5 Skills your child can develop in an Infant Care
5 Skills your child can develop in an Infant Care
Are you thinking of placing your baby in an Infant care centre? Do you need some alone time for yourself? Even though your baby is your most precious thing ever, it’s completely normal to want some time for yourselves. After all, having to work, do house chores and take care of a baby 24/7 will get increasingly exhausting. If you are looking for an article that tells you the reasons to choose an infant care centre, you’re in the right place!
Handing over your baby to a caretaker is hard….
Most parents start to look for alternative solutions such as hiring domestic helpers or even asking relatives or grandparents for help to care for their babies. These are all common options that run through a parent’s mind when thinking about how to provide the best care for their baby.
In Singapore, an Infant Care centre is a great alternative. Infant educators are certified and trained in infant first aid and most already have experience when it comes to taking care of infants. As such, the benefits of having your baby in an environment designed just for infants are numerous.
Mulberry Infant Care
1. Social Skills
Although babies do need lots of care and love, developing social skills start as early as their first year. In infant care, babies learn to take turns and share their toys. They learn to be patient and respectful towards others and not snatch or fight with others.
Observation is an important skill that babies pick up to communicate with other children and understand their environment. Babies may not know how to speak proper words and sentences yet, but they are very good at observing. Facial expressions and voices are vital when it comes to learning how to pick up social cues for your child. A simple smile with a higher pitch in voice expresses happiness and frowning with a low pitch voice expresses anger or frustration.
These expressions and interactions come naturally to us, but it is everything to your child at their age. Over time, they will learn to speak words like you do and pick up expressions while linking them to their own emotions. To them, it’s the start of learning how the world functions and how their environment works.
2. Fine Motor and Visual Cognition
In infant care, babies learn how to use their bodies, especially their hands and legs. The closest feeling we can probably get to how they felt when learning how to hold something is probably when you first stepped into a car and placed your hands on the wheel. In their eyes, everything is new. If you ever see your child crawling towards a random item and slowly picking it up and dropping or throwing it on purpose, please do not be angry at them. It’s simply their way of figuring out how something works.
As they explore their surroundings in infant care, their educators would be able to verbalize colours and shapes for them. To us, a ball may just be that a ball. To them, a ball is red and round and soft to the touch, and bounces when it falls.
Trained educators will be able to see things from a baby’s perspective and guide them to pick up these skills at their own pace. They know how to help a child understand their environment and infant care provides them with a specialized and safe environment to do it.
3. Linguistics Development
Your child’s first words would be one of the most exciting moments as it gives you an insight into what is happening in their little minds. Most children can pick up speech naturally as they interact more with their surroundings and their caretakers. They learn how to communicate and even respond to questions in due time.
In a specialized environment like infant care, they are motivated to pick up speech faster. Observing their caregivers and other children allows them to understand and link sounds to objects.
4. Emotional Development
Providing a loving and nurturing relationship for your child is important because it gives them a strong sense of comfort and safety, which in turn, helps to build their confidence.
Through positive interactions, they can develop the skills they need to socialize and interact with their peers in the future. In an infant care centre, babies become aware of their feelings, thoughts, and behaviours. They learn how to self-soothe themselves to sleep as they are being cuddled by a caregiver and understand that they are in a safe environment.
They also learn a crucial skill, taking responsibility. As they learn how to use their hands and legs, they would also learn the effects of their actions over time. They learn that simply picking up a ball and throwing it can injure others and their environment. Most importantly, caregivers can also guide them to understand that throwing things at others is the wrong thing to do.
5. Exploratory Skills
At such a young age, the most prevalent emotion they have is curiosity. Your child would want to see, touch, feel, hear and even taste (by licking objects) to understand an item. If you see your child picking up an item and placing it in their mouth, don’t be surprised, it is just one of the five ways they know to help them understand how an item works.
Through hands-on activities in infant care, curiosity is an emotion that is encouraged and cultivated in babies. We want them to reach out and discover new things on their own.
This is a handy skill, especially in their early years when forming their play groups to focus on hands-on learning and exploration in their curriculum.
If you were already considering infant care centres as a place to take care of your baby while you go off to work, we hope to have helped in your decision to do so 😊. If you have any lingering questions, please feel free to contact us at [email protected].
Families in the North, rejoice! T-Play Khatib is a fun-tastic indoor playground located at HomeTeamNS Khatib. This site is especially unique as it is heavily inspired by Southeast Asia’s Peranakan culture, making for an interesting change of scenery for your little one! This facility features unique and exciting play areas, such as a sports pitch, foam ball shooting arena, and a ninja course for your child to unleash their little ninja!
Every parent understands how it feels to have their child do something seemingly “out of character” and wonder…where did he/she pick it up from? Or when you are doing household chores or preparing to go to work, and they picked that exact time on purpose to break something. It can be increasingly frustrating, and it would be easy for you to snap at them. This is how not to set an example.
Mulberry Learning prides itself on making the preschool experience both memorable and enjoyable while transforming a child into a competent explorer, an imaginative thinker, and a creative problem solver. Through our proprietary award-winning curriculum, unique Habits of Mind programme and dedicated staff who are passionate about imparting positive attitudes, Mulberry Learning holds strong in its promise to deliver a holistic education that nurtures the Future Ready Child.
A PREMIUM PRESCHOOL BRAND UNDER GLOBAL EDUHUB