Baby and Toddler - Develop Skills in Your Toddler

Understanding who your child is, is essential for promoting healthy development. If you know what their strengths are and know where they need support, then you are on the right track for your 2-3 year olds' development.

When children are two years old they can usually speak between 200-250 words. When they are three, they can put two sentences together containing three or four words. Even with all of this vocabulary, toddlers still have a hard time expressing their emotions. This can leave them very frustrated and powerless. There are a couple things you can do to help. Having conversations with your child will help boost their language skills and makes them feel important. Try to find out what your child likes to talk about and engage them in a conversation. Also read to them as much as possible. By letting your two year old know that you understand the frustration they are experiencing will help calm them down and will make it much easier for them to tackle the challenge. Figure out how your child handles their difficult feelings and situations. This will help you to calm them down and show them the right way to handle their emotions.

Playtime is very important for your two year old child. It will build in all areas of their development. When they play, they interact more with friends, they use pretend play to help understand things in a more complex way and they learn important concepts like big and small and up and down. Try to get more involved in their pretend play. Note what they like to pretend to do and join the fun. When you do this it will help build a strong connection between the two of you and it can help encourage creativity.
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Making plans for your child to spend time with other children will give them the pleasure in making new friends. The more time they get spending with other children the more they learn to get along with each other. It is a good social skill to build on. As many of you know, two year olds are very active, with their constant running, jumping and climbing. These motor skills allow them the freedom to explore in new ways. Try to spend as much time outside as you can. There will be plenty of room to run and jump safely. Taking them to a park to play with other children is great. Get your child involved in family sports like swimming and soccer on the lawn. They will benefit a lot from it and let's not forget the benefits of nap time!! Go on walks with them and take time to discuss what they see. Compare things like houses and cars, it will help teach concepts of big and small. They will get a chance to explore other things that they see. If you can't go outside due to weather then create a safe place in your home that they can prowl around and explore different stations you create.
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These few steps will help your two year old develop the skills for a bright imagination and prepare them socially. They will also learn to express themselves better and reduce the frustrations for both of you.

Michael Russell

Your Independent Baby and Toddler guide.

Do You Know When Your Child Becomes A Toddler?

Most experts define a toddler as a child from 13 months old to the age of 24 months. This seems to be a generally accepted rule of thumb, since, according to babycenter.com, three-fourths of toddlers are walking on their own by then. For simplicity, we say children are toddlers at 13 months, even if they are not walking. If your child still hasn't stopped crawling, it just means walking on his/her own is going to take a little longer.

While my son, Carlos, was walking by 13 months, my daughter, Angelina, did not start walking until she was 18 months old. Since she was not learning to walk, Angelina was learning other things like finger dexterity and good hand/eye coordination. When I compared her to other children her age who were walking, I thought she seemed to have better hand-eye coordination and greater finger dexterity. For example, she could pick up Cheerios with two fingers while the other child could not.
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We did not realize how different our daughter and our son would be. My daughter liked to sit still and play with all the toys within her reach. While she crawled around a lot, she could be content in a single spot for 20 minutes at a time.
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My son, Carlos, definitely toddled when he was first walking. I used to tell people that he trips over the cracks in the ground, because he was constantly falling over things and tripping on anything in his path. He is different from Angelina, because he will not stay in one place for longer than about 5 minutes.
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Soon after he started walking, he would also push things around the room. Chairs and baskets, boxes and toys--if they moved, he would move them around the room. Once his sister, Angelina, showed him how chairs could be used as stools to climb to higher locations, nothing is safe any more. Carlos and Angelina both move chairs over and then climb up on them to reach anything they want off tables or countertops. Since Carlos learned some of this from his sister, he is displaying the same behavior despite being 2 years younger.

But often Carlos will climb just because he can. He has many scrapes and bruises from his climbing adventures. In addition to climbing, now that he is approaching his 2nd birthday, he has moved on to running. This does not mean he has mastered turning in time, but instead corners by running into walls to help change directions quickly.

In April (2006) I will no longer have a toddler in the house, as my toddler will turn 2 years old, and four days later his sister will become 4 years old. Now that both children can run, they spend a lot of time doing exactly that. In fact this desire to always be moving and playing is what makes "time-out" so effective. Both children hate to be put in "time-out" when they are bad.

Written by William E. Petersen, author of the e-zine called Daddy Resource and the website http://www.DaddyResource.com - A Practical Resource to Help Dads Grow. William is a father of two children, Angelina who is four and Carlos who is two. He lives with his wife and children in Texas.