Infant Toddler Learning & Development Foundations
Infant Toddler Learning & Development Foundations
Infant Toddler Learning & Development Foundations
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in which to engage children’s drive to<br />
explore, building on their interests and<br />
strengths and supporting their overall<br />
physical and psychological health.<br />
Pioneering researchers in infant<br />
motor development used novel and<br />
painstaking methods to study the<br />
progression of infant skill acquisition<br />
(Adolph and Berger 2005; Adolph<br />
2008). Their findings were presented<br />
for both professionals and the public<br />
in the form of milestone charts that<br />
depicted motor skill acquisition as a<br />
clear progression through a series of<br />
predictable stages related to chronological<br />
age (Adolph 2008; Adolph,<br />
Weise, and Marin 2003). More recent<br />
research in the area of perceptual and<br />
motor development has indicated<br />
substantial variability between children<br />
in the pathways to acquiring<br />
major motor milestones such as sitting<br />
and walking (Adolph 1997; Adolph<br />
2008). Each child may take a unique<br />
developmental pathway toward attainment<br />
of major motor milestones<br />
(Adolph and Joh 2007). Crawling, for<br />
example, is not a universal stage.<br />
Research clearly shows that not all<br />
children crawl before they walk<br />
(Adolph 2008). Although most children<br />
walk independently around age one,<br />
the normal range for acquisition of this<br />
behavior in western cultures is very<br />
broad, between 9 and 17 months of age<br />
(Adolph 2008). Age has traditionally<br />
been treated as the primary predictor<br />
of when landmark motor behaviors<br />
occur, but studies now indicate that<br />
experience may be a stronger predictor<br />
than age is in the emergence of both<br />
crawling (Adolph and Joh 2007) and<br />
walking (Adolph, Vereijken, and Shrout<br />
2003).<br />
91<br />
It is important to recognize that,<br />
though developmental charts may<br />
show motor development unfolding in<br />
the form of a smooth upward progression<br />
toward mastery, the development<br />
of individual children often does not<br />
follow a smooth upward trajectory. In<br />
fact, “detours” and steps backward<br />
are common as development unfolds<br />
(Adolph and Berger 2006, 173). <strong>Infant</strong><br />
motor development can be understood<br />
as a process in which change occurs<br />
as the infant actively adapts to varying<br />
circumstances and new tasks (Thelen<br />
1995). Thelen (1994) demonstrated<br />
this experimentally in her well-known<br />
study in which three-month-old<br />
babies, still too young to coordinate<br />
their movements to be able to sit,<br />
reach, or crawl, learned to coordinate<br />
their kicks in order to engage in the<br />
novel task of making a mobile move.<br />
Cultural and historical factors, including<br />
caregivers’ behavior, also affect the<br />
ways in which infants engage in motor<br />
behaviors. For example, Adolph and<br />
Berger (2005) observed that mothers<br />
in Jamaica and Mali “train” infants<br />
to sit by propping up three- to fourmonth-old<br />
infants with pillows in a<br />
special hole in the ground designed to<br />
provide back support.<br />
For years, researchers, educators,<br />
and early childhood professionals have<br />
emphasized the interrelatedness of<br />
the developmental domains. The current<br />
research supports an even greater<br />
appreciation of the profound role of<br />
interrelatedness and interdependence<br />
of factors, domains, and processes<br />
in development (Diamond 2007). The<br />
developmental domains are linked not<br />
only with one another, but also with<br />
factors such as culture, social relationships,<br />
experience, physical health,<br />
PERCEPTUAL AND MOTOR DEVELOPMENT