Your responsiveness to your baby’s needs is the first step

• There are two keys to building a healthy emotional foundation for your child: encouraging joy and relieving distress. Throughout the first 18 months, your baby should have ample opportunity to feel joyful, Your play, games, songs, readings, and conversations are the basis for her growing expression of positive emotions, of different types and at different levels.

• Many experiences are needed by your baby in which you help relieve her negative emotions. Not only needed releif is provided but also stregnthens the attraction between both the caretaker and the child. This is a crucial issue in socio-emotional development and essential to later growth and functioning. It is too early during the first 18 months to teach the need to control or delay the expression of some types of emotions. There will be plenty of learning opportunities for this later.

• Be Responsive Extensive research confirms that parents who can read their babies' cues and respond to them promptly will have children who are more social, more appropriate in their interactions, and more empathetic. These foundations for a socially and emotionally competent child and adult are being laid in the early years through parents' efforts to show their infants that feelings are important to well-being and to social interaction.

• The better you are at reading your child's cues, the sooner you can intervene to lessen negative emotions and elicit positive ones. As with much of parenting, you will learn what works by trial and error. The good news is that you can trust your baby to tell you what he is feeling by his facial gestures, sounds, and body and hand movements.

• Babies react negatively, When exposed to a quiet and unresponsive face. This reaction indicates that they somehow know that they need to be with someone who gives clear cues, especially smiles and coos, on a regular basis. Since almost all learning occurs within a social context in early life, this interconnectedness in thinking, feeling, and social development is reinforced as a firm part of your baby's foundation for life.

5 Important Speech Milestones
All children develop at different rates, but you still need to observe yours to make sure he hits certain targets on time. If you are concerned about your child's language skills, and he hasn't met the following milestones, ask your pediatrician for advice and a referral for an evaluation.

• 12 months: begins to understand that sounds hold meaning

• 18 months: utters single words, both nouns and verbs; can follow easy instructions ("give me your ball")

• 24 months: has a better understanding of the language around him; speaks in two- to three-word phrases

• 30 months: uses and understands plural nouns and negatives; speaks in short sentences; understands at least one color; asks questions about "what" and "where"

• 36 months: Exhibits spatial awareness through his words ("The ball is under the table"), understands correlation between actions in a picture and actions in real life; knows at least one song; asks questions about "why" and "who"