Understanding the key areas of your child's growth and development.
If you’re a new parent in Singapore, it will be important to know the different key areas of your child’s growth and development. Understanding these major developmental areas will give you a baseline for knowing how well your child is maturing compared to their peers, thus allowing you to be more proactive in your parental responsibilities.
While there are competing models of child development, in most models, it is divided into multiple phases, spanning infancy through adolescence. At every stage, children will undergo different changes and parents will need to understand these to effectively guide their child’s growth. The stages will include the physical, social, emotional, mental, and other aspects of child development.
Of all the stages, infancy and toddlerhood may be the most critical, as it is the time when a child’s brain development is at its peak. How well they do at this point can greatly influence how well they’ll perform in school and, consequently, how well they’ll function as part of a greater Singapore community. This is why in addition to holistic parenting, it’s also important to send your child to a caregiving facility with a program for infant care Singapore parents can truly rely on. Such a facility will be able to give your child the responsive and nurturing setting that will help tremendously in their development.
Below are these four of the areas of growth and development that parents need to nurture to ensure that their child develops at par or better than their peers.
Physical Development
Physical development refers to all the observable physical changes in a child. It is not limited to just the child’s size, height, weight, and shape but also the maturity of their body’s various components, including their musculoskeletal and nervous system. Thus, when discussing a child’s physical development, motor skills are often included in this category.
Human children tend to follow a predictable pattern in their physical development. Parents should aim to provide age-appropriate and nutritionally substantive meals so that their children can safely develop their bodies to their full potential.
Additionally, safe opportunities for active play should be offered so that the child’s gross and fine motor skills develop properly, laying the groundwork for them to draw, write, and use more complex tools. Also, activities that engage the senses can help growing children understand cause and effect, which is critical for higher functioning.
Language and Cognition
Cognition is an individual’s capacity to think, learn, and recall information. Children’s brains develop at an immensely rapid pace, particularly during infancy and toddlerhood, so it’s important to provide them with enough mental stimulation to take full advantage of this early developmental advantage.
Children’s ability to absorb and recall information is, perhaps, best demonstrated by their rapid ability to learn new languages, something that is far more difficult for adult learners. Infants and toddlers, however, are still in the process of acquiring at least one language.
To ensure that they develop language mastery at the level of their peers, it’s important to expose them to the distinct sounds of different languages, particularly the ones you want them to learn. This may be reinforced through playing and teaching music with lyrics in the languages that the child is frequently exposed to.
Creativity
While related to cognition, creativity is sometimes considered a separate area of development. Creativity involves original thinking, independence, as well as problem-solving skills. Activities involving play tools and art supplies can be critical in helping a child develop a sense of self as well as executive functioning, as they will have to actively make decisions that will enable them to create something.
Offering children art materials and other avenues for them to create can help their observational skills as well as their ability to make independent decisions. It may also help their fine motor functions as well as give them a healthy outlet for expressing their emotions. Thus, helping your child pursue their creative development also has implications in other developmental areas.
Emotional and Social Development
According to the U.S. Department of Education's National Center on Safe and Supportive Learning Environments, proper emotional development allows children to develop five critical skills: self-awareness, social awareness, emotional regulation, relationship-building, and responsible decision-making. Having these skills can determine the level of success a child has at school and in other areas of their life.
These skills are not completely innate and have to be learned. Children need to be guided by their parents and other authority figures to ensure that they do not struggle academically, behaviourally, or emotionally. Without sufficient guidance, a child may develop lifelong mental health conditions or personality disorders that may be difficult to correct in adulthood.
Because emotional and social development has implications for all other development areas, parents should make every effort to cultivate emotional and social skills from the very beginning. This is especially important during a child’s early years as their brains are still developing very rapidly at this time.
Parents should also be aware that their mental health can negatively impact their child’s emotional development. Thus, parents should strongly consider seeing a therapist or other qualified mental health expert if they know or suspect they have a mental health issue. This may help mitigate the potentially harmful effects of a parent’s behaviour on their child.
Children develop extremely rapidly during early childhood. They can develop so fast that parents can sometimes miss important opportunities and risks in their development.
By understanding the key areas of infant or toddler development, parents can be more proactive in raising their children. When the potential of a child is maximised, so too are the chances that they will become responsible and productive members of their community.
