Your patient should reach milestones in how they play, learn, speak, act, and move as they grow. This timeline illustrates when and what kind of behaviors children should demonstrate from 2 months to 5 years old. Use this tool to anticipate your patient’s development and learn how to act early if you are concerned.
The relationship between infants and their parents lays the foundation for health, learning, and social wellbeing.
What makes your baby smile?
Playing, talking, or simply cuddling your baby is a great way to connect but it also supports their learning and development.
Attachment is the first way that babies learn to organize their feelings and their actions, by looking to the person who provides them with care and comfort. Attachment is essential to long-term emotional health. Healthy attachment is how children learn to trust and develop healthy relationships later in life.
How does your baby communicate with you? How do they tell you when they are tired or just want to be held?
Your relationship with your baby is the foundation of how they will explore the world and know you are always a safe place to return to.
Young children interact through babbling, facial expressions, and gestures. Adults respond with the same kind of vocalizing and gesturing. This back-and-forth is called serve and return and is fundamental to building the brain
How do you talk to your baby?
Play is how babies learn. While your baby is young, you can still play in everyday moments. Talk to your baby while changing their diaper, sing a song while feeding them, or simply make silly faces.
Routines support relational health by building self-confidence and trust, self-regulation, communication, and patterns for social skills. As children learn what each routine entails, they slowly become more independent. If routines are predictable, have appropriate transition cues, and have room for flexibility, routines will also help reduce challenging behaviors.
Can you share some routines you build for your baby?
Building consistent routines provide comfort and a sense of safety to your baby. They understand when it is time to play, eat, sleep and expect a loved one to return. You can help your baby build this sense of trust and safety with everyday things such as bedtime routines, mealtimes, how you like to get dressed in the morning, and offering regular times for play.
Plays games with parent, like pat-a-cake.
Research demonstrates that developmentally appropriate play with parents and peers is a singular opportunity to promote the social-emotional, cognitive, language, and self-regulation skills that build executive function and a prosocial brain. Furthermore, play supports the formation of safe, stable and nurturing relationships with all caregivers that children need to thrive.
How do you play with your child?
Playing together is an important way to support your child's growth and learning. Play allows them to explore their environment, feelings, and experiences. They are also learning that they are loved and important and that you enjoy being around them.
Reading regularly with young children stimulates optimal patterns of
brain development and strengthens parent-child relationships at a critical
time in child development, which, in turn, builds language, literacy, and
social-emotional skills that last a lifetime.
How often do you read with your child?
Reading together is a great way to spend time with your child and encourage them to learn. It is never too early to start reading to your child. Try to point out colors, shapes, or characters to engage your child in the story, even if you make up a new one.
Research shows internal motivation (aka curiosity) not external strategies, is what motivates young children to seek out new experiences and leads to greater success in school over the long term. Young children are born with innate curiosity. Healthy relationships early in life support a young child's curiosity by building safe environments for them to explore and learn.
Children use all of their senses to take in all this new information and use their developing skills to make sense of what they are seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, and touching. Secure relationships build the trust that children need to exercise their curiosity.
What interests your child? What do they like to explore?
How do you encourage curiosity with your child?
Your child is learning so much very quickly. You can nurture their curiosity by exploring their interests together. Talk about what you are doing, answers their questions as honestly as possible, and ask them open-ended questions to understand how they see the world.
Each approach to nurturing and encouraging curiosity varies. You can nurture their natural interests and emotions by asking open-ended questions and wondering out loud. The most important takeaway is that children’s interests should be acknowledged and encouraged to support healthy social emotional development and future learning.