tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-51064826733785869372024-03-12T22:39:21.810-07:00KIDS-BABYLINIAhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12880248453374768899noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5106482673378586937.post-46059682146910974052016-07-15T17:24:00.001-07:002017-03-26T00:33:26.270-07:00What’s in a milestone? Understanding your child’s development<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #d5a6bd;">Photo: Getty Images</span></span><br />
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Children come in all shapes and sizes, but not with a manual. Childhood achievements such as walking and talking are often celebrated signs that things are going well in a child's life. However, once these achievements start being compared between children (at the park, on Facebook), they can become the cause of anxiety.</div>
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"Why isn't he crawling yet? Is her language normal? Is there something wrong?"
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It's often difficult for parents to know whether they should be waiting or worrying. Asking for advice is natural but lots of opinions can be confusing. Doctors, health professionals or early childhood teachers may give differing opinions about childhood development, as they often look at it from different perspectives. Family and friends may give alarmist advice or be falsely reassuring.
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Parental knowledge and instincts about their children are very powerful, but parents often lack objective reference points to compare their children to. Anxiety, hope, denial and competing priorities can complicate matters.
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Understanding the underlying principles of child development will help clarify issues and outline what needs action, and what action to take.
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<b>What is 'normal' development?
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The age that children attain certain skills is variable. While many children achieve skills at a similar age, the range of what is considered "normal development" is in fact far broader than what is considered "common".
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For example, it's common to walk at around 12 months, but it can be perfectly normal to not walk until 16 months.
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Normal development relies on an underlying foundation of elements: a child's body, brain, well-being and practice. If all these elements are healthy, then it can be normal to be slower in a certain milestone.
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But if any of these elements are impaired, a child's development might be problematic, even if their milestones appear at a common age. Two children who appear to have the same difficulty walking might, in fact, have very different underlying issues and require different interventions.
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<b>What do I need to know about milestones?
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Child development is a continuous process of acquiring skills, or milestones, which emerge from the foundations described above. Professionals cluster developmental skills into groups or domains.
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These are commonly called motor, communication, cognition and social-emotional domains.
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<b>Motor</b>: gross motor skills refers to the control of the body and limbs. These are most easily recognised in infancy, and include skills such as head control, sitting and walking. Fine motor skills refers to the use of hands and fingers, such as when manipulating objects and drawing with precision. The quality of motor skills also depends on muscle tone and co-ordination, which may be smooth, clumsy or imprecise.
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<b>Communication </b>is one of the best recognised domains and is divided into three components: expressive language (production of words and sentences), receptive language (understanding of sentences) and non-verbal communication or pre-linguistic skills. Pre-linguistic skills are essential for healthy language development; they are the way we communicate in the absence of words and include eye contact, gestures and reciprocal responses.
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<b>Cognition or intelligence</b> is often signified by problem-solving skills, memory, and identifying key concepts. As children's cognition develops, they mature in their co-operation, application to new tasks and they broaden their play skills. Every parent marvels at their child's ability to learn new things, but assessing intelligence objectively requires a formal test.
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<b>Social and emotional:</b> babies have an inherent interest in human voice and movement, and our brains involuntarily mirror the movements we see. Toddlers watch other children and soon want to spend more time with enjoyable people than toys. They are programmed to "copy and paste" what others do. Children who have limited "copy and paste" or reduced interest in the perspectives of others tend to learn on their own agenda, and this leads to the slower acquisition of skills.
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Emotional development manifests as a balance between confidence and seeking reassurance, developing a sound sense of self and others. Instability in early emotional development can result in dysregulation of emotions, unsettled behaviour, or sometimes guarded social responses.
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<b>Helping your child's development
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Milestones can be useful markers of a child's progress, but alone they are not good tools for diagnosis. The context, pattern and foundations that underpin childhood development are central to interpreting milestones.
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A practical way for parents to bring together all of the aspects of child development into everyday experiences can be summarised as Love Talk Sing Read Play. This is a resource for parents containing helpful information on what to expect from your child, how to stimulate them and when to seek further advice.
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Milestones are measurable evidence of a child's development but are not always the best way to understand what children need. If you find yourself worrying about your child's milestones, see your GP or early childhood nurse and start a conversation about your child's development and what to do next.
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Milestones are visible and well known. Supporting children's needs, and understanding their developmental foundations, is much more important than simply measuring when they walked or talked.
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Chris Elliot is a Consultant Paediatrician and Conjoint Associate Lecturer, UNSW Australia; Con Papadopoulos specialises in Developmental and General Paediatrics, UNSW Australia. This article first appeared on The Conversation.
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">source:<span style="color: magenta;">essentialbaby.com.au
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LINIAhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12880248453374768899noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5106482673378586937.post-62417612257672059772016-07-15T17:24:00.000-07:002017-03-26T00:35:03.999-07:00Identical quads star in absolutely adorable photoshoot<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="color: #d5a6bd; font-size: x-small;">The Webb quads: Abigail, Mckayla, Grace and Emily. Photo: Cassandra Jones/Noelle Mirabella Photography</span></div>
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Honestly, it is just too much cuteness in one photoshoot.
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The Webb quads from Canada – Abigail, Mckayla, Grace and Emily – have been featured in a new series of baby photos.<br />
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The two-month-old identical sisters were photographed by Cassandra Jones of<span style="color: magenta;"> Noelle Mirabella Photography</span> in Grande Prairie, Alberta.
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Speaking to <span style="color: magenta;">TODAY,</span> Jones said that the girls were "amazing".
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"There were absolutely no tears. In fact, they did not even raise an eyelid. They slept like little angels for the entire shoot," she said.
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<span style="color: #d5a6bd; font-size: x-small;">Photo: Cassandra Jones/Noelle Mirabella Photography</span></div>
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The ridiculously adorable photos include one of the four babies sleeping in a hollow log, and another of them wearing fluffy bunny suits.
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<span style="color: #d5a6bd; font-size: x-small;">Photo: Cassandra Jones/Noelle Mirabella Photography
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Seriously, how much cute factor can you squeeze into a photo?
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The identical quadruplets were conceived without the help of fertility drugs or any intervention from reproductive technology. The odds of this happening are about one in 15 million pregnancies.
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Mum Bethani says she was shocked when she discovered she was carrying quads during a routine ultrasound.
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<span style="color: #d5a6bd; font-size: x-small;">Photo: Cassandra Jones/Noelle Mirabella Photography
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"I'm definitely glad I was laying down because I could not believe that there were four there. I thought there had to be some kind of mistake … [my husband] almost fainted. He had to sit down for a moment," she told TODAY earlier this year.
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While the new photos are adorable, they took a lot of work. Jones says that it took five extra team members to set up the shoot – one person per baby, and one person to arrange the props.
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Jones says that she chose white outfits so that she could coordinate all the different hats without having to change the babies and risk waking them up. The girls' knitted hats and wraps were custom-made specifically for the shoot.
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<span style="color: #ead1dc;">Photo: Cassandra Jones/Noelle Mirabella Photography
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The large rectangular barn wood prop was custom-made especially for the Webb babies, while Jones was lucky enough to find the hollow log and hollow stump at a local park – and they were just the right size.
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"They were a pretty snug fit, but we managed to get them all in together and looking adorable," she said.
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<span style="color: #d5a6bd;">Photo: Cassandra Jones/Noelle Mirabella Photography</span></div>
Was it worth it? Of course it was! The family – and their fans around the world – adore them.
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"The pictures [Jones] took are absolutely beautiful," said Bethani. "I love them so much."<br />
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">source:<span style="color: blue;">essentialbaby.com.au</span></span>LINIAhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12880248453374768899noreply@blogger.com