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Injury Prevention Nutrition Parent Infant Interaction Family Relationship
brilliantbaby.com recommendations (4 months old)
Emotional Social
·Respond to her cooing & gurgling. Imitate her.
·Talk to her as often as possible.
·Sing to her at bath time or in the kitchen.
·Make sure your facial expression is always lively when playing with her.
·Play with her only when you are relaxed and not stressed out.
·Never shout or be upset in front of her.
Language & Communication (4 months old)
·Follow her focus of attention.
·Get into the habit of looking to see what she is looking at.
·Talk about the object or focus of her attention.
·Tailor your speech to corresponds with her limited attention span (mothers who realized that their babies were not able to cope with information from more than one sense at time had babies with wider vocabularies at one year old than those who did not.)
Stop your learning activities if she started getting bored, tired, or sleepy.
Use short and simple sentences.
Make your sentences as interesting as possible.
Change your tone, tune, and volume of your voice for emphasis.
Speak slowly. Pause between each phrase or short sentence.
Give her turn to talk with her eyes. Stop talking for one minute or two.
Use a lot of repetition of words or phrases.
Teach her simple sign language with your fingers, hands, face, and arms.
Baby signs for drink, eat, more, and read are
demonstrated at our office as part of the routine
visits.
Red Flags (bring this up
with your clinician)
- Not making any
cooing, gooing sounds.
- Not looking at the
eyes of the parents
- Not smiling or
laughing
- Not tracking at slow
moving objects from about 10 inches
- Does not seem to hear
noises
- Head size is not
growing or is growing fast above 95% in the chart
- The soft spot in the
head is closed
Emotional & Social Development (4 Months Old)
·Laughs & chuckles spontaneously when he feels happy
·Enjoys familiar experience such as feeding, bathing, and dressing
·Laughs loudly when she is tickled
·Relaxes when you sing to her calmly
·Uses facial expressions to keep parent's attention
·Smiles at herself in the mirror
·By four or five months babies show anger when they are frustrated. Some ways of showing anger are: quivering of her cheek, trembling of jaw with rage, flailing of arms and legs in protest.
Cognitive & Learning (4 months old)
·Looks curiously for objects or toys
·May take two or three naps a day. She maybe alert up to half an hour.
·Peers at her own reflection in a mirrors
·Plays at a particular time with a familiar toy
·Can now look around from side to side for sounds because of improved muscle control of the head and eyes
·Search for speaker, finding them even when they are out of sight.
·Listens more attentively to their own name than to the names of others.
·Will often stop her activity to listen more closely
Language & Communication (4 months old)
·Vocalizes to attract parent's attention by cooing & gurgling.
·Seems to become aware of the impact of their cooing on others and make us of it socially to show their emotions.
·Shouts sometimes and occasionally whispers.
·Laughs intently when something amuses her.
·Shows pleasure through delighted facial expression.
·Listens keenly to voices making strenuous attempts to find the speaker.
·Become capable of modulating their voice in several ways.
·Vocalization becomes voluntary, one of her first voluntary actions.
·Might play with their articulators, clicking her tongue, opening and closing her mouth.
·Appearance of first vowel.
·Begins to babble, repeating little sounds made with her lips: "p," "b," and "m."
·Produces first laughter and cries of joy with mouth wide open.
·Variations in pitch may occur within one vocalization up to three octaves.
·Sometimes her own voice will make her laugh at herself.
·Makes body movements accompanied by little sounds to get mother's attention
·May stop what she is doing just to listen more closely
·May attribute meaning to the speech hears by responding to different voices
·Enjoys taking conversational turns
Hand-Eye Coordination (4 months old)
·Waves small toys held in her hand
·Grabs toys near her
·Resists when you take a toy from her hand
·Begins to be aware of her hands & plays with fingers
·Looks at a place from which an object has dropped
·Slaps hands in water in the bathtub
·Eyesight has improved and she can focus far almost like an adult
·Increased control of her eye movements & can explore her visual environment looking longer at one toy after another
Motor Activity (4 months)
·Grasping is deliberate
·Turns head and move in all directions
·Head does not flop around when held upright
·May roll from front to back and vice versa
·Pulls herself around the crib
·Sits upright with support
Newborn 2 Months 3 Months 4 Months 5 Months 6 Months 9 Months
12 Months 15 Months 18 Months 24 Months 27-30 Months 36 Months
4 Years Old
Leo Leonidas, MD, FAAP, Assistant Clinical Professor in Pediatrics, Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston; Attending Pediatrician, Eastern Maine Medical Center, Bangor, Maine
Please send my your suggestions and comments to improve this site:
lleonidas@pcpediatrics.org
I wrote and designed this website for parents in our practice
at Maine. Before you use ideas from this website, please discuss it first with your clinician if you are not with our practice.
copyright Leo Leonidas 2002
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