Early Child Development

Executive Summary by Daniel D. Dwase and Laura Doerflinger

Early Child Development Stages

During the first year of early child development your baby develops at an incredible rate, not just physically, but intellectually, emotionally, even socially. Your baby was born with a certain amount of reflexes, like sucking, grasping and crying. But within a few weeks of your infant’s development she will become more and more efficient at these actions and gradually those reflex behaviors will be replaced by deliberate actions of sucking, grasping and crying. Your baby is learning that if she sucks, she will eat.

It’s interesting to note that at 4 months of age, your baby has yet to reach the stage of early child development known as ‘object permanence’; so when an object is out of his sight he has forgotten about it (literally out of sight, out of mind).

By around 8 months a baby will look for a toy he was playing with if it is taken out of his vision. This is why babies at this age love dropping toys and watching you pick them up! They have figured out that the toy has not disappeared when they drop it, and are thrilled to see it reappear!

It is also at this stage of your baby’s early stages of child development that she loves to play peek-a-boo. Parent’s can test their baby’s object permanence by sitting them in a high chair with a toy. If you drop the toy on the ground and she looks down for it, then she has grasped the concept of object permanence. If she doesn’t look for it, then she is not quite at that stage of child development at the earliest stages yet.

There are lots of fun games to play with babies who are at this early child development stage. Let your 10 month old baby see you ‘hide’ her toy under a blanket. Babies at this stage also love to imitate the changes in your face. Stick your tongue out, and watch her imitate the action.

Playing games like this with your baby is an excellent way to spend quality time as well as a way to help develop her grasp of object permanence.

Family Play Time

Play allows a parent and child to bond and form a secure attachment. This attachment provides the child with a basis for a happy, healthy life. The trick to playing with your child, however, is two-fold. Firstly, you have to be able to let your “adult” responsibilities go for 30-minutes so that you can play and be present. Secondly, you have to enter the child’s world, literally and figuratively, and discover your “inner” child. Here are five simple steps to help you let go of the heavy world of responsibilities and play with your child:

1. Acknowledge that play is as important as the bills, the dishes, dinnertime, and work.
2. Use your own emotional self-regulation skills to allow your adult stresses to fade away when you are playing with your child. Tell yourself, “This is important. I’m going to be in the here and now. Worrying about anything else during playtime doesn’t help me get those things done nor does it help my relationship with my child.”
3. Take deep breaths anytime you feel physical stress. The breathing will allow you to relax.
4. Smile and laugh even if you don’t feel like it at first because we know that pretending that you’re having fun actually produces real fun!
5. Play! For some of you, it has been a long time since you picked up a block, a doll or a racecar. In order to play with your child, however, it’s best to understand your early child development stages so that your expectation matches your experience.

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