The First Years of Your Child Are Essential

Scientists continue to prove that the first three years of children are the most important that last forever. This has been recognized by thinkers and educators throughout history. Chinese old saying goes "三岁定终生“! Tremendous physical growth and learning occur between 0-3 ages. The followings briefly address the Piaget's stages of cognitive development and the Erik Erikson's (EE) stages of personality development:

•  Birth - 18 months/2 years (Sensory-motor)
  Piaget:
  Sensory-motor systems of sucking, grasping and gross body activities to build schemes
  Simple activities, like cuddling and rocking a baby stimulating healthy growth and development. Inadequate nurturing can be devastating in long term.
  
  * My Family Child Care trainer, Linda shared one case of her caring child who has social and emotional problem because the neglect of cuddling and eye contact at feeding during his infancy.

Erik Erikson: Trust is established when mother attends quickly, reliably and calmly to the needs of the infant. The repetitive handling, feeding and love-motivated attentions of a mother become the fundamental attitude of trust of an infant toward himself and his world. 

Note: This kind of attention will NOT spoil an infant in his age of trust and distrust. 

• 2-7 years – (Preoperational)
  Piaget:
  Language development accelerates. Egocentric in thought and action. Thinks everything has a reason and a purpose. Make judgments primarily on basis of how things look.
  

         Erik Erikson:
         15 months to 3 years – It is necessity for a child to achieve a sense of independence or willful
         autonomy in the guidance of his body. It holding on ad letting go crisis revolves around the age
         of 18 months. The experiences with self-control set the pattern for his later capacity of free
         choice-making.

         3 to 7 years – how a parent or caregiver responds to a child's self-initiated activities, intellectual
         as well as motor will create either a sense of freedom or a sense of guilt and a feeling of being
         an inept intruder in an adult world.

In reference to Family Child Care Training, February 2011

“In the first three years of life every human being undergoes yet a second birth, in which he is born as a psychological being possessing self-hood and separate identity. The quality of self an infant achieves in those crucial three years will profoundly affect all of his subsequent existence.” Louise Kaplan, Ph.D., Oneness & Separateness, p. 15.

But then, who does a child need in his first years? This post gives some great words worth to ponder on.