Did You Know...?
Infant & Toddler Development

Read each true/false statement and test your answers by placing your cursor over the question mark.

	During the first year of life, most infants triple their body weight.
	Proportionally, all parts of the body grow at about the same rate during the first two years.
	At birth, the nervous system contains only a fraction of the neurons the developing person will need.
	At birth, infants’ vision is better developed than their hearing.
	At birth, newborns cannot focus well on objects at any distance.
	All healthy infants develop the same motor skills in the same sequence.
	Age norms for the development of motor skills, such as sitting up and walking, vary from group to group and place to place.
	Because of differing infant-care routines, ethnicity is considered a factor in SIDS.
	Approximately 8% of the world’s children are severely protein-calorie malnourished in their early years.
	Chronic malnutrition during infancy may lead to permanent damage to the developing brain.
	If a 5-month-old drops a rattle out of the crib, the baby probably will not look down to search for it.
	Most developmentalists consider perception to be an automatic process that everyone experience in the same way.
	Only infants age 9 months or older notice the difference between a solid surface and an apparent cliff.
	Infants look longer at strangers whose images and voices indicate happiness than at the familiar faces of their mothers.
	Infants’ long-term memory is actually very good.
	At 1 year, infants can imitate the actions of a person they observed a day earlier.
	Children the world over follow the same sequence in early language development.
	Deaf babies begin to make babbling sounds several months later than hearing infants do.
	When they first begin combining words, infants tend to put them in reverse order, as in “juice more.”
	Most developmentalists believe that infants develop language in many ways, depending on a variety of factors.
	In the traditional view of personality development, mothers and fathers share equally in shaping infant character.
	According to Freud, an adult who eats, drinks, chews, bites, or smokes excessively may have been weaned too early.
	Unlike Freud, Erikson believe that problems that being in early infancy can last a lifetime.
	In part because of inborn temperamental characteristics, some children are more difficult to raise and harder to live with.
	Change in temperament is not possible, according to epigenetic theory.
	Infant fear, as expressed in stranger wariness, signals abnormal development.
	Attachment patterns established in infancy almost never change.
	Social referencing - searching the expressions of others for emotional cues- becomes very important as infants begin crawling and walking.
	Infants use their fathers for emotional cues in uncertain situations as much as their mothers.
	High-quality day care, even during the infant’s first year, does not lead to negative developmental outcomes.