Helping Your Baby Learn 1-2yrs old

(RaisingX.com) These twelve months have so much change and growth it is incredible to watch. They go from forming little personalities, beginning to be mobile, to having an expanded vocabulary, running around, and starting to talk in little sentences. In this incredibly formative time there is a lot you can do to help encourage their development. We have been doing a lot of reading recently and like much of the work of Jean Piaget, so you will see some of that in here.

Here are a few of the milestones for this development period. They will/should begin:

- walking alone and starting to run

- to climb on and off objects without help

- manage carrying toys and walking

- imitate all kinds of behavior

- recognizes familiar names

- recognizes and points out objects when named

- says several single words (15-18months)

- says simple phrases (18-24months)

- draws/scribbles

- builds/stacks toys, can build more than 4 blocks high

- increasing separation anxiety (18months)

- increased self awareness as independent person

- object permanence: kids understand that objects exist even when out of sight (Piaget)

- motor experimentation: kids begin to experiment with their motor skills to see what will happen. They begin understanding more advanced levels of manipulation, i.e. turning a book vertically to pull it in their crib (Piaget)

You will notice that they will have learning spurts just like growth spurts, where their development seems to sky rocket. Enjoy and encourage these. They will experiment more with objects to understand their use, may take your hair brush to brush his/her hair, or take your kitchen spoons and stir empty pots. These are examples of symbolic play. (There is a large body of work detailing the connections between symbolic play and: language, learning, developmental delays, etc) Symbolic play is how they learn at this age and start to make discoveries. Learning here should be fun, not formal.

You can help this play by encouraging and applauding them as they experiment. Even when they are using an object wrong allow them to continue without discouraging. This is important. According to Piaget they are trying to find new means to an end, which will involve trial and error. And this experiential learning is much more powerful than us telling them the proper use. To illustrate the color green, for example, we could describe green, we could show a picture of green, or we could let Xavier mix blue and yellow. We think the latter definitely has more staying power.

At this age, kids learn an immense amount through imitation of adults and other kids. So to help their learning here parents should try to incorporate learning into imitation based fun. Fun can include simple and functional things like cleaning up. Xavier loves to be in the kitchen while we cook and clean up after dinner, so we will give her a wet cloth and she will ‘clean up’ the kitchen like mommy and daddy. Granted, half the time she will spill water or draw on the floor, just to be able to clean up the mess, but, either way she is learning a lot about her world.

Great toys for this age are pretty much any thing that allows them to safely experiment. Toys that focus on shapes and spatial relationships are especially good as they begin to understand the connections between objects. Wooden blocks are a classic favorite for learning. Versatile, having the ability to incorporate shapes, numbers, pictures, and spatial reasoning, it’s hard to go wrong with these.

One of X’s favorites right now is her keyboard. We had a keyboard which saw scant use so we gave it to her. It is one of the ¾ full size keyboards with like 100+ instrument sounds. Xavier will pull up her little chair, turn it on, start some of the preprogrammed music, and bang away. Stopping often to giggle and say OHHHHHH! In the spirit of imitation she also really likes her backpack, which, several times a day, she fills with toys, puts over her shoulder says bye-bye, drags to the other room and unloads. Really the key here is just capitalizing on what they are interested in. Learning shouldn’t be forced, but rather incorporated.

[Jean Piaget: Stages of Intellectual Development, American Medical Association,

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