Hello everyone and welcome to the Your Village podcast, Parenting Beyond Discipline, the place to learn about all things parenting and get your questions answered. I'm your host, Erin Royer. Today I'm going to cover a topic that I get asked about frequently. And those are developmental milestones and some ways to support

them. But rather than answering several questions independently, I want to put it all together

so that I can share it more as an unfolding that is the developmental process rather than several

disjointed questions and answers. Now, infancy through age four is a time for

huge changes in development, and this only rivals adolescence and the amount of changes happening

in such a short period of time. These are huge foundational years for development in all areas,

social, emotional, physical, cognitive, and language development.

It's also the years to set up a solid foundation for connection and bonding, which are all interconnected with the development as well.

Bonding is part of social, emotional, and language development.

Bonding and connection also affect a young child's physical and cognitive development.

So when you play and talk to or with your baby or toddler, give your baby or toddler opportunities

to explore and grow with new experiences, you are not only helping their development, you're also building the bond between you.

I'm also going to start with communication and language development.

Now keep in mind that while there are common milestones you want to see by certain ages,

that all babies and children develop different skills at different rates and times.

And so comparing to another baby or child is never a good idea.

What you want to see is progress when it comes to physical development from tummy to lifting up on the arms to up on all fours to

rocking to crawling, etc. Now they may skip some of these steps but you want to see that progress

forward. With language, it's crying, cooing and squealing as an infant to babbling to single words.

Now the words may not even sound like the word they're meant to be. My oldest first word was food, but he said,

oof. It was basically backwards and missing a sound, but I knew what he was saying because he was doing sign language at the same time.

So he would make the sign for food and say oof at the same time. And he did it on several occasions, so I knew he was saying because he was doing sign language at the same time. So he would make the sign for food and say,

...