4.7: Infant and Toddler Development and Its Facilitation

Because everything is new to infants and toddlers, and their brains are developing rapidly, infancy is a unique period of life that calls for unique responses from adults. The ways infants and toddlers think, feel, and function differ somewhat from the ways children in the developmental periods of preschool, middle childhood, and adolescence think, feel, and function.

Four major aspects of infant and toddler development illuminate the kinds of “basic sensory, social, and emotional experiences” that are “essential for optimizing the architecture of low-level circuits” in the brain. The following four aspects of infant and toddler development call for a special approach to planning and supporting their learning:

Infants Follow Their Own Learning Agenda

Infants are driven by an internal learning agenda focused on developing fundamental competencies that typically emerge around similar stages in early development. These include:

• Forming relationships with nurturing and protective adults

• Acquiring language to communicate needs and ideas

• Understanding basic concepts, such as cause and effect, object permanence, and spatial awareness

• Developing motor skills, including both fine (small-muscle) and gross (large-muscle) movements

Adult support is essential. Responsive, caring interactions help infants and toddlers navigate these milestones. By engaging with young children in sensitive and developmentally appropriate ways, adults provide the foundation for meaningful learning.

Infants Learn Holistically

Infants absorb information continuously, naturally, and fluidly. Although they may focus on one thing at a time, their focus shifts rapidly. Through their actions, interactions, and observations, they gather a wide array of information that supports learning across multiple domains at once.

Because of this holistic learning style, infants may not focus on the specific content area that an adult intends to teach. When adults attempt to structure learning to produce outcomes in a particular subject, such as colors or language, they may miss the broader, richer learning taking place from the child’s perspective.

Planning With the Whole Child in Mind

To support holistic learning, adults should design experiences that reflect the child’s openness to all aspects of an activity, not just a narrow learning goal. For example:

An Example:

A teacher might plan a lesson focused on teaching colors. However, an infant or toddler engaging with the activity may be more interested in:

• The texture of the materials

• The movement involved in transferring paint from the brush to the paper

• The tone of voice the adult uses during the interaction

• The social dynamics of the shared activity

In this case, the child’s learning may have little to do with colors and more to do with sensory, emotional, or motor experiences. By observing and responding to the child’s focus and cues, adults can expand the learning possibilities and support development across multiple domains.

Figure 4.12: This child is deeply engaged in spreading the shaving cream on this transparent easel. Notice the bottles of colored liquid waiting to be explored. If the only focus of this activity was color, what experiences might have been missed?[2]

During the first three years of life, much of a child’s life is organized around issues related to security, exploration, and identity.

While children attend to all three issues throughout infancy, each of these issues generally takes center stage at different points in development. As an issue becomes more or less prominent, developmental transitions occur. The child’s behavior starts to change and reflects a new way of organizing experiences.

Figure 4.13[3]

Infants are in the process of developing their first sense of self, and this begins with how others treat them. They receive important information from others.

So, adults must be intentional in how they treat infants and toddlers.

For Example

They may resist eating food they do not like and judge someone who tries to make them eat such food as mean or unfair. Even when infants resist eating certain foods, they do not consciously judge the person trying to feed them. Instead, they take in the ways they are treated as examples of how things are. They come to expect: “This is the way people feed me,”; “This is the way people express emotions”; “These are things that cause people to get yelled at”; “These are the ways to approach people”; and “This is how my curiosity is accepted.” Thus, creating a warm, caring, personal relationship with the infant is more than a nice thing to do; it significantly contributes to a child’s positive sense of self.[4]

The four aspects of infant development call for teaching and care that is individually adapted to who infants and toddlers are and who they are becoming. Because infants move through distinct developmental periods so rapidly, adults need to respect and be responsive to each child’s learning agenda. Because early learning is holistic, plans to facilitate infants’ learning should reflect consideration of all the domains of development that may be influenced by an experience.[5]

Figure 4.14: What domains of development do you see here? While the caregiver might be reading a book, the infants are engaged in physical, cognitive and language, and social and emotional development.[6]