Infant and Toddlerhood:

Within the first two years of life children begin to develop many skills. An infant will

begin to develop a motor system. When motor skills work as a system, separate abilities blend
together, each cooperating with others to produce more effective ways of exploring and
controlling the environment. Some of the motor skills that an infant develops are: rolling from
side to back at two months, sitting alone and crawling at seven months, pulling to stand up at
eight months, and walking at eleven months. The motor skills that a toddler develops are:
scribbles at about 14 months, walks up stairs with help at 16 months, jumps in place and walks
on tiptoes at 25 months. Infants will also begin to gain some perceptual development such as:
touch, taste and smell, and hearing. These perceptual developments include responding to touch
and pain at birth, frequently engaging in exploratory mouthing objects between one to six
months, distinguishes between tastes and smells at birth, readily changes taste preferences
through experience at one to six months, distinguishes some sound patterns at birth, turns eyes
and head in the general direction of sound at birth, prefers listen to human speech over
structurally similar non speech sounds at one to six months, and screens out sounds that are not
used in their native language at about seven to twelve months. (book) The perceptual
development is the same for toddlers. At 30-36 weeks a toddler can identify a special blanket just
by touching it, adjust the way they are walking just by the way the surface that they are walking
on is, and sway back and forth to the beat of a song while standing up. (cde.gov Foundation:
Perceptual Development California Infant/Toddler Learning & Development Foundations).

The language that is developed within infancy is cooing and babbling, and interaction
with others. At about the age of two months old an infant may begin to make vowel-like sounds,
which is called cooing. Then some consonants are added at about six months which is called
babbling. When an infant is babbling they will repeat consonant-vowel combinations, often in
long strings such as babababababa and nananananana. For babies to continue babbling
further they need to hear human speech. Even an infant who is deaf will babble at about six
months of age. Babies will initially produce a limited amount of sounds and then expand to a
much broader range. Infants also communicate through interactions with others. An infant will
initiate interaction through eye contact and then terminate that eye contact when looking away.
Babies also interact through pointing, touching or holding an object while looking at someone to
see if they will notice. They also get another person to do something for them by reaching,
pointing, or making sounds.
Toddlers language begins to develop phonologically and semantically. At about the age of
two toddlers will begin to try and pronounce each individual sound within a word. As a result
they can be heard experimenting with phoneme patterns. Toddlers also begin to gain
comprehension through semantic development. A toddler can typically follow simple directions
through memory-recognition and recall. The speed and accuracy of a toddler begins to rapidly
grow over the second year of toddlerhood (Berk, Laura E. 2014 Child development 9th edition).
Piaget believed that children moved through four stages of cognitive development- the
sensorimotor stage, the proportional stage, the concrete operational stage, and the formal
operational stage. Through the sensorimotor stage there are six substages: reflexive schemesbirth to one month, primary circular reactions-one month to four months. secondary circular

reactions-four months to eight months, coordination of secondary circular reactions-eight to

twelve months, tertiary circular reactions-twelve to eighteen months, and mental representationeighteen months to two years. In the reflexive schemes substage is when infants suck, root, blink
their eyes, and have swimming reflexes, etc.This is when infants begin to sit up and become
skilled at reaching for and manipulating objects. During the primary circular reactions substage
is when an infant stumbles onto a new experience caused from their own motor activity. As the
infant tries to repeat the newly learned strategy again and again it is strengthening their scheme.
The secondary circular reactions is when infants begin to imitate familiar behaviors effectively.
Coordination of secondary circular reactions is when an infant from eight to twelve months old
has intentional, goal-directed behavior. Infants also have the ability to find hidden objects in the
first location in which it is hidden. This is called object permanence. The last two substages of
the sensorimotor stage focus on the toddlers development. Within the tertiary circular substage is
when their is exploration of the properties of objects by acting on them, and the ability to search
for several locations of an object accurately. Lastly, during the mental representation substage
18-two year olds will begin to use make believe play, develop internal depictions of objects and
events, and use sudden solutions to problems (Berk, Laura E. 2014 Child development 9th
edition).
Infants within their first year of life begin to build an implicit appreciation of people as
animate beings whose behavior is governed by intentions, desires, and feelings. This sets the
stage for the verbalized mental understandings that blossom early childhood (Berk, Laura E.
2014 Child development 9th edition). A three month old will socially begin to smile more at
people rather than objects. They will become upset when an adult poses a still face and fails to

communicate with them. By the end of the first year infants view view people as intentional
beings that share and influence one anothers mental states. This opens the door for
communication, joint attention, social referencing, preverbal gestures, and language. By the end
of the second year toddlers are able to empathize, and begin to realize that people differ from one
another and from themselves with their dislikes, likes, wishes, wants and needs (Berk, Laura E.
2014 Child development 9th edition).
Infants and toddlers primarily learn how to behave morally through modeling of others
around them. They will observe and imitate those behaviors of the adults around them. Pre-social
acts such as sharing, helping, and empathy occur because of these moral skills that are taught to
infants and toddlers. By having helpful and generous models it increases a young childs social
responses. Models are most influential in early years. Toddlers eager, willing imitation of their
mothers behavior can predict moral conduct and guilt. (Berk, Laura E. 2014 Child development
9th edition). Many relationships influence an infants and toddlers moral reasoning within their
surrounding environment. They are biologically influenced by environmental focuses that mold
development. Brenfenbrenner believed that a childs environment is a series of nested structures
that form a complex functioning system. These structures include and extend upon school, home,
and neighborhood settings (Berk, Laura E. 2014 Child development 9th edition). `
Infants and toddlers learn how to self-regulate through the interventions of their
caregivers. Infants have limited self-regulation skills and may become overwhelmed when their
feelings become too intense. Infants need to be talked to softly, gently stroked, help up on a
caregivers shoulder, and rocked. Infants that are able to turn away from things that put them in
distress or engage in self soothing activities are less likely to experience distress. By the age of

four to six months and infant should be able to shift their attention away from distress and be
able to self sooth themselves which helps them to be able to control their emotions. Toddlers are
able to learn more self-regulation skills because they are developing language skills to help them
to be able to do so. Parental guidance and sensitive parents can help their toddlers describe their
internal feelings of their feelings of being happy, surprised, scared, loved, sad, mad, etc.
(Berk, Laura E. 2014 Child development 9th edition).
One type of atypical development is when infants have a vision impairment. Infants that
have a vision impairment will develop many months after the regular milestones of a normal
infant. Vision impairments can attain fine motor and gross motor skills. A blind infant will not
reach for objects until about the age of 12 months, crawl until 13 months, and walk at about 19
months. This is because infants with visual impairments have to rely on sound to be able to
identify the whereabouts of objects. Since infants with vision impairments do not engage with
their caregivers, the adults may not provide them with rich early exposure to sounding objects.
Infants with vision impairments are not motivated to move independently because of their own
uncertainty and are tentative to their movements. These babies build an understanding of the
location and arrangement of objects in space only after they begin crawling which causes a delay
in their cognitive development (Berk, Laura E. 2014 Child development 9th edition).
Another type of atypical development is an infant who is born deaf. two to three children
out of every 1,000 American children are born deaf. Many of the parents that these children are
born to do not know how to communicate through sign language. This can affect are delayed in
language skills and socio-dramatic play. Children with less sensitive parental communication do
not have the same control over their behavior as their playmates do. Hearing parents tend to be

less positive, less responsive to their childs efforts to communicate, less effective at achieving
joint attention and turn-taking, and less involved in their childs play. These parents just lack
visual communication, which enables the parents of the deaf child to be able to respond properly
to their childs needs (Berk, Laura E. 2014 Child development 9th edition).
There are many social factors that can influence the development of an infant and toddler.
These factors can be environmental risk factors such as living in an unsafe community; lack of
resources available in the community; family issues such as depression; substance abuse; mental
illness within the family; poverty; and family violence. This can infants and toddlers to become
fussy, have developmental delays, and health issues (http://www.ecmhc.org).
In a study that focused on similarities and differences within three different ethnic
groups. Within this study it showed that African American and Hispanic families owned no
books compared to European American families. Of these three ethnic groups the poverty status
had an effect on who owned books and who did not. Within these groups the non poor population
was more likely to have three or more books within their home for their infants. 64% of the
European mothers were reported to read to their infant three or more times a week, 38% of
African American mothers did the same, and only 34% of Latino mothers read to their infants
three to four days a week. This is the statistics of the non poor families, and they are even lower
for the poor families within each ethnic group (Maschinot, Beth 2008 Zero to three http://
main.zerotothree.org).
Parents can help their infant learn to talk by speaking parentese to them. Parentese is
when parents talk in a high pitched tone stretching out the vowels. The elongated vowels, high
pitch, exaggerated facial expressions, and short simple sentences help infants learn language. An

infants brain is mapping the sounds of parentese as they hear them. Parents can speak parents by
pulling out the vowel sounds and elongating the consonant sounds. An example would be sweet
baby would now sound like sweeeeet baybee. Parentese is like a soothing lullaby to babies
and research shows infants actually prefer parentese to adult conversations (www.pbs.org child
development). Parents can also help their toddler to reach their developmental milestones by
reading to their toddler, asking them to name body parts and objects, encouraging them to
explore and try new things, encourage a toddlers curiosity, and respond to wanted behavior rather
than discipline for unwanted behavior (CDC Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Toddlers 1-2 years of age www.cdc.org).

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