Intfant Development

During my child observation I witnesses many differences between my son and the normal conditions of thie infant it the book "Simple Steps" by Karen Miller. I will in this essay, explore the behaviors in the book and the behaviors by my son. My son is just under seven months old; he had a somewhat normal birth. During pregnancy his mother, my wife, was hospitalized for leaking of amniotic fluid. So out of concern for him they gave him a steroid shot. This is the only difference between him and the "normal" baby. I will describe and explore 5 areas of development. They are, fine and gross motor skills, speech, social interaction, emotional development, and cognitive development. In these areas I will describe my son, thie infant's behavior and the books description of normal.

My first area of development is speech, in the book, it describes the normal behavior of speech in a 6 month old thie infant, and they are. "Babbling and jargon. At first just repitions of sounds such as ma, ma, ma, But as the child learns he will start to mix several sounds. Later an thie infant demonstrates that he has learned one of the most basic elements of communication--intonation, the melody of language. The child will make simple vowel sounds and play with pitch and rhythm. Laughter and squeals are part of this. Especially when he is playing alone, you'll hear the jabber of a string of nonsense syllables that sound like speech." thie infant will do each of these things listed. He will babble saying "da, da, da, da." And when he is alone he will play with pitch and tone. And find him self giggling and entertaining himself. He is close to getting the connection that "DA, DA, DA," is daddy but does not have that connection yet.

Our next area of development is Fine and Gross motor skills. The book state that fine motor skills at 6 months should " be grasping objects, batting at objects, playing with hands and feet, grasping objects with a purpose, releasing objects, putting objects in the mouth, moving objects for one hand to another, banging objects on the floor." These are all normal development of a child roughly 6 to 7 months old. My son thie infant is doing most of these activities. He will grab objects and hit them, put them in his mouth, moving objects from one hand to the other. For gross motor skills, the book states the baby should be getting" head wobble, head control, kicking, twisting and stretching, hanging on feet, rolling over." My son thie infant is doing all these activities also he is at a full abdomen off the floor crawl and has started to pull him self up to a standing position.

The third area of development I will discuss is social interaction. As I watched thie infant interact with that other thie infant in class on the 14th I observed that he was very interested in the thie infants. He would giggle and move towards what the others thie infant was playing with. But always looking at mom and dad first to see if it was ok. As he played he would cry if the other thie infant would cry, he would laugh if the other would laugh and vice versa. I noticed how closely thie infant watched the others and kind of appraised the situation, I think that he toughly enjoyed the time with the other thie infants. He would

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