What should a child at 1-1.5 years old be able to do?

During the first 12 months of life, your child has undergone such significant changes that their rapidity can only be compared to the growth rate of bamboo! Just imagine: from a tiny, red, constantly screaming "worm" the child turns into a little person. His almost vegetative (in the first months of life) capabilities, consisting of alternating sleep, feeding and crying, have expanded so much that you are already interested in communicating with him. The baggage with which the child crosses the threshold of the second year of life is not so small. Certain successes have already been achieved in motor skills, successive stages of sitting, standing, crawling, walking and even attempts at running have been passed. The child can take objects with his hands, throw them. Moreover, already at this age you notice that one of the hands becomes the leading one and you can already determine whether your child is right-handed or left-handed.

The emotional sphere becomes quite rich (compared to the monotonous emotions of the first months, which consisted of expressing pleasure or displeasure). Now the child can express not only them, but also joy, reaching delight, and he can intensify displeasure to anger, turning into rage. Curiosity appears, which can already be read on his face. It is quite clear when the child is afraid of something or surprised by something. Moreover, it is not so much the richness of emotions themselves that is important, but the variety of reasons for their manifestation, which the child can distinguish.

At this time, all the child's movements, all forms of activity are already imbued with emotionality. He jumps, runs, tears paper, throws a cube or other toys, listens to unfamiliar sounds coming from another room or corridor, and you can always see quite expressive emotions on his face. They are manifested in the form of facial expressions, gestures, etc. A smile is a facial movement characteristic only of humans. It appears in the first months of life, and by the end of the first year is supplemented by laughter, stretching out little hands and various vowel sounds.

At this age, the child already plays quite consciously. If he is left alone and has nothing to play with, loneliness begins to weigh him down. But as soon as he sees familiar faces, joy simply overwhelms him.

By the end of the first year, the child begins to master speech and enters the second year having mastered monosyllabic and even some disyllabic words. But his vocabulary is much larger due to those he knows but cannot pronounce.

Having stood up, the child strives to conquer space. For this, he needs more time. Thus, from the "sleeping beauty" (in the first months of life, the child sleeps about 20 hours), he gradually moves into a regime where only 10-13 hours are allocated for sleep. The rest of the time, the child does not know a minute of rest. Everything that surrounds the child attracts his sensory and motor functions: he tries to touch everything, grabs everything that comes to hand, pulls various objects into his mouth, and if he cannot get some thing that interests him, he begins to demand that it be given to him. All these acts can be combined into one common colorful picture, which is called emotionality. Moreover, not only the facial muscles and skeletal muscles participate in it, but also all other functional systems of the body - cardiovascular, respiratory, endocrine, nervous. Thus, a one-year-old child reaches a certain level of social development, but it is still quite primitive, since the baby has not yet fully formed the concept of prohibition (he already knows some of the "taboos", but does not always follow them). That is, he can periodically check whether it is really impossible to do something that adults prohibit him from doing, or whether the prohibition can be violated. At the same time, he can already try to disguise his actions so that he is not interrupted at the very beginning. At this age, the child's individuality begins to emerge.

At the end of the first - beginning of the second year of life, the child continues to master independent walking. Some children, having already learned to walk, continue to crawl after a year and, in order to reach their goal faster, instead of running, they get down on all fours and crawl very quickly, or rather, "run" on all fours. At the same time, the crawling methods are improved and varied. At the same time, holding the head, straightening the neck, arms and back, simultaneous rotation in opposite directions of the body and shoulders, body and pelvis, differentiated movements of the shoulders and arms, body, legs and pelvis are noted. Mastered before the age of one, these movements begin to combine into new motor skills.

For some time, babies continue to walk "sideways". At the age of 12-15 months, the child may no longer hold on to a support, but he is not yet able to turn back from this position to get a toy. This will only become possible by the age of one and a half years. In a vertical position, the child is not yet able to fully straighten his legs, so he stands "belly forward", and his legs are slightly turned out.

The more stable a child stands, the better his legs are developed. The hips and knees begin to straighten freely, and plantar flexion is formed in the feet. Thanks to this, a heel-toe form of step appears with initial support on the heel, and then on the toes - the so-called roll.

Starting from one and a half years, the baby independently gets up from a position on the stomach and on the back. The way of walking becomes more perfect: he no longer spreads his legs wide. The arms, which the child previously raised to shoulder level, trying to grab onto surrounding objects to insure himself, are now lowered along the body.

The main means of learning about the world for a child remains play. To do this, he manipulates various objects. He picked them up before, but now, at the beginning of the second year of life, these actions with objects (toys, dishes, household items) have become more diverse and have acquired a different quality. Now actions with them are carried out not only with the help of hands and eyes. The neck, body and especially the legs play a big role. After all, now you can approach an interesting object.

At the age of one to one and a half years, the child begins to feel, turn over, shake, disassemble, separate, and then connect objects. He moves them from place to place, as if checking where they will look better. He can knock them, especially if the objects make a melodic sound when struck. At this age, children begin to learn to throw and catch a ball.

Starting from the first months of the second year of life, a child tries, and not without success, to move furniture. He can push a stool or chair around the kitchen for quite a long time, pull it out from under the table, push it back in, move it into the room or move around the entire apartment with it. At the same time, you need to make sure that the stool does not fall and kill the child. He can pull a car on a string, transport it from place to place, hide it under the bed or in a closet, etc. Such motor activity is of great importance for the development of the child's motor skills, for developing the precision and coordination of his movements, subordinating the work of his arms and legs to the control of the eye. The formation of increasingly precise coordination of movements during this period leads to the development of the child's stability of attention, the accuracy of his perception, and the development of his volitional efforts.

If earlier the child sat in the mother's arms or in the crib and saw all objects directly in front of him, not seeing them from the other side, then when he starts walking, he goes around them from the other side, getting acquainted with their size, learning the volume of objects. When children start walking, they get acquainted with the distance and direction in which they make their movements.

Having learned to walk around the room and then go beyond its boundaries, the child constantly encounters difficulties, unexpected obstacles that he is forced to overcome, problems that he must solve. For example, a child pulls a mop, which suddenly gets caught on a table leg, but he does not see this and continues to pull and tug it. And if the mop does not give in, the child begins to ask adults for help. Watching how an adult frees the mop, he learns to find the cause of the difficulty, and most importantly - to find a way out of the difficulty. In this way, the initial forms of thinking develop. This form of thinking is called "thinking with hands" and it is extremely necessary for the further mental development of the child.

A child wants to get a car from a high shelf. To do this, he needs to put a stool under it, climb on it and only then grab the desired toy. He puts a stool under it, climbs on it, but it turns out that the stool is too far from the shelf and he cannot get the car. He gets off the stool, moves it closer, climbs on it again and only then gets the desired toy. In this way, he learns to achieve his goal, which develops his independence and persistence. At the same time, your task is to ensure that achieving the goal is not dangerous for the child, but at the same time it is important to encourage the baby to such efforts.

In parallel with the improvement of mobility, fine motor skills are also developing. The child is becoming more dexterous! He can already take small objects with his fingers, take apart mom's jewelry, open the caps of medicine bottles, etc. And this is already becoming dangerous! Especially since all this goes into the mouth, since the mouth is still an organ of cognition. Thus, there is a risk of poisoning or getting a foreign body into the respiratory tract. If you simply take these objects away or simply scold him, the baby will still try to "outwit" you and get his way. Therefore, having noticed that the child is doing something inadmissible, it is better to switch his attention to another game, and put dangerous objects where he cannot get to. Although in some cases you can allow him to do what he wants - let the child himself feel and understand that what he is doing can cause pain. (For example, a baby got to a box of needles. He turned it over and spilled the needles on the carpet. Then he started to rake the pile of needles with his palm and pricked himself. There is pain and surprise on his face, turned towards his mother. His mother had previously explained to him that needles can prick his hand, and now she repeated the same thing. After that, the baby stopped touching the box: the injury is minor, but how instructive!)