Autonomy in Child Development
At 12 months, your child’s personality is already acquiring aspects of uniqueness that will remain her entire life. The basic skills in all areas of development are growing into more complex skills. These more complex skills are allowing your child to interact with his environment in ways that will engage those skills. This is an exciting time to watch your child grow, because her learning is driven by the development of her brain. This is a natural developmental engine in your child. At this age, the most important instructional tool is a stimulating environment and your child’s access to that environment. He still needs your support and encouragement, but he will begin to have his own ideas about what he wants. His expression of those ideas will increase. Your ability to listen to those communications and willingness to support his efforts are critical parenting skills at this age.
Developmental Milestones Categories
Your child is no longer an infant. While acceptable definitions of infancy vary, many authorities consider it to be during the first 12 months. One characteristic of the infant is almost total dependence upon others to access the environment. At 12 months, your child is crawling, grasping objects, attending to people in his environment, and communicating with gestures and vocalizations. This independence in accessing her environment will accelerate during the next six months.
Toddler Cognitive Developmental Milestones
Because language is so complex, it is often discussed as a separate skill from cognition. However, it involves many cognitive skills. As these cognitive skills increase, your child will become increasingly attuned to the language you use and will take his first step into the language community. Having mastered some speech sounds in her first year, she will begin to say words that she associates with important events, objects, and people in her environment. Her pronunciation won’t be exact and her speech will have traces of baby talk. But, this is the first foray into the speech community. The gesture of pointing he has learned earlier will help bootstrap him into this amazing world of language. He is learning that things have names. He is learning that these sounds people make in their speech are associated with things and events around him.
You can help your child make these associations by pointing to objects and people you name as you name them. For example, if you ask your child if she wants some milk, have the milk present and point to it as you ask. You can help your child say the word “milk” if when handing the milk to her, you stop, make eye contact with her, and clearly pronounce the word “milk.” Before giving your child the milk, give her a chance to say or attempt to say the word. Accept any response your child gives and give her the milk. The cognitive skill your child is learning is the category of “milk.” This will become part of a larger category of “things to drink.” As your child learns the words “milk” and “water,” you can ask him if he wants “something to drink.” Then you can ask what he wants to drink. Learning categories of objects in his environment will help your child organize information about his environment.
An important object in your child’s environment is her own body. Your child is the center of his world, and his body is the center of that center. Learning to categorize the part of his own body is a critical skill. She will know more about her own body than any other object. Being able to associate the parts of his body with names is a critical life skill. The more body parts he has names for the better he will be able to communicate with you about the status of his body. If she has pain, she will be able to communicate that. At this time, you are still providing your child with assistance in many daily living tasks, such as toileting, bathing, dressing, and tooth brushing. These daily living activities offer perfect settings for instruction on naming your child’s body parts.
The instruction should be very brief. It should involve only receptive language. That is, your child will not be required to say the words. You will only say the words for your child. For example, while bathing your child, name the body part you are washing. You could just wash your child’s arm, for example, without naming it. Your child would learn nothing from this interaction. But without adding any additional work to your chore, you could say to your child, “Let’s wash your arm.” You could then say, “Let’s wash your leg.” This interaction provides your child opportunity to learn the name of her body parts. In this way, you can introduce much cognitive learning into your interactions with your child.
Social Emotional Milestones Early Childhood
A very important skill that emerges as skills in all the other areas develop is pretend play. While pretend play involves all the other skill areas, it is considered a social and emotional skill because it involves all those skills in the social context. Essentially, your child uses objects for their social purposes. By 18 months, your child will be responding to more than just objects; she will begin to respond to the imagery associated with them. Toys will begin to be miniaturizations of objects used in parts of her daily life. For example, given a toy spoon, he will put it in his mouth as if he were eating. Given a toy car, he will push it as if driving it. These actions with toys show that your child is developing awareness of events in his daily routine and is forming abstractions of their uses. This development represents the integration of her cognitive and social skills and is an important part of developing symbols of her world. As she develops, these symbols will become more abstract and separated from the world they represent.
Your enrichment of this development is important for your child’s mental growth. You can facilitate your child’s development in this area by playing with her. Parents sometimes see toys as only baby-sitting tools. This use of toys is ok; but if you spend some time accompanying your child in toy play, you can give her development a boost. At this stage, your child will not be doing complex play. The play actions he uses will be very brief and simple. Your child will not be using much speech while he is engaged with his toys. Her play will mostly involve her motor skills. She will push a car back and forth. You can do this with her and extend the action by one additional step. For example, push the car back and forth like she is doing then make it go fast with engine sounds that you make. Push it back-and-forth then push it up an object. Talk about what you are doing. This will insert language into his play routines.
Her pretend play shows your child is getting some perspective on her world. Now, her world is much bigger than herself. This perspective taking is shown by her becoming fearful of strangers. His categories of familiar and unfamiliar people has developed, and he is experiencing unfamiliar people as strangers. By your responses to these people, she will learn that some strangers are not to be feared. Tell her the names of safe strangers and help her interact with them. The fact that she knows a person’s name and has interacted with them will become an important basis of her learning which strangers she should trust and which she shouldn’t.
Since she was born, your child has been experiencing several emotions. You have been naming her emotions as she experiences them. With her new perspective on life that has emerged through the development of her cognitive, social, emotional, language, and motor skills, she will begin to use her emotions to communicate and obtain things of interest. She will quickly learn that the emotion of anger produces large effects on others. At this age, tantrums that are intentionally thrown become common.
It is easy for a parent to believe their child is being bad when she throws a tantrum. Actually, your child is learning to control his emotions. Tantrums are not about being good or bad; they are emotional development. For example, assume your child throws a tantrum (becomes angry) because you don’t buy a candy bar for her when you go to the store. Your child throws a tantrum, because he has not developed emotional control. In order to develop emotional control, your child needs to develop more awareness of her emotions. You can help her do this by naming the emotion she is experiencing. She also needs to know what is making her angry. Help her identify what is making her angry by naming it. For example, say: “You are angry because you didn’t get a candy bar.” This is a lot of language for your child to comprehend, but she will learn. Your child will also need support from her environment. You will provide this support by not giving her a candy bar to stop the tantrum.
When you give your child the candy bar is all important for her developing emotional control. Get the candy bar and tell your child she can have the candy bar when she “gets happy.” You will keep the candy bar where your child can see it until she quits throwing her tantrum. When she quits throwing her tantrum and has demonstrated some emotional control for several minutes, then give her the candy bar. Let her know she is getting the candy bar because she is happy.
Language Development Milestones Toddlers
Between 12 and 18 months, you child will began to say words. These words don’t just happen; your child has learned them from the words you say. You will notice that these words are not isolated events but are said in the presence of objects, people, and activities. In earlier developmental stages, your child would babble, making speech sounds without associating them with things in her environment. Now, your child is relating specific speech sounds to things in her environment. She is beginning to crack the language code. At this stage, she is discovering that these speech sounds contain information. To access that information, she has to relate these sounds to objects, people, and activities in her environment. You can help her discover the meanings of words by saying the names of things you give her. For example, when you give her a spoon, don’t just hand it to her, say the word “spoon” as you give it to her. When she attempts to repeat the name, praise her for her effort.
Among these first words your child will learn at this time will be the word “no.” You may notice your child is using this word quite often. It is not because he has suddenly become stubborn. Your child is discovering that speech and language has real effects upon the world, especially upon other people. If you push an object, the object moves. That’s an obvious effect upon the environment. But it is not so obvious that saying something will have an effect also. To the toddler who is just beginning to use language, this seems magical. Speech is an easy way to affect the environment. Simply by saying “no,” one can stop something from happening.
Learning when to say something is part of learning to say it. There are times to say “no” and there are times not to say it. Having a daily living schedule for your child will help you teach him when to use language. For example, if your child’s daily schedule requires him to take a bath after dinner to get ready for bed, then there will be many cues in his environment telling him it is time to take a bath. However, if bedtime for your child comes at different times in the evening, then there will be no specific cues telling him it is time. You can expect to get a lot of “no’s” when suddenly told it is time for bed.
An important clue to teaching your child language is that language is learned within social situations. Every social situation has a routine that governs what language is tolerated within that situation. Learning to use language involves learning these routines. One simple routine that your child will learn early is that of leaving a situation. That involves saying “bye.” Not only does this routine involve saying “bye” but it includes the gesture of waving. As your child is included in more social situations, model for him the routines and language that is used. Be aware that this is what your child is learning from these situations.
Movement Development Milestones
The goal of your child’s movement development is to give her increasing access to her environment. At this stage of his development, the important achievements will be climbing one or two stair steps, standing alone, walking while holding on to surfaces for support, and drinking from a cup. These skills are called gross motor skills and all involve balance.
In walking, your child still needs to hold on to objects, but her use of objects for balance support shows her interest in exploring her environment. Give your child opportunities to walk on different kinds of surfaces. This will help him explore how his body balances. Each surface will require a slightly different balance skill.
Standing alone is another important skill that will facilitate her access to different environments. In terms of the structure of the skill of walking, standing precedes walking. Your child has not yet mastered standing. Like walking, standing on different surfaces will help your child learn this skill.
Walking up stairs presents entirely new motoric demands on your child, both in terms of balance and the action of walking. Your child is not yet ready to alternate feet in her stair climbing. She is now learning to simply step up on a stair step. To do this, she has to shift her weight upward while maintaining her balance. The things you do easily everyday are actually quite complex. Take time to give your child a chance to practice these skills on one or two stair steps before picking her up and carrying her up the stairs.
Toddler Development Activities
In a way, this is a peculiar stage of development when it comes to your child’s learning. She still needs considerable help, but she has developed enough skills to become more independent. You need to leave the mindset that your child needs you to do everything for him. Just a couple months ago that was true. Now, though, you need to began reducing your assistance. Your strategy will be to help her do parts of a task that is more difficult for her but to let her do those parts on which she has achieved some mastery.
Think of your child’s day as a string of independent tasks. Each task has a beginning and an end. Your goal will be to reduce the amount of help your child needs from you. On what tasks do you spend the most time each day helping your child? Where in your day do you have the most time to give your child some instruction? For example, suppose you take your child to a daycare each morning before you go to work. This part of your day likely has tight time constraints. Thus, its not a good idea to teach your child to walk from the house to the car. You will not be able to give your child the time she needs to learn this task. Because you feel rushed, you will rush your child. It will be a negative experience for both you and your child. When you pick up your child after work would be a better time to work on walking. Walking from the car to the house in the evening would be a less stressful time of day.
Many people don’t plan for time to teach their children. Teaching your child is a big part of parenting. You need to plan for this task each day. In working with parents, it has been my observation that this lack of planning by parents on teaching their children introduces friction into those relationships. As children mature, that friction turns to negativity. The skill here is to observe your child’s growth and help her some each day on various developmental milestones. As her skills increase, reduce your assistance. The biggest motivator for your child’s development is achieving competence in managing her life.