Expresses feelings

Understanding their feelings and being able to express them is a huge deal for children. Congratulations Your Child!

From picking up on your emotions to imitating your facial expressions, Your Child was gathering information and is now able to show what they’ve learned  through different forms of self-expression, such as facial expressions, sounds, and hand movements.

Babies at this stage are starting to realize that the people around them are responding to their actions, so they grasp the concept of communicating their emotions.

How to support this development
Allow Your Child to mimic your facial expressions, and when your little one expresses happiness or sadness, respond to them and tend to their needs. Allowing them to feel happy or sad is a great way to teach them that whatever they feel is fine and they don’t need to feel bad to express themselves.

Never, not now or later, make them feel bad for showing their feelings. If you do, they could start to feel ashamed of who they are and, as a result, try to develop strategies to feel nothing.

Note: All children develop differently and at their own pace. For children born preterm, the referred timeframe for achieving the various developmental milestones might be incorrect.

Source: The information and graphs about when children reach specific milestones are taken from various sources, including the United States Center for Disease Control (CDC), the Denver Developmental Screening Test, and the State Institute of Early Childhood Research, Germany (IFP).