The signs to look out for in children’s development

As children grow from infants to toddlers, they undertake various milestones in their development, where they learn different skills along the line. A child’s growth is accompanied by three main development stages: Gross motor development, fine motor development, as well as language development stage.
Shamyn Louw, the counselling centre coordinator for LifeLine/ChildLine Namibia, indicated that during the early stages of development, children rely more on caring adults to meet their needs. They need parents to nurture, protect and guide them towards independence.
“You learn more about your child’s development, positive parenting, safety, and health at each stage of your child’s life,” she said.
She added that delayed development can have a major impact on the well-being of both the mother and the child. They may experience poorer psychological well-being due to feeling helpless, stressed, having concerns, and so forth. The child may also experience low self-esteem and seem confused about what is happening to them.
“Parents are advised to be more loving and caring with the child and spend a lot of time with the child to make the child feel loved and cared for,” she prompted.
Sharnay Botha, a kinderkineticist from Stellenbosch University, said children are expected to be able to do certain tasks at certain stages of development and there is a leeway in which a child is expected to be able to do certain tasks; failure to do so is considered a developmental delay, where intervening is essential.
Intervening is rectified according to the type of delay and includes an occupational therapist, speech therapist, as well as a kinderkineticist, she said.
Kinderkineticists mainly focus on children delayed in gross motor skills. “We help babies who have trouble crawling, walking or have balancing issues. We diagnose them first and conduct certain activities with them that rectify the issue,” she said. She added that the child needs to achieve all the necessary milestones required in development to build the foundation for the following milestones.
There are two kinds of motor skills that children undertake during development. The skills include fine motor skills, where the child learns to do light tasks like eye control and the grasp of objects. This mostly happens within the first fourth months after birth. She added that another motor skill is gross motor skill where children do bigger movements like rolling over, head control, as well as sitting without support. Language development also happens around the first month of birth, and here, the child starts to babble.
Botha indicated that in later milestones of fine motor skills, children learn to write, by first starting with scribbles. They learn to use scissors, but it is advised that they must not be left to scissors (or any sharp object) on their own and should always be supervised need adult supervision, as they could harm themselves with sharp objects. It is also here that kids learn to colour.
She said the later milestones of the gross development stage are an improvement from the earlier as here children do bigger tasks like crawling.
Botha said during language learning, children start with babbling words and smiling spontaneously. These skills are important as they fortify the muscles in the lips and eventually enable them to mumble until completing single words like mom, or dad, and skills such as learning to ask for something, i.e., their bottle.
“The completion of a two-sentence phrase comes sometime after 24 months,” she said.