Babies Growth & Development

Nurture plays a role in offering various opportunities for exploration and movement, and in modulating the pace and perhaps the style with which motor behaviours are expressed. The social context can either subdue and temper or evoke and encourage the way babies maneuver through their environment.

At birth, an infant's voluntary muscle responses are poorly coordinated. Most early motor responses appear to be reflexive, meaning that a specific stimulus will evoke a particular motor response without any voluntary control or direction. Many of these built-in responses help infants survive and lead them to developing more complicated sequences of voluntary behaviour. For example, the sucking reflex.

Babies have been shown to use their mouths to explore objects that they can identify visually. Babies' reflexes include sucking, grasping, rooting(turning the head in the direction of the cheek that is stroked), coughing and stepping. Voluntary reaching begins as the child tries to make contact with objects on the same side of the body as the outstretched hand. By 4 months babies will reach for objects placed on the same side, the opposite side, or in the middle of the body. By this age, babies have also become skilled in using both hands to hold an object, so that they are more able to keep the object close enough to investigate. Between 5-7 months, babies become increasingly accurate at reaching and grasping a moving object, alternating hands to intercept an object by anticipating the direction of its movement. By 12 months, babies have mastered the pincer grasp, using the index finger and thumb to pick tiny things. With this advance, they can also manipulate things by lifting latches, turning knobs, and placing small things inside bigger things and trying to get them out again. These activities give the baby new information about how object work and how they relate to one another.

Parents are often amazed at the fast growth and development of their baby. Babies' response to their environment is so amazing and many parents want to capture this special process of growth and development of their babies. Almost every parents nowadays take photographs and even take videos of their babies during their developmental stages. It is a joy and pride to see their babies growing healthily and happily. Most parents would want to spread and share their babies photographs with friends and families at Baby Photo Gallery. These are online community places where all parents can gather to exchange ideas, answer each other's questions and find answers to many puzzling questions which they might have when it comes to raising their children. For example, Soothing Your Crying Baby.