Dr. Indira Mallya

Toddlers between 15 to 24 months with their just-gained simple sensory-motor skills delve gleefully into everything exciting that catches their eye! Don’t be surprised if your toddler tries to reach for the porcelain vase or raid your makeup box and smear lipstick and mascara all over her face. All work and activities at home are a toddler’s play. It helps stabilise their sensory motor skills and promotes new learning of concepts and behaviours. Your toddler will find her own avenues to play if no likable activities are provided at home. She will try new heights, run around, test her physical skills, play with gooey stuff and bang on things. She will assert her new found independence of mobility and will want to do everything on her own.

With a limited vocabulary, she will rely on physical force and tantrums to get her own way. She will also have mood swings many times in a day. One moment she will be loving and the next moment she may throw a terrible tantrum. Once you shower attention on her, she will be calm and quiet. But if you pull away your toddler from such escapades, she will fight you and throw a huge tantrum. If your verbal ticking off after such incidents has not put the brakes on your little one, here are some useful tips that will help you avoid a power struggle with your toddler.

• Provide her a safe play area at home, where she can express her autonomy, control and release her physical energy, within safety limits and her maturity. Allow her to make a mess without making her feel guilty or ashamed. Stock a variety of attractive play materials and accessories for playing in the safe area and replenish or change them from time to time. If she enjoys her space, she will not have the need to indulge in forbidden escapades. If your child is playing beside another child, provide enough toys that look similar, or you will have them snatching at each other’s toys. Also, do read up on preparing age-appropriate play activities for toddlers.

• Keep your expensive and treasured articles out of reach of your toddler and make your house child proof in general.

• Always tell your child what to do instead of telling her what not to do. Follow through on what you have told your child. This approach will reinforce positive behaviours and perhaps avoid power tussles with you and your child.

• When your child is hurting someone stop her immediately by holding her wrists or carrying her outside the room. Give her a hug and wait till she calms down. Only then you can tell her why you did not like her behaviour, but you love her.

• Have some quiet time for yourself and recharge your energy levels by relaxing with a good book. You will be ready to face any challenge.

Well planned play activities and accessories in a designated area at home will keep your toddler happily occupied so that she does not have the urge to go in search of forbidden escapades. It will also diminish her negative behaviours used with others, and, power struggles with you.

Toddlers aged between 18 to 20 months spend most of their time in being adventurous or trying to assert their independence at home. They like to get their own way in their social environment and, when thwarted, they like to cry, grab, bite, poke or hit others. As a mother, you can develop your child’s social skills through guided experiences in key areas. Some well planned guided experiences will go a long way in helping your toddler build social skills.

Set a daily routine

• Knowing what to do will help your toddler regularise his daily routine.

• It will also give him the opportunity to make independent choices in things under his control, such as picking out what to wear.

Provide a safe home environment

• As far as possible, allow your child to express his likes, dislikes, independence and adventurous behaviours by close supervision. In turn, this will help him gain greater mobility and a positive self-image.

Set up a supervised play environment

• Provide plenty of resourceful materials and activities, so that your toddler can use them to release his pent-up feelings and physical energy.

• Let your toddler play alongside other toddlers without having to share toys or take turns with them. This is because they like to indulge in parallel play. Just remember to provide multiple toys and be sure to supervise from a distance.

• Also, arrange play dates with older children so your toddler can observe and learn about sharing and other social skills.

• Give opportunities to practice and internalise, for instance, a newly learnt social behaviour through “pretend play” as children love this medium.

Set limits for unacceptable behaviours

• Provide corresponding reasons when setting limits for unacceptable behaviours for your toddler. If he crosses the line, let your child know that you love him but did not like his behaviour. This way he will feel loved and secure while understanding why you ticked him off.

• Help your toddler be aware of his feelings by labeling them, such as “feeling sad” because his toy is broken or “feeling angry” because he did not get the balloon he wanted. Slowly he will start verbalising them instead of throwing tantrums.This will also help your toddler show empathy to his peers in trouble.

Lead by example

• Speak as much as possible and verbalise your actions when interacting with your toddler, so that he picks up some language skills. They will prove to be very useful in communicating with others.

• Provide a good role model to your toddler as he learns by imitating others around him.

So work on those key areas and if you found these tips useful share it with other mothers you know.

 

A toddler aged between to 30 months, usually asserts her new found motor abilities by indulging in forbidden activities. She throws huge tantrums when pulled away by a harried mom. To avoid such power tussles, you can offer pleasurable and engaging activities to your toddler which also give dividends.
Experts opine that these activities provide ‘sensory motor stimulation’ for improving gross and fine motor skills, and help them learn new concepts and behaviors that allow better adjustment in their environment.

Sensory activities
The five senses maybe addressed one at a time through guided steps. After each step, have a little talk with your toddler about the experience. Repeat the experiences for as long as your child enjoys.

Taste

• If you want to familiarize your toddler with the sour taste, let her first examine and smell a lemon.
• With her help, squeeze a little lemon juice and let her taste it, and know it is a sour taste.
• Make lemonade in front of her and let her drink some.
• During the week, make simple recipes with lemon as one of the ingredients.
• Simultaneously, make rhymes, jingles, tiny stories with lemon as the central character. Your child will enjoy this assortment.
• When your child is ready, start with the sweet and salty tastes. Defer the bitter and hot tastes to the future for obvious reasons.

Sweet and salty

• Use the above-given steps making adjustments with reference to context.
• Use familiar smelling things. Show and name the source of each smell.

Touch

• Borrow as many steps as suitable here keeping the reference to the context in mind.
• Start with two opposing concepts such as wet and dry or hard and soft. Use colourful household material for the same.
• Don’t forget to use homemade gel and dough made with vivid food colours as toddlers like to mess around with malleable and gooey stuff.

Sight

• Offer your toddler a range of activities that will help improve her focus.
• Assemble 2 or 3 piece puzzles and discriminate between 2 to 3 colours by sorting coloured cards and copying linear patterns with them.
• Use any other activity liked by your toddler to sharpen her eyesight.

Motor activities

Gross motor is the control of large muscles which enable walking, jumping, and climbing. Fine motor is the ability to control small muscles that enable the toddler to eat by self, scribble and play with small objects.

Gross motor

• You may want to enhance your toddler’s newly acquired motor movements by clustering movements such as reaching, running, jumping, skipping, hopping, crawling and stepping up and down. Set up a mini obstacle course with chairs, boxes, ropes sticks and any material at hand.
• You can also sing action songs and let your toddler do the actions suggested in the songs.
• Make a cardboard postbox which has primary geometrical shapes carved on them. Let your child post corresponding shapes from their respective openings.
  The sensory activities outlined above lend themselves to promoting small muscle skills.
• Try to put together other activities which your child may like.

All the sensory-motor activities mentioned will stabilise your toddler’s gross and fine muscle skills, and, help them develop new concepts and behaviours for better adjustment with her environment. So be innovative moms! Let your imagination run riot and prepare your own sensory-motor activities for your toddler. In this quest, be guided by your child’s likes, dislikes, and abilities to perform.

 

At three years, your child is testing his emerging physical skills to explore everything new that he encounters. He is also more agile, with better body coordination and balance. Take this opportunity to fine tune his motor skills with fun-filled activities that will pave the way for advanced skills.

Activities to boost gross motor skills

Movements such as rolling over and sitting use the larger muscles in the arms, leg, torso, and feet. You can improve the gross motor skills with a few of these activities.

• Make an obstacle course wherein your child leaps over a chalk line, goes under a chair, climbs up and down a big square block and runs to the finish line.
• Your child can also try a medley of activities at different times. He can walk forward three steps and three steps backward.You can play the game of “Simon says” with your child and give commands for doing different types of movements, such as hopping, skipping and jumping. Or, you can sing action songs and have your child do the human, animal or bird movements depicted in the song.
• Your child can go on a treasure hunt in a strategically arranged room to challenge his physical skills.
• Your child can have fun with a large ball by aiming it at a target, throwing it in a basket or at a distance, and catching it.
• To enhance his balance, your child can try walking on a thick chalk line, or he can leap over one stick at a time.
• Riding a tricycle will help your child use different sets of muscles and coordinated movements.
• You can also let your child dance freely to his favourite tune or do simple exercises.

Activities to boost fine motor skills
Fine motor skills are small movement such as picking up small objects and holding a toy. Fine motor skills make use of small muscles such as finger, toes, wrists, tongue, and lips. Involve your child in these activities to fine tune his fine motor skills.

• Make your child thread 5 to 10 large wooden beads on a child-friendly plastic wire.
  Also make him sort out beads by colour, from a small pile of two coloured beads.
• He can pound, squeeze and make shapes with play dough or with clay.
• Your child can button large buttons on a sample cloth or try to cut paper by using child-friendly scissors or even tear a piece of newspaper into small pieces.
• He can use thick crayons to draw or pour coloured water through a funnel, into a plastic bottle. Make him do palm painting, by moving both hands vigorously on a big paper which has some blobs of thick starchy paint made at home.

Do not forget to use close and guided supervision when giving these activities to your child for safety and maximum learning. Also, use your creative imagination to generate more such activities as your child likes change and variety.

 

Children grow up in the blink of an eye but watching your child grow both emotionally as well as mentally, and not just physically makes you a proud parent. Cognitive development refers to the development of thinking, reasoning, problem-solving and creative skills. You need to understand that children do not soak up information like a sponge and developing cognitive skills requires some work. Don’t panic, we are not asking you a climb a mountain; we are simply asking you to indulge your child in a few fun activities.

To increase attention span
A toddler needs to concentrate on a task to increase his attention span from the present capability of 5 to 15 minutes. If you help your toddler make imaginative use of his toys and play materials, he will be happy to spend more time playing with you, thus increasing his attention span.

Play activities

• Your toddler can sort and classify two to five items by size, colour, shape or class. He can classify by shape or by colour if you give him some big round beads and medium blocks of two to three colours.

• Similarly, your toddler can build a tower of 3 to 5 graded blocks to learn about size.

• He can learn about sequencing and ordering by placing side by side, three pictures to depict his daily routine sequence of activities such as waking up, eating lunch with family and going out to play. You may intervene as and when necessary.

• Pretend play is a favorite pastime of all little children. For instance, if you give your toddler some interesting kitchen oriented play materials he will get an opportunity to focus and get engrossed in imaginative play for a long period of time, thus promoting his attention span and other mental skills.

To improve memory
A toddler has trouble with short and long-term memory retention. He needs to learn to store information gained from experiences and retrieve it to influence future action. It is therefore important to repeat and practice daily experiences, to facilitate storing and retrieval of information gained from them. You may prod his memory by oral cues whenever necessary.

Play activities

• Repeated listening to favourite stories will help your toddler to focus, retain and then retrieve information about the characters, sequence, and other aspects of the story.

• Talking and answering questions soon after an event, such as a visit to the zoo will help jog his memory to retrieve information about the things he liked at the zoo.

• Identifying three to four familiar objects, either by his touch and sight or by the sounds they make, will test your toddler’s memory. The objects can be bundled in a feely bag for a tactile experience, displayed one by one to recognise them by sight or identified by their sounds.

To boost thinking
Thinking skills help a toddler to decide for instance, if he has completed a task or needs to ask for help to complete it. At other times he may have to find solutions to problems posed during his play, such as how to climb down from a high chair or what to do when he cannot find his favorite toy. Therefore you may get him started with simple tasks and experiments to promote a problem-solving attitude by nudging him to think for himself.

Play activities

• Ask your toddler to put for instance a piece of paper and a small object in a bowl of water. When you quiz him about the task he will explore and start asking his own questions. Well, you have set him thinking!

• Or, display a big picture of a house and ask him to show you as many details as he can spot. This task helps him to combine attention, memory, and thinking to name or point out things he recognizes. He may need help in naming some items.

• Ask your toddler thought to provoke questions when you join him in pretend play, such as “The elevator is not working today, so how can we get to the ground floor” or “I need cold water to drink, from where should I get it.”

Do use your creativity and imagination, to make up more play activities for your toddler.

 

Breastfeeding is important to provide your child with all the necessary nutrients but the process of breastfeeding depletes the water content from your body. This loss must be compensated by drinking plenty of water to maintain your 70 percent physiological water balance. If you continue to blissfully forget to replenish the water losses, you may soon start reeling under the onslaught of dehydration. Dry mouth, tiredness or sleepiness, decreased urine output or change in the colour of urine to a darker yellow, constipation or dry skin, and headaches are all symptoms of dehydration.

How much water should you drink?

There are many opinions given by experts and experienced parents. We summed them up as follows:

• Whenever you feel thirsty, drinking water should be your first choice. Since breastfeeding makes you thirsty, you should drink enough to satisfy that thirst, after every breastfeed.

• Experts believe that you should drink eight times in an 8-ounce glass, per day especially after every time you breastfeed. In addition, you must take two glasses more.So, in total, you should be taking drinking 10 glasses of water per day.

• Sometimes it is all right to take other fluids and semi-solid foods like milk, smoothies, vegetable or fruit juices, soups and yogurt to quench your thirst. Just remember not to substitute them for drinking water as semi-solids especially do not provide you with enough liquid in your diet.

• In your quest to quench your thirst, remember to limit intake of diuretics such as coffee, soda, and alcohol, as they are known to cause dehydration. In fact, coffee in the morning can deplete your energy level and may make you feel miserable for hours together.

How often should you breastfeed your baby?
Experts opine that you should breastfeed as often as your baby wants. And, the more you drain your breasts, the more milk you will produce for your baby.

Disclaimer: This article just gives a generic view on water intake and breastfeeding for mothers. It is advisable to approach your doctor or a nutrition expert to chalk out your diet and water intake, suitable to your unique health needs while nursing your baby.