How to Encourage Child Development

Regardless of your child's age, all parents want to help their children reach developmental milestones. Whether it be fine or gross motor skills or speech and language development, there are several activities and ways a parent can encourage their child's development.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Encourage Motor Skill Development

1. Lay your infant on their belly for tummy time. Giving your child just a few minutes of tummy time a day will help development strong neck and back muscles. It will also help them to eventually scoot and crawl across the floor.

2. Stand your infant in a bouncy swing or jumper. This will further help develop their back muscles to teach your child to stand properly. This can be done once your infant has good neck control and can hold their head straight up for several seconds at a time.

3. Hand your child rattles to play with. This will encourage their fine motor skills as a new baby as they learn to grasp different size toys. They will learn that they can shake or move an object and that it will roll or make a noisy sound.

4. Give your child lots of tactile and block sorter toys. Tactile toys have several different shapes or animals but are made out of different types of fabrics: soft, fuzzy, bumpy, hard or slippery are different examples that help teach your child how things feel different. Block sorters encourage hand-eye coordination by placing shapes in their matching holes.

5. Play Patty-cake. Help your child learn how to clap their hands by holding them and playing patty-cake. This can also be a building block to teaching infant sign language and other activities that require hand-eye coordination.

6. Dance to music. Once your child can stand or walk independently, playing music encourages their gross development by bouncing up and down, balance and rhythm. You can also incorporate jumping and skipping to music as they get older.

Encourage Language Development

7. Read to your baby daily. In the early months, babies don't care whether you're reading them the newspaper, magazine articles or baby books; they just love to hear the sound of your voice. As they grow older, board books with rhyming words and simple pictures will help increase their vocabulary.

8. Talk to your child constantly. Babies learn from conversational tones so whether you're giving them a bath, changing their diaper or driving to the store, talk to your baby about what you're doing, what you see and where you are going.

9. Build on what words your baby says. As a child begins to learn words like "ma-ma" expand on what they're saying like: "Mama loves her baby." "Mama likes to play with baby."

10. Ask questions. Once your child, around the age of 2, has a more expanded vocabulary, begin to ask them questions that allows them time to think of answers and allows them choices. "Where do lions live?" or "Do you want milk or water?"

11. Slow your speech down so your child can easily understand you. Speaking clearly and properly will help give your child a better foundation for learning how to talk.