baby learning - Fifteen to Thirty-Six Months

What is your baby learning?

* Your child is learning to recognize himself or herself as a separate physical being.

* Prior to 18 months, young children do not seem to know that what they are seeing in the mirror is their own reflection. In one experiment, a researcher had mothers put a spot of rouge on their child s nose without the child knowing it. At 18 months, the child pointed to the mirror. By two years, the child touched his own nose as if he knew that the face in the mirror was his own face.

* Toddlers are able to store a memory and hours, days, even weeks later, that memory will be retrieved and guide their behavior. They watch how you pet a cat, and another time, when you re not around, they do the same thing. This capacity for "deferred imitation" explains in part how they learn so much so quickly!

* Toddlers also play symbolically, letting one thing stand for another. They pretend they are a tiny baby and crawl into a doll s bed; they pretend to be "Daddy" and give a doll a bath. They push a block on the floor, pretending that it s a dump truck. This rich, imaginative pretend play shows their minds at work and often reveals feelings that can t be expressed in words.

* The toddler years are traditionally known as the time when children declare that they are their "own person." They are eager to explore and experiment. They re leaving behind the dependency of infancy and feeling the independence of toddlerhood. What this means is that they want to take control and be separate from you. In terms of their emotional development, this is a healthy and inevitable step.

What are you, the parent, learning?

* Exercising authority. As a parent of a toddler, you may be wondering "how do I discipline?" First of all, think about discipline as teaching it s not equated with punishment. Your job (and it is a job with an assertive toddler) is to teach your child how to develop self-control, but you must also realize that this takes time. When your child is young, you will have to set limits, repeat them, and expect they won t work all the time. You ll also want to model the kind of behavior you do want (remember that your toddler will imitate you long after you ve acted in certain ways). Keep in mind, that children who have solid relationships with their parents care about doing what their parents want. So the nurturing, responsive relationship you establish with your baby is the foundation for socializing your toddler.

* Young children are adept at finding their parents hot buttons. This is a time to learn to deal with your own anger in a way that doesn t pass it on to your child.