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. Children without special needs often master these skills relatively easily. Children with challenges often don’t, not necessarily because they can’t, but because their biological challenges make the mastery more difficult. By understanding these skills and the factors that influence them and by working direction on them, caregivers, educators, and therapists often can help even those children with what are thought to be chronic disorders master many of them. Appropriate emotional experiences during each of the six developmental phases help develop critical cognitive, social, emotional, language, and motor skills, as well as a sense of self.
In the earliest days of a child’s life, she knows herself primarily through her response to her physical world: gas, bubbles, movements, sights and sounds, textures, and other sensations. Soon she responds particularly to her parents, their voice, smiles, and special smells. Patterns of movement create states of shared joy. By 4 to 8 months she begins to take a rattle and may even give it back, or throw it back in frustration. She smiles and makes sounds, expecting to get a smile, a frown, or a sound in return. For the first time, she knows herself in part as distinct from others, as a person of volition, as someone who can initiate an action and have an impact on the world. As the year progresses, emotional gestures grow in complexity. By 12 or 16 months she doesn’t merely reach when Daddy offers a toy, but she can take Daddy to the shelf to get the toy she really wants. She knows herself as someone who can string together a series of actions to communicate her intentions to another person. Months pass, and her actions grow more complex again. By 18 to 20 months she feeds her dolls instead of merely cuddling them and explains her actions, saying, “Dolly eat.” Now she knows herself in terms of ideas. She can picture herself and others in her mind. She can generate ideas and tell the world about them with her words. More months pass, and she grows more complex again. By 36 months she can tell you, “Let’s ride bikes!” Pausing at the door to see whether it’s cold out, she might then say, “Better put our coats on first.” Now she is a logical, cohesive, thinking person.
Through all these stages the child’s emotional, social, and cognitive skills grow and her sense of self grows increasingly complex. This sense of self will continue to expand as the child grows older and as new experiences stir her interests and capabilities in a new direction. But her functional sense of self, that core emotional sense that forms the foundation for further learning, is in place. It was nurtured through millions of daily interactions, primarily with her parents, as every glance, every smile, every tickle, every question built her sense of who she was. Thanks to these interactions, she can layer on additional cognitive, intellectual, and social skills to serve her throughout her life. She is prepared for the further challenges of her own development, and for the world.
These six basic steps form a developmental ladder; each layers new abilities onto those of prior stages. We call these steps the six milestones because each one marks a major turning point in the life of a child.
Children who receive warm nurturing and do not have developmental challenges often master these milestones automatically by the age of four or five. But children with challenges need help from parents and therapists and often take longer to achieve mastery. Instead of reaching out to be picked up at 8 or 9 months, a child with motor challenges may do so at 14 or 15 months. Instead of imitating his mother’s vocal tone and babbling reciprocally at 10 months, a baby with auditory-processing challenges may do so at 17 or 18 months. Instead of linking abstract ideas at the age of 3, a child with multiple challenges may do so at age 5, 6, or 7. That’s fine. When your child is 45, it may not matter whether he learned to babble reciprocally at 8 or at 17 months or learned to write at age 6 or at age 10. It matters less at what age a particular skill is learned than how well it is learned and whether progress continues. As these basic skills are learned early in life, extra time is usually available to master them. These basic capacities are vital because they are the foundation for all future learning and development in your child’s life. They are like the foundation of an 80-story building: to hold the building up, they must be very solid.
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