Infancy and Toddlerhood
Includes a section on Pregnancy and Baby Care and Development and Behavior for ages 1 to 3. Includes a discussion on health, immunizations, fathering, taming your toddlers temper tantrums, among many other important topics.
How to make home a safe environment.
The pros and cons of breastfeeding. Includes internet resources on breastfeeding and books.
Information on the importance of car seats and how to use them effectively.
Researchers say playing a series of sounds when infants are four months old could speed up the way babies process language and make them linguistic stars when they are older. How babies respond to the sounds can also predict which infants will have trouble with language as well.
Immunization information for parents by the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Discusses building baby's intelligence - why infant stimulation is important during the 1st 3 years of life. Includes resources and articles on: how babies learn to listen, critical windows of opportunity, child's play and brain development, fertile minds, the importance of early brain development and more.
Infant swimming resources.
An organization dedicated to providing education, information, support and encouragement to women who want to breastfeed.
An article in Psyche-an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness. Recent findings are reviewed on the developmental theory of synaesthesia. The theory states that all human neonates have synaesthesia (one sense triggering another) by by about 4 months of age, the senses become modularized and babies loose this ability.
Serve and return interactions shape brain architecture. When an infant or young child babbles, gestures, or cries, and an adult responds appropriately with eye contact, words, or a hug, neural connections are built and strengthened in the child’s brain that support the development of communication and social skills. Much like a lively game of tennis, volleyball, or Ping-Pong, this back-and-forth is both fun and capacity-building.
This site is designed as a support site for victims, parents and others interested in combating shaken baby syndrome--abusive head trauma.
Healthy development in the early years provides the building blocks for educational achievement, economic productivity, responsible citizenship, lifelong health, strong communities, and successful parenting of the next generation.
The authors of this joint study, from Durham and Lancaster universities, claim the facial expressions could be a way of learning how to communicate pain or distress upon birth
Healthy development in the early years (particularly birth to three) provides the building blocks for educational achievement, economic productivity, responsible citizenship, lifelong health, strong communities, and successful parenting of the next generation. What can we do during this incredibly important period to ensure that children have a strong foundation for future development? The Center on the Developing Child created this Guide to Early Childhood Development (ECD) to help parents, caregivers, practitioners, and policymakers understand the importance of early childhood development and learn how to support children and families during this critical stage.
The national organization is dedicated solely to infants, toddlers, and their families. Headed by recognized experts in the field,it provides technical assistance to communities, states and the federal government. The site includes a section for parents and professionals among other resources.
Videos
The basic architecture of the brain is constructed through a process that begins early in life and continues into adulthood. Simpler circuits come first and more complex brain circuits build on them later. Genes provide the basic blueprint, but experiences influence how or whether genes are expressed. Together, they shape the quality of brain architecture and establish either a sturdy or a fragile foundation for all of the learning, health, and behavior that follow. Plasticity, or the ability for the brain to reorganize and adapt, is greatest in the first years of life and decreases with age.
This video is part one of a three-part series titled "Three Core Concepts in Early Development" from the Center and the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child. The series depicts how advances in neuroscience, molecular biology, and genomics now give us a much better understanding of how early experiences are built into our bodies and brains, for better or for worse. Healthy development in the early years provides the building blocks for educational achievement, economic productivity, responsible citizenship, lifelong health, strong communities, and successful parenting of the next generation.
Serve and Return Interaction Shapes Brain Circuitry
One of the most essential experiences in shaping the architecture of the developing brain is “serve and return” interaction between children and significant adults in their lives. Young children naturally reach out for interaction through babbling, facial expressions, and gestures, and adults respond with the same kind of vocalizing and gesturing back at them. This back-and-forth process is fundamental to the wiring of the brain, especially in the earliest years.
Toxic Stress Derails Healthy Development
Learning how to cope with adversity is an important part of healthy development. While moderate, short-lived stress responses in the body can promote growth, toxic stress is the strong, unrelieved activation of the body's stress management system in the absence of protective adult support. Without caring adults to buffer children, the unrelenting stress caused by extreme poverty, neglect, abuse, or severe maternal depression can weaken the architecture of the developing brain, with long-term consequences for learning, behavior, and both physical and mental health.
Patricia Kuhl: The Linguistic Genius of Babies
The Marshmallow Test
Posted recently to YouTube by the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences, the video shows an experiment in which a 15-month-old boy named Adrien must decide whether to play with some noisy beads after witnessing an adult get pretty peeved when someone else makes noise playing with the beads.
"Babies and young children are like the R&D division of the human species," says psychologist Alison Gopnik. Her research explores the sophisticated intelligence-gathering and decision-making that babies are really doing when they play.
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