Babyhood
Penelope Leach
Language: English
Pages: 413
ISBN: 0394714369
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Leach shows, almost month by month, what your baby will do so that you can understand and anticipate your child's development and behavior. She explains what is happening to the child—physically, mentally and emotionally—from newborn to 2 years old.
infant pass a movement when he is taken off his mother’s back, unwrapped and held out in the open air: he must pass his movement on a pot. When this happens it is because that sphincter has become conditioned to the stimulus of the potty-rim against his buttocks. During the years when “potting” small babies was common practice, an extensive literature on the method of conditioning and another literature on the results accumulated. Both sets of literature were excellently reviewed in T. Berry
“Words are reproduced if, and only if, they are first made to sound good in the context of affectionate care and attention.” Dorothea McCarthy [154] derived similar ideas from working with human infants. She believed that human infants came to associate the gentle speech sounds they heard with pleasure and the fulfillment of their needs. When the infant then heard his own sounds, they sounded to him like those gentle speech sounds from his caretakers and therefore they too made him feel
depending on how much he drinks, the temperature, whether he has any fever and so on. The problem is therefore not one which can be dealt with for the day in one successful potting. The mother has to be alert all day to help the infant. The infant has to be alert, or at least prepared to have his activities interrupted, all day, too. Obviously discouraging accidents are far more likely than they are with bowel training. Obviously too the infant is the more likely to get fed up with the whole
of bodily expression and of beginning to make sense of the sound patterning of speech. For her, then, speech is a tool in the service of interpersonal communication rather than in individual mastery of the world’s novelty. It will be clear by now that the specialist literature in the development of language is complex and controversial. At the date of writing, the real answer to the question: “How and why is language acquired?” is “We do not know.” From the practical point of view, language
to the kind of handling the infant is ready for, so this manual development gives cues too. As soon as the infant’s hands are usually open, he is ready to be given light objects to hold, both for practice and against the day when he makes the connection between holding and seeing. Once he plays with his hands, watching them as he does so, he is ready for real toys as well. And once his hands go in his mouth, so will everything else. For some months the infant’s mouth will be an organ of
