When it comes to the early years of a baby's life, Dr Miriam Stoppard's knowledge and experience is second to none. She looks at how important skills can be nurtured as your baby grows and develops

In your baby's first year, your baby grows and develops by:

• Using her brain to think and to develop language
• Learning to stand upright and walk, starting with attempts to control her head as early as her first week
• Acquiring fine control of her fingers. By 10 months she will be able to pick up a pea between her thumb and forefinger

Take your lead from your baby

This is the golden and unbreakable rule of child development. Your baby will always give you some sign that she wants to and can make progress. It's important to follow her lead because, if you do, you'll hit the right moment for her to acquire the skill.

This will make her feel very pleased with herself, especially if you praise her, and you'll build her self-confidence and self-esteem right from when she's only a very young baby. Just think what a confident, balanced, affectionate child she'll grow into. And all this groundwork is laid in the first year.

Growth and development leads to new skills

Picking up a pea between finger and thumb is a complex process and a huge amount of development has to occur it to be achieved successfully. Baby needs to develop:

• muscles that will draw finger and thumb together and grip
• muscles that will obey the brain when it sends the message to grip
• eyes that can see the pea clearly
• co-ordination between what the eye sees, how far it is from the eyes and where the hand moves (hand/eye co-ordination)
• a brain sophisticated enough to give the command to the muscles to work
• nerves to carry the order from brain to muscle

All these elements should come together by the time your baby is nine months old, although rates of progression do differ.

Learn how to spot each phase of development. At two months you will notice your baby's desire to reach out and grab something even though she hasn't developed enough to do so.

Understanding that growth and development must be in place before every new skill is very important when it comes to your baby's bowel and bladder control. You cannot timetable this development. Babies can't become dry overnight nor can they perform for you when you sit them on a potty. Forcing the issue stores up trouble for the future.

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!

Cues and signals

I've already mentioned that it's important never to push your baby, but to let her go at her own pace and encourage her when she lets you know she's ready. Spotting this moment of readiness is not as hard as you think. She'll give you cues and signals that make her intentions clear:

• At about two weeks, your baby will probably try to raise her head a little when lying on her tummy. This is a cue telling you she's ready for the game that strengthens her neck
• At five months she'll blow raspberries at you to ask you for games where you imitate noises
• At nine months she can point, so get her to point things out in her books
• At around 10 months she'll start pulling herself up to standing. She's getting ready to walk so place furniture so that she can cruise round it

Acting it out

Babies and children get the message better through actions rather than just words and this phase lasts till they're age six or more. Babies love it if you act out your emotions, so make sure you accompany as many words as possible with actions and expressions and exaggerate them all, especially pleasure and joy.

So the rule is: be theatrical whenever possible, larger than life, dramatic and over the top. End everything with giggles, laughter and cuddles whenever you can and make and keep eye contact with your baby as much as possible, especially when she's very young.

Emotional continence

'Emotional continence' means being able to handle emotions and not let them get out of hand. It involves being able to control strong emotions by turning them to good purpose because:

• Babies learn emotional continence from you
• If emotional continence isn't learned in the first year it's very difficult to acquire later

It's important for your baby to acquire emotional continence. Without it she finds it very difficult to cope with anything that thwarts her wishes or stands in her way as she grows up. In other words, she becomes emotionally incontinent. The classic outcome of emotional incontinence is a pre-schooler who bullies, is disruptive, or even destructive at home and at nursery school.

Building emotional continence

It's not difficult to give your baby early lessons in emotional continence. There are three easy steps in any situation:

• Legitimise your baby's emotions. Tell her 'I know it hurts' if she's fallen over or 'That is annoying' if she's frustrated by something and becomes angry
• Defuse your baby's emotions. Say, 'Mummy will kiss it better' or 'Daddy gets annoyed with that too, you know'
• Move on from the emotion. Suggest, 'When it's stopped hurting we'll go out to play' or 'Let's forget that and have a cuddle'

Dr Miriam Stoppard has a new series of books for babies called Baby Play Skills. These books are rooted in the needs, interests and capabilities of babies.

Titles in the series include Happy Baby, Baby Games, Baby Senses and Baby Talking and each aim to help encourage intelligence and the acquisition of physical and mental ability, speech and emotional skills.