How to help your child’s development

In order to help your child’s development it is important to:

Show them love, it sound so obvious but some people have trouble doing this. Hug, kiss, smile, encourage, listen to, and play with your child whenever you can, if you have household chores to do, ask them to help, to show your child you enjoy spending time with them.

Care for your child's basic needs, food, comfort and sleep. For your child to be able to devote their energy to learning and growing, they need to be well fed. They also need to be healthy, well rested, and comfortable. Make sure you feed a balanced diet that you try to follow a good sleep pattern, during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep your child's brain cells are making important connections. These synapses, as they're called, are the pathways that enable all learning, movement, and thought. They are the key to your child understanding all that they are seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, and smelling. It’s really important that you change their nappies very regularly, wet or dirty nappies are uncomfortable and distracting.

To keep your child healthy, take them in for regular checkups, keep their injections up to date, if you're worried about your toddler's sleeping or eating patterns, talk to your doctor.

Talk to your child, it is so important, research shows that children whose parents spoke to them extensively as young babies have significantly higher IQs and richer vocabularies than kids who didn't receive much verbal stimulation. If you find it hard to come up with things to say just describe what you are doing but try to avoid baby talk. Remember babies learn by listening so be careful how you say things as they can pick up on your mood from a very early age.

Try to build your toddlers self esteem, toddlers are still just realising they're separate people, and are slowly build up a sense of self. Gradually, they learn what they look like and work out the things they can do. Some of the more difficult types of behaviour your toddler might display, which you may find hard to cope with, happen as a result of them beginning to realise they are a separate person with a mind of their own. They quickly learn that they don't actually have to stay where you've put them or do exactly as you have told them. It is important that you reassure your child that you love them and you are proud of them give praise as much as possible. If more likely when you have to challenge their behaviour explain why so they can understand and learn from their mistake. Try to set boundaries a soon as you feel they need them and be consistent and follow through on warnings, toddlers are very quick to learn if they are being given hollow threats. Remember to praise good behaviour or if they do something for themselves, positive attention works really well.