How babies develop

Helping babies to learn

Your baby is born with some innate survival instincts. Because every baby has them, all parents can use them to help their baby learn.

• She's born to smile at faces and can see yours at 20-25 cm (8-10 inches). She'll smile from birth and learn to be friendly and sociable
• She's programmed to high-pitched sounds and born to communicate, so first talk to her at 20-25m (8-10 inches) and she'll mouth conversation

There are a number of quite abstract ideas which we adults take for granted, but require huge intellectual skills for a baby. The best way to help and encourage your baby's development is through her senses - sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste - because these are what she will be using to explore the world before she can move around independently.

Learning through opposites

It's hard for a baby to get the hang of what 'hot' means if she's presented with the idea on its own. But if you give her the opposite, it's much easier for her to understand. So always consider describing a concept such as 'hot' in relation to its opposite 'cold'.

Examples of opposites

Texture = hard and soft
Taste = sweet and sour
Edges = sharp and blunt
Sizes = big and small

Babies and children find it quite difficult to perceive the difference between things. You can make their job easier by making the differences very plain. Demonstrate 'hot' (only warm in reality) by letting your baby find something cool to feel immediately after, making sure you use the words 'hot' then 'cold' at the same time. Adding actions helps, so blow your fingers with hot and shiver with cold (be careful not to let your baby touch something hot).

Recognition

Like adults, babies learn by repetition and you'll help her by repeating the 'defining features' of something over and over again. This promotes recognition, a very complex intellectual skill.

For instance, every time you see a cat you can describe its defining features: four legs, whiskers, long tail, fur, pointy ears, says 'miaow', can jump up high. Conversely, the defining features of a bird are: feathers, beak, wings, two legs, can fly.

Constantly describing the defining features of something helps to fix it in your baby's mind and helps her distinguish it from the myriad of other objects she's seeing for the first time every day. By the time she's about 10 months, she'll know that your pet cat, her cuddly toy cat and the picture of a cat in her book are all cats and she'll also know that your pet is real, but the others are just representations. This is very sophisticated thinking!