Healthy Children: Cognitive development in infants

Dr. P's favorite quote of the week

Children are born true scientists.

They spontaneously experiment and experience and reexperience again.

They select, combine, and test, seeking to find order in their experiences -

"which is the mostest? which is the leastest?"

They smell, taste, bite, and touch-test for hardness, softness, springiness, roughness, smoothness, coldness, warmness:

they heft, shake, punch, squeeze, push, crush, rub, and try to pull things apart.

-R. Buckminster Fuller

U.S architect and engineer (1895-1983)

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Among the joys of parenthood for you, I hope one will be the thrill of observing how your child learns to make sense of the world ("cognitive development").

If you are interested, there is a great book on the subject: "The Scientist in the Crib" by Gopnick, Meltzoff and Kuhl. In it, the authors explain how your infant learns so much so fast:

S/he has a brain which is ready to solve problems and process information and make hypotheses on how the world works
S/he has great teachers (that would be you!).
(Most surprisingly), infants are already born with a good deal of knowledge.

All of this ordinary eternal machinery is our evolutionary heritage. There is no need for extra stimulation: the little scientist will learn to figure things out in the "ordinary expectable environment", with "good enough" (i.e., not 'super') parents.

Of all the motivations for your infant and toddler's behavior mentioned by the gurus, the drive to understand - to make sense of the world - is vastly underrated and neglected. If you realize, for example, that your oppositional 2 year old is really conducting a legitimate social experiment and not being 'terrible', that will go a long way in helping you figure out what is really going on and how to respond in a constructive way.

Children are not little, unformed adults. They make sense of the world in fundamentally different ways than us. Your job as a parent is to discover - not invent - your child. Learn how you can support your little scientist's quest for understanding by learning more about his/her cognitive development.