By Monkey Business Day Homes

Child Development at Home

Feb 4, 2020 | 2:43 PM

When looking at a child’s development in the Early Childhood Education field, professionals often break down a child’s development into what we refer to as developmental domains. There are between 5-7 domains, depending on how they may be grouped together. As a parent, you may be interested in how you can stimulate growth in these developmental domains at home. Remember that child development can begin even before your child is born, it is never too early to begin interacting with your child.

Social Development: Social development refers to the way your child builds and maintains relationships with those around them. Learning to take turns, resolve conflicts independently, engage in play with others, compromise and cooperate are all skills that fall under this domain. A child’s level of social development will directly affect their overall health and well being throughout their lives.

Activities you can do at home:

-Mimic your baby. When your baby smiles at you, smile back. When they start cooing, copy their sounds back at them. These interactions are the foundation of both social competencies as well as language development.

-Bed time check in. Simply talking to your child about their day can help support their social development. Did any difficult situations come up? Opening these lines of communication with your child may encourage them to talk about struggles they may be having. If so, this is a great time to brainstorm with your child about what they could try saying or doing to change the outcome of the situation.

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Physical Development: Physical development can be further broken down into two sub domains – gross motor and fine motor.

Gross motor development talks about the way that your child uses their large muscle groups to do things such as crawling, standing, walking and running. Another part of gross motor development is proprioception, which refers to a child’s innate ability to know where and how their body is oriented within their surroundings.

Fine motor development refers to the way an individual uses the small muscle groups in their wrists, hands and fingers as well as in their feet and toes. This domain can affect actions like colouring, ability to pick up small objects, stacking blocks, etc.

Activities you can do at home:

-Obstacle courses. Set up obstacle courses for your child. These could include climbing over pillows and going through tunnels for younger children to things like monkey bars for older children. Older children in particular like to be timed while completing these courses.

-Water painting. Water painting is great because it allows children to have the benefits of painting but you don’t have to worry about the mess! Give your child a bucket of water and different painting tools and let them make a masterpiece on the sidewalk. Have your camera ready to take photos of their creations before they dry!

Emotional Development: Your child’s emotional development centres around the ability to identify and manage their emotions. When a child is learning to manage their sadness, frustration or disappointment, this is emotional development but it is also when they begin to understand that they are happy, excited, or overwhelmed. It can be difficult to plan specific, truly meaningful activities for emotional development as it is most effectively addressed in the moments that these emotions are happening; when you comfort your crying child, when your surprise them with a special outing, when you are explaining why they cant have that orange cup, etc. Giving words to the emotions that your child may be feeling or strategies to appropriately express feelings are the main ways of supporting emotional development.

Activities you can do at home:

-Faces game. You can point out pictures of faces expressing different emotions and ask your child “What do you think they are feeling?” You can also ask your child this question as you read them stories or even watch their favorite TV show! These questions can expand to include “Why do you think they are feeling that way?” and “What do you think could be done to make them feel better?”.

-Sing! ‘If You’re Happy and You Know It’ is a great way to help children begin to understand emotions. As your child develops, let them name the feelings and actions that go along with them!

Intellectual/Cognitive Development: Often, these two areas are separated but they are very closely related. Intellectual development refers more to concrete concepts, like letters, numbers, shapes and colours while cognitive development focuses more on a child’s grasp fluid concepts like problem solving and critical thinking skills. When a toddler drops their spoon on the floor repeatedly and you pick it back up, they are learning about cause and effect and gravity all at the same time, this is cognitive development! As a child begins to recognize the letters of the alphabet, they are developing intellectually!

Activities you can do at home:

-Sensory play. There are all kinds of different sensory materials, the most common being sand and water. Let your child explore the sensation of pouring sand and watching it flow through the water wheel. They will likely do this several times as they process what impact their actions are having.

-Baking. Following recipes, measuring ingredients, mixing, recognizing changes of state, early math skills. All of these are skills and topics that a child is learning about when you bake or cook with them. They may also be learning to take turns, wait patiently and how to use different kitchen tools appropriately!

Even though we look at development in individual domains, it is important to recognize your child as a whole. Each one comes with different natural talents and traits that may contribute to their proficiency or perhaps delay in any given domain. Furthermore, all domains are interrelated; what happens in one domain directly impacts the other domains. If you believe that your child may have a developmental delay in any domain, speak to your doctor or child care professional.