Throughout the first eight months of life, the infant develops their ability to regulate sleep patterns, eating and emotional expression. The infant becomes increasingly able to perceive and understand the world around them through their senses and by exploring their surroundings and gaining experiences in interaction with others.
By nine to ten months of age, motor development enables the infant to sit up, start crawling and actively explore the world around them. The infant is curious and interested. They enjoy developing their motor skills, whether it is rolling around, standing up, trying to crawl or reaching for things. They investigate everything within reach and can focus their interest and attention for a brief period of time. At this age, the infant can briefly concentrate on toys, food and other things that pique their interest, but they need help to maintain their attention. The infant reaches for things they find exciting and explores by touching, switching from hand to hand and putting things in their mouth.
During the first year of life, the infant develops their ability to understand bodily and linguistic cues and to respond with gestures (flailing arms and legs in response), smiling, vocal responses and increasingly nuanced babbling sounds. The nine-to-ten-month-old infant demonstrates their skills in eye contact, expression and body contact and in differentiated interaction with their parents, characterised by answer-reply.
Emotionally, the infant expresses themself in more and more nuanced ways, and it becomes clearer whether they are happy, relaxed, satisfied or dissatisfied, irritable, angry or sad.
Development can differ significantly for children at this age
Children do not have the same pace of development, and delays or disruptions in development do not necessarily mean that there is something wrong with the child. At the same time, we now have new knowledge about different types of difficulties during this period. We know that difficulties can be an expression of a vulnerability in the child, who will benefit from support in this regard to ensure their development in the years to come. This could be difficulties in regulating sleep, eating, attention and emotional reactions, or developmental deviations in motor skills or the development of language or contact.
Problems in these areas are often non-specific signs of vulnerability, whereby problems in one area may be an expression of vulnerabilities in other areas of development. For example, both sleep problems and eating problems may reflect various forms of developmental immaturity and regulation, and they may also reflect vulnerabilities in relation to emotional regulation.
The DIMHP’s training and its user manual enable the community health nurse to gain an overview of the child’s development and functioning across the areas of psychological development that are in play at the child’s ninth to tenth month of age. In addition, the community health nurse is trained to include the full range of developmental vulnerabilities and potentials when counselling parents.
You can read more about the DIMHP here.
Additional reading on infants’ development and function can be found here.