YOUNG CHILDREN (1 YEAR AND OLDER)
- All outside play near the street or driveway should be strictly supervised. Be especially careful when backing out of the driveway.
- Other measures concerning car safety, poisoning, drowning prevention, sunburn and burn prevention, as mentioned before, all apply to this age group.
- Children should not ride on motorized machinery with parents. These include lawn tractors, lawn mowers, all-terrain vehicles, farm vehicles, industrial equipment and other like machinery. Severe injury may result.
- Take extra care to provide protection for your child from animal bites. Even trusted pets can produce significant bite wounds in young children of this age. If your child is bitten by an animal, consult the section on bites in this handbook.
- Speech and hearing should be things of which you take notice. If your child has a poor response to noise or voice, has slow language or speech development, let us know this at your routine check-up examination. At 15 to 18 months of age, your child will be screened for autism with a questionnaire called M-CHAT. If you feel that your child is delayed in an area of development such as speech, make an appointment to evaluate this condition. Please see the section on growth and development for normal time tables of development.
- Please know that multi-lingual children may experience mild language delay in each of the languages that they know. However, the combined total number of words from all the languages that they know should be normal for their age. This perceived “language delay” generally resolves in the first few years of life as the child learns more and more words in each language. Speaking multiple languages is actually encouraged for young children as it develops enhanced brain power, contributes to family cohesion (especially if grandparents do not speak English) and makes multicultural interactions possible. It is a big mistake to let ancestral languages drop out of use in a family’s children.
- Continue to limit screen time.
- By the time a child is two years of age, the car seat may be faced forward. This change does reduce the incidence of leaving a child in a hot car, however continued diligence is still needed. A child should remain in a car seat until the child is approximately 40 pounds or about four years of age at which time a booster seat is needed. Our car seat recommendations can be found here.
