THE FIRST 1000 DAYS

Toddler – Walking, Babbling, and Learning

As your child starts exploring the world around them and learns new things, your child also learns to walk and talk. The processes of motor development and language development and other aspects of development coincide. The first few years of life for your child are important; they learn and develop a plethora of skills necessary for the years to come. For your child to develop gross motor skills, lots of practice is required. There also may be good days and bad days. The basic developmental milestones are as follows:

· Your child may be able to hold their head by four months of age.

· Your child can sit unassisted by about 5-6 months of age.

· Your child may be able to stand by about 11 to 13 months of age. Your child may use support to pull themselves up.

· By 12- 15 months, your child can walk. Your child, at first, may use nearby furniture as support to walk. Soon, they will be able to stand alone easily and walk alone as well.

When it comes to speaking and acquiring language, it too is a step by step process. Your child can produce sounds from birth. By about four and a half months of age, your child can listen longer to their names and names with similar stress patterns. They understand 'mummy' and 'daddy' at around six months of age. From 3 to 6 months of age, your child plays around with speech sound, which then progresses into babbling from 6 to 10 months. Your child may repeat sounds like "ee-ee-ee" or "ma-ma-ma-ma." It is not language as it does not hold meaning. From 9 to 10 months, your child will begin to make deliberate imitations of language sounds. Speaking in parentese is helpful to your child; you talk in exaggerated vowel sounds. (What is parentese? Talking to infants using both adult speech and “baby talk” can be especially interesting to little ones. Baby talk is sometimes called Parentese or Motherese. It is a type of speech where an adult talks to a child in an exaggerated and repetitive way.)

In this way, your child identifies the distinctive sounds in the language. At around the same time, your child has learned social gestures like shaking of the head for "no" and nodding for "yes." By 13 months, your child has picked up more gestures like raising their arms to be picked up.

From 10- 14 months, your child speaks words that convey meaning. By 18 months, your child can recognize words after hearing the first half like "shu" for shoes. From 16-24 months, your child has what is called a word explosion. Your child learns 50- 400 words in a few weeks. Soon, your child can string together words into short sentences like "Mummy come." By the time your child is 20- 30 months old, they will start using articles and tense. By age 3, fluent and sophisticated speech is demonstrated by your child.

As you can see, as your child grows into a toddler, they learn quite a bit. They learn how to walk and how to talk. This development occurs in a step-by-step fashion. This development is also simultaneous. Your child first makes speech sounds and attempts to stand with support. One can see that in the first few years of life, your child is learning and exploring the world around them.