possible and how to cope with conflict when it inevitably occurs. Overly restrictive or overly permissive parents limit their childrens options in avoiding and coping with conflict. A normal response to overwhelming conflict is to revert to a defense mechanism such as rationalizationthe denial that one ever wanted a specific objective, for example. Although everyone uses defense mechanisms at some time, they should not become a persons sole means of coping with conflict. A child with a balanced, integrated personality feels accepted and loved and has been allowed to learn a number of appropriate coping mechanisms.Intelligence may be defined as the ability to manipulate abstract verbal co...
