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Questions & Answers - Developmental Concerns
My son turned a year old a couple weeks ago. He was a few weeks
early, but not technically premature. He is not yet clapping, pointing,
waving, or playing peek-a-boo. He also really only says, "Dada."
However, at times he has sounded like he is saying "mama," and "night,
night" at bedtime. I've been trying to get him to use some musical toys
to get him to use his arms. He held the drum sticks for a little while
and hit the drum with both arms, but later I saw him mostly putting the
various instruments in his mouth. I tried to get him to stack blocks and
similar issue; he tried for a little with help, but then put them in his
mouth. We are concerned that he has some type of developmental delay and
wonder what we should do or if it is too soon to tell. He does pull to
stand up, cruises, feeds himself with fingers, holds bottle but tilts
head back, smiles, acknowledges when we enter the room, responds to
"no," and his "name."
I've tried to use sign language, but he has not picked up on it yet.
He was diagnosed a couple months ago with mild hearing loss and had
tubes put in a couple weeks ago. This did seem to make a difference in
how well he responds to sound. He is our second child. His sister tends
to like to get all the attention. We've thought that this might be
contributing to his learning delay at first, but now we're very worried.
We will be seeing his doctor next week for his 1 year old checkup. Any
advice?
It sounds like your son is doing fairly typical things for a little
boy who just turned one. It is certainly not uncommon for 12 month olds
to continue to prefer to mouth toys over functionally playing with toys.
It is great that you are continuing to encourage functional play by
using specific toys like the drum and blocks. Usually at this age,
anything with noise, lights and/or music as an incentive to keep
repeating an action on a toy will hold a baby's attention for a few
minutes. Do not expect him to play with one toy for more than a minute
or two, as even 2 year olds only have average attention spans of about 3
to 5 minutes per toy. At his age, you can encourage dropping toys into
large buckets or cans (coffee cans with the edges taped to avoid
sharpness make a nice loud noise when toys are dropped inside) and
encourage a voluntary release of objects, which helps work on fine motor
skills.
Encourage finger isolation for pointing by using buttons on pop up
boxes. At snack time, drop a single Cheerio into each opening in an
empty egg carton (hold the carton steady for him) and encourage him to
use his thumb and fingers to get them out, moving toward a neat pincer
grasp. Since he is making a variety of consonant-vowel sounds that is
good too, and just continue to encourage him to make attempts at new
sounds-environmental sounds and animal sounds are the most fun (moo,
woof, ding-dong, wheee). Continue to practice with encouraging the
gestures you mentioned-clapping, waving, pointing and also continue to
practice daily with simple signs like "more", "eat", "drink"....you can
use hand over hand to facilitate. Use music and finger plays such as
Wheels on the Bus and Itsy Bitsy Spider, and enlist his sister as a
helper.
Sometimes a baby will imitate a sibling more so than a adult family
member. Encourage moving away from the bottle to a straw cup rather than
a sipper cup for better oral motor practice needed for speech. Lastly,
since you mentioned tubes and a diagnosis of a mild hearing impairment
(was this conductive due to fluid in the ears and multiple ear
infections?), it wouldn't hurt to seek an early intervention evaluation
since even a mild temporary hearing loss can have a great impact on
speech development and later learning. If the diagnosis of the hearing
impairment was permanent or sensorineural in nature, than do seek
immediate services. Of course, go by your doctor's advice at his one
year check up, but sometimes doctors will take a "wait & see" approach
and in early intervention we would rather assess a baby NOW and say "no
he doesn't qualify for services" rather than see a child at 18mos-2
years and says "why wasn't this child referred earlier?".
This may be a resource in your area:
State of Ohio: Early Intervention Services
1952 West Broad Street, Columbus, OH 43223-1260
(614) 644-8389
Back to: Therapist
Questions & Answers - Developmental Concerns