Celebrate those mini milestones

Bright, emotionally healthy children don’t just happen. There are some crucial irreplaceable experiences that enable children to expand their intellectual and emotional potential as human beings – and it all starts at birth, writes Kerry Wallace

THE LITTLE THINGS

You may find yourself spending a lot of time fretting about the big baby milestones – crawling, walking, talking, and starting solids. However, it is the “mini milestones” that occur in the first year of a baby’s life that really make the difference. We are social beings and it is through our relationships that much of this development happens as the connections in our brains are made.

Helping your baby build a sense of love and trust is reason enough, but equally compelling is the fact that emotional interactions are the source of intelligence, morality and self-esteem. The loving intimate connection forged between you and your baby sets the stage for your child’s higher thinking skills later in life.

WHEN SHE SMILES

It all starts with the first smile, usually seen at around five or six weeks of age, signalling that the connections between the emotional centres of your baby’s brain, the muscle of her face and visual system are forming, that your infant is developing the capacity for an emotional interest and connection with people. Smiling depends on being calm, attentive and interested in the world, and is one of the signs of the first social-emotional milestones.

It is described by Stanley Greenspan, author of Building Healthy Minds, as a capacity for self-regulation. A state of self-regulation enables your baby to explore objects freely without caution, to remain calm for a play period, be comfortable touching textured toys and to enjoy moving or engaging in some rough horse play with Dad.

I SEE YOU!

By three to four months, your baby should be showing the capacity for dual processing, making eye contact, smiling, gurgling and kicking her legs in delight as you appear in the room. She should also be able to focus and pay attention for at least 30 or more seconds. Now your baby will woo you with her smiles, babble by using a variety of sounds and intonations, and be responsive to your expressions and sounds with vocalisations. She will smile at her own face in the mirror, follow objects with her eyes and enjoy looking at and exploring her own hands.

TIME TO ROLL

Tummy time encourages the important milestone of pushing up on extended arms and strengthening back and shoulder stabiliser muscles in readiness for sitting and crawling. Rolling is the first step towards independent movement, and at four months it is usually from back to front, while reaching for a toy or during the fascinating journey of discovering their toes, rolling form side to side, that they suddenly find themselves rolling from their backs on to their tummies.

LITTLE EXPLORER

As your baby grows she gains more control of her body and becomes mobile (around seven to eight months), enjoying movement in space and the freedom it provides in exploring the world. Around this time it becomes evident that she is starting to recognise and respond to her name and to simple request and being told “No!” By nine to ten months she should no longer be showing sensitivity to bright lights or loud noises, which enables the little crawler to explore her home environment fearlessly, even into three-dimensional space as she starts climbing and exploring inside cupboards and stands up to see what is interesting on top of a shelf. Especially if she has an older sibling, she may start trying to imitate fine motor tasks like a scribble.

With increasing focused attention she starts enjoying listening to stories or nursery rhymes, and can play with you or alone for five or more minutes. While

EVEN IF YOUR BABY REACHES HER MILESTONES A LITTLE SLOWER, THE BUILDING BLOCKS TOWARDS BECOMING A SOCIAL BEING IS WHAT COUNTS IN THE LONG RUN

playing calmly, she maintains a visual or vocal connection across space. Copying simple gestures like “bye-bye” with a hand wave and “no” with a head-shake, illustrates her early understanding of symbolic thinking. Finding a toy hidden in a parent’s hand indicates her visual memory developing.

LOOK WHO’S TALKING, ALMOST

She is also starting to use sounds to convey intentions or emotions, such as pleasurable “mmmmmmm” that develops into “mama” in most languages, and mobility enables her to initiate physical closeness to her parents. She begins to be able to think ahead and anticipate with curiosity and excitement when you present an interesting object or game. She’s starting to understand the concept of cause and effect and the focus of her attention at this age is only for one or more minutes.

LITTLE COMMUNICATOR

The ten-to-12-months period is the beginning of purposeful two-way communication. Your baby will initiate her intentional actions with toys while playing with an adult. She notices the adult’s response to her ideas and responds by elaborating on what the adult did, for example, by taking the toy held by the adult, examining it and imitating her or some other response that is clearly linked to what was done. Gestures, facial expression and intonation precede language, which is the culmination of social-emotional building blocks from earlier. By drawing on all the new discoveries about how your baby’s brain and mind grows, you now have tools to turn these discoveries into practical reality. However, more important than when they occur is the process. Even if your baby reaches her milestones a little slower, the building blocks towards becoming a social being is what counts in the long run. You are a pivotal part of her development for both mini and major milestones. YB