The development phases of the young child are a fascinating process. The article below offers a glimpse into language development. Children between the ages of four and seven develop through play based on the language they use and the games they play. They create their own world of thought and experience from which personality development takes place, partly due to the reactions of parents to this: it is important that parents take reasoning seriously.
Providing language development and sufficient development opportunities
It is important for language development, but also development in every area, that sufficient development opportunities are offered in the first six years of a child’s life. Only the synapses (synapse is a transmission site of the impulse) in the neural networks that are used over and over again will survive. This creates a preliminary structure of constructed neural pathways. In normal language: you should compare this with a walking path to the dunes. The more often you walk along a certain path, the more solid the structure of the path becomes: at first there were only some footprints to be discovered in the sand and a clearly recognizable path is created when it is walked more often. This means that in the first six years children must be offered sufficient development opportunities to develop skills for now and later. With insufficient stimulation, insufficient connections are formed and certain skills may never be learned.
So offer language in abundance
The connections are stabilized and strengthened over a period of six to ten years . As a result, the neural pathways become increasingly permanent and eventually become permanent. Language development means that you have to offer language. In order to achieve and ensure proper language development, it is very important to provide children with sufficient language! This preferably happens from the moment they are born. When the child is a baby you can sing songs and answering the baby’s cries is also very important. When the child is a toddler, you naturally also answer his questions/comments, sing songs, and name things. You respond to the child’s initiatives to communicate. Children younger than six months respond equally strongly to sounds from different languages. Children older than six months respond much more strongly to sounds from their own language than to sounds from other countries. The brain starts to focus on sounds from its own language system at a very early age. Listening very quickly becomes language specific. Environmental noise slows down listening development.
Children develop at their own pace
Children are gradually led out of magical thinking and introduced into concrete thinking , between the ages of four and seven. Every child experiences this process at his own pace. It is therefore not wise for a parent to interfere too much with the child’s play with the aim of accelerating development . There are all kinds of educational toys on the market to give your child a head start, including in terms of language development. But if you know that a child does everything at his own pace and indicates his own needs , you understand that it is nonsense to go along with the hype of educational toys. It is characteristic of development that language development, social-emotional development, cognitive development and motor development show a parallel that no longer occurs to such an extent at a later age. It is also characteristic of language development that it is the combination of thinking, talking, fantasizing and playing that ensures proper language development.