Promoting Child Development Series Part - 3, Cognitive, Linguistic and Communication skills




COGNITIVE, LINGUISTIC, AND
COMMUNICATION SKILLS
Environmental factors influence the infant’s
developing brain significantly during the first
year of life.

When parents provide consistent

and predictable daily routines, the infant

learns to anticipate and trust his environment.



An infant’s brain development is
affected by daily experiences with parents
and other caregivers during feeding, play,
consoling, and sleep routines.

Reading is important for all children,

including infants. 

Health care professionals
should educate parents about how to read to
infants, the importance of language stimulation,
including singing songs to infants and
children, reading to them, and talking to
them.

They also need to understand the transition
from the parent talking about pictures
in a book to engaging the child in reciprocally
talking and pointing to pictures in a book.

Health care professionals also should identify
feeding issues related to oromotor function
and coordination because these are integral
to early pre-linguistic and later communication
skills.

Special discussions could be used
with parents who are unable to communicate
verbally or who have a child with special
communication needs (such as a child with a
hearing loss) to help the parents support normal
language development in their children.

Exposure to live language has been shown to
have a positive impact on early child development,
whereas television screen exposure

increasingly shows adverse effects.


Children who live in print-rich environments
and who are read to during the first

years of life are more likely to learn to read
on schedule than children who are not
exposed in this way.

Giving an age- and culturally

appropriate book to the child, along
with anticipatory guidance to the parent
about reading aloud, at each health supervision
visit from 6 months to 5 years, has been
shown to improve the home environment
and the child's language development, especially
in children at socioeconomic risk.

Parents should make reading with their children
part of the daily routine.

 Reading together in the evening can become an
important part of the bedtime ritual beginning
in infancy and continuing for years.
Books and reading encourage development
in multiple domains and are especially

important for cognitive and linguistic development.


Book-handling skills in young
children also reflect fine motor skills, and
parent-child reading promotes social and
emotional development as well.


Reading to a young child is often a source of great warmth
and good memories for parents and children
alike. Parents can use books in various ways,
and health care professionals can emphasize to
parents with low or no literacy skills that having
conversations with their young children
about the pictures in books (ie, interactive

reading) also is an important way to encourage
language development

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