A New Year and Time to set your Family Routines
Happy 2024! Welcoming a New Year is a perfect time to implement new routines and goals for your family. Routines can help limit poor behavior and outbursts. A lot of bad behavior is primarily triggered by hunger, tiredness or overstimulation, therefore developing a routine where they eat and sleep at certain times will help children emotionally prepare for the next task and understand what is expected of them when the task is completed. Routines help children learn essential life skills. Routines help children learn so much, from learning how to perform each task (getting dressed, brushing teeth etc) to learning how the world works and what they need to do in order to interact successfully in it. A simple daily routine provides a basis for children to learn other essential skills such as basic hygiene, time-management, self-control, self-care, responsibility, independence, and confidence.
Routines help bring you all closer as a family. Routines involve doing a lot of things together and while the tasks themselves might seem mundane, this can actually really help to strengthen family relationships. When building your ideal family routine, think about how you can create them around having fun or spending time together such as reading stories before bed or going somewhere for a treat after dance class or football practice. These moments will become a special time for you and your child to share and will be remembered when they grow older and make their own traditions.
What Does Child Development Include?
Child development covers the full scope of skills that a child masters over their life span including development in:
Cognition – the ability to learn and problem solve
Social interaction and emotional regulation – interacting with others and mastering self-control
Speech and Language – understanding and using language, reading and communicating
Physical skills – fine motor (finger) skills and gross motor (whole body) skills
Sensory awareness – the registration of sensory information for use
The number of children with developmental disabilities is on the rise with new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing that nearly 1 in 11 kids are diagnosed with autism, intellectual disability or developmental delay. Between 2019 and 2021, incidence of developmental disabilities grew from 7.4% to 8.56% among children ages 3 to 17 across the country.
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