Your One Year Old
Just like the flowers and the grasses that are beginning to stir under the cold, hard ground at this time of year, new ideas and new thinking skills are starling to bud in your 1-year-old's head.
In this year alone, your child will learn hundreds of new words and be exposed to thousands of new ideas. But cognitive growth in a 1-year-old doesn't mean just knowing more things - it also means experiencing some completely new ways of thinking. Understanding how your youngster is now seeing and interpreting the world will help you make better sense of his behavior and structure his environment in ways that enable him to get the most out of every fresh and exciting new experience.
The 1-year-old is unquenchably curious and well equipped to satisfy that curiosity. There is a veritable explosion of new skills and behaviors at this time, most of them designed to help your child test the world around her. Just for starters, a 1-year-old child is fascinated with weights, textures, tastes, and smells, and even with the new sounds objects make when they strike other objects.
And every one of those items will most certainly be put through its paces: Every block and toy car, saucepan and bar of soap is felt,hefted, smelled, mouthed, banged on the floor, and thrown. Of course, the young scientist may be less than discriminating in her choices - your bottle of expensive perfume, the cat, and the crystal vase will be subjected to the same tests and procedures if your baby finds them within reach.
You can take advantage of your 1-year-old's fascination with physics when selecting playthings. Beautiful toys hold little attraction when other objects are available to be manipulated by the child himself. Boxes with lids and sturdy objects to put in and take out of them delight children at this age, as do toys that enable them to hammer a peg through a hole or roll a ball down a chute. Or offer an unbreakable wide-mouth bottle and a few blocks or balls that fit easily inside. Toys that can be taken apart - stacking toys, for instance, or puzzles with oversize pieces - are also appropriate, though your child probably won't be able to put them back together yet!
It is of no concern to your 1-year-old whether the toys you give him are fancy imported ones or empty oatmeal boxes and paper cups. Consider giving up a low shelf in the kitchen (or buy a small laundry basket), and keep it filled with a changing assortment of unbreakable plastic cups and spoons, well-cleaned plastic food containers (like some margarine tubs), plastic ice cube trays, and other containers. These should be his materials to use as he pleases. Vary the supply by adding new objects occasionally and removing the things your child seems to be bored with.
One-year-olds also love to explore processes and the relationships among things and events. That's why repeatedly opening and closing doors and boxes holds such appeal. (Drawers, while also fascinating, pose a greater safety risk and should be avoided.) Be sure that the doors your child plays with have special safety catches to prevent them from closing on tiny fingers; these are inexpensive and easily found at hardware stores. And remember the drawers and cabinets that should never be accessible to children: those containing sharp implements, household cleaners, or other dangerous items. These should be securely fastened with childproof safety latches.
Books will also fascinate your little one - largely because they too can be opened and shut. Sturdy cardboard board books or spiral-bound baby books are ideal for this use. To help her manipulate the heavy pages, punch a hole in the corner of every other page and tie a piece of yarn through each hole. This will separate the pages a little bit and make it easier for your baby to grip them.
Other processes, too - turning a light switch off and on, filling and emptying cups and bottles in the bathtub, or any exploration of cause-and-effect relationships- will delight your young experimenter. Pop-up toys such as jack-in-the-boxes may startle your child the first few times the character leaps up, but she'll soon be thrilled with the discovery that she made it happen-and that she can do it over and over again.
Obviously there are times when it will be inconvenient to have a young Einstein underfoot in the kitchen or a miniature Madame Curie conducting an experiment on how loudly - and how often-she can bang a frying pan against the floor. Within reason, give her free rein - virtually every experience has the potential to teach your youngster something. Setting behavior limits is essential, however, and anything detrimenuntal to her safety, to family property, or to your peace of mind should be beyond those limits.
For example, when you point to a Great Dane at the park and say, "See the big dog?" your baby may be baffled. To him, dog means the one at home, and only that one. He hasn't yet learned that the word actually stands for an entire class of animals. Before long, however, he will come to understand that any one of a group of furry, barking creatures that come in a variety of sizes, shapes, and colors is a dog.
As they begin to understand these classes of objects, children will often overgeneralize. Not only will they recognize that German shepherds, poodles, and terriers are all dogs, but they may call horses, cows, cats, and just about any other four-legged animal a dog as well. By all means correct your child, but do it gently ("That animal is a horse, honey") so you impart the information without admonishing him.
This phenomenon is also at work when your child greets an unfamiliar (and startled) man in the grocery store with a hearty "Daddy!" She doesn't yet understand that, unlike dog, the word Daddy represents only one individual. It will be many months before she fully grasps more abstract concepts like heavy or beautiful.
Your 1-year-old's newly developed ways of thinking and understanding apply to you, too. She may, for instance, become upset if you violate her expectations. If you put on glasses you don't normally wear, or a hat, or have your hair cut in a new style, your baby literally may not recognize you. If your husband shaves off his beard, your little one may be genuinely frightened by the stranger who sits down to breakfast and tries to kiss her good morning. Over the coming year, she'll begin to learn that who you are doesn't change with variations in your appearance, but for now this is a difficult concept to grasp.
Your child's growing understanding that you exist even when out of her sight means that she can seek you out when you're apart. As a result, she's also more aware of people outside her immediate family than she has been before. The stranger anxiety that begins in the latter part of infancy may persist well into the second year. Unfortunately for you, some of those "strangers" may include close friends or relatives. Your baby may even be frightened or shy with her own grandparents if she seldom gets a chance to see them. Given a few minutes, however, most children will follow parental cues and warm up to anyone who appears to have your approval. Your child can then fit this new person into her growing world.
As he approaches his second birthday, your child will also begin to pretend. Imagination and pretend play depend on his growing ability to use one object to represent another. Thus, a doll becomes a real baby, the water in a toy cup represents the coffee he will serve you, boots on his tiny feet magically turn him into a cowpoke. Everything your youngster is learning today will form the basis for these developments, and those in turn will stimulate others.
What can you do to encourage learning? Relax! Learning can hardly be prevented under any but the most direct circumstances. You don't have to turn your house into a classroom stocked with "educational" toys or sign your child up for brainy baby or infant enrichment programs in order for him to learn. Your role as a parent is paramount, though. You are like a lens, filtering and mirroring your child's experiences for her. If you value her attempts at learning, then she will, too, and her eagerness will in-crease. You can help by supplying the raw materials she needs for learning: a safe environment, toys, and household objects she can use in her many day-to-day experiments. And you can provide warm and loving encouragement for her explorations - your excitement will work to enhance her enthusiasm even more. The most important thing your child needs to do at this young age is to learn how to learn. Structure her world to make it a safe, nurturing, and predictable place for exploration. Be patient with her continued demands and experimentation - after all, you are the expert to whom she most often turns for help and information. Most of all, share her delight at her discoveries. Thanks to your 1-year-old scientist, you will see that learning really is child's play!
WHY BABIES LOVE TO EXPERIMENT
The 1-year-old has a truly scientific mind, which she uses ceaselessly to experiment with the characteristics and limits of the people and objects in her world. The simple highchair becomes her laboratory as she drops cereal bits, one by one, squealing with glee as they hit the floor. And she is no less excited than Sir Isaac Newton was when he discovered gravity because, at her level of thinking, that's exactly what she is doing.
HOW I-YEAR-OLDS SORT THINGS OUT
How does your child make sense of all this new information? It's easy to assume that children think about things in the same ways that adults do. But research on early thinking capacity tells us that very young children go through a complicated process of sorting and categorizing each new fact, word, and experience they encounter.
HELPING YOUR CHILD LEARN
In many ways, this year represents the most important period of learning your child will ever go through. Each month will bring dramatic and exciting changes in the quality of your 1-year-old's understanding of his world. His growing ability to hold images of you and other important people in his mind will enable him to plan and carry out simple activities. He will also begin to develop a sense of the future and of the past. Your little one will formulate a sense of who he is and how he feels about the self he has discovered.