Even though the thought of taking charge of your child’s education can be idealized, it is important to take the following factors into consideration:

• It requires time . Giving your child an education that meets the requirements of your local government, involves spending a lot of time preparing and teaching. There are experiments and projects that need to be done, you have to grade papers, organize and go on outings, give music lessons, etc.
• Personal sacrifice . You have to realize that home schooling your child will mean that you spend more time with him/her, and have less time to yourself. It is very important to keep a good balance and ensure that you have support structures in place in order to make personal time.
• Financial sacrifice . It is quite improbable that the parent taking charge of teaching, will be able to hold down a full time job. If you are used to be a two income family – certain adjustments will have to be made in the household.
• Socialization . Many people are concerned that when you home school your child, he/she loses out on contact with peers. It is a valid concern, which will require you to organize socialization time with other children in the form of outings, sport or other activities and also play time.
• Household organization . If you are used to having your house spic and span by 9am, you may be in for a shock. As mentioned earlier, home schooling involves you spending alot of time with your child, meaning that the washing and ironing might have to wait while you are teaching your child to build a volcano. It is important that chores get divided and time reallocated to tasks, everyone will have to make sacrifices in order to have the household running optimally.
• Agreement . Both parents have to agree on the decision to home school their child. They have to be in agreement over how it will affect the household and how to deal with it. It is also important that if only one parent is taking charge of the education, that the other parent acknowledge the need for social and emotional support.
• Willingness . Lastly it is extremely important that your child is willing and enthusiastic about being schooled at home.

Fortunately, home based education does not mean that you as the parent are left to your own devices to formulate a curriculum and try to copy what you learnt at school.  There are many structured programs available which ranges from online programs to virtual schools.  Groups have been formed to give support and advice to other parents.  Cooperative home schooling involves families getting together for a couple of hours a week, where the parents can share their expertise with the children as a group in a certain subject.  Sometimes experts are brought in to teach more involved subject matter.

Steve Moitozo is an avid supporter of home schooling and feels the advantages of home schooling can be summarized into four main points:
1.   Religious and Philosophical convictions . People with strong convictions can build these convictions and beliefs into every aspect of their curriculum and therefore take charge of  topics and subject matter.  This is one of the biggest advantages – the ability to teach your child according to your belief structure.
2.   Socialization . With home schooling socialization becomes community based and not classroom based.  Children learn to interact with not only the children in their class, who are the same age, but also older and younger children.  Being schooled at home, expose them to real world problem solving.  They see their parents dealing with household and social problems and learn from that.  The children do not sit isolated in a class room being mostly exposed to theoretical problems.
3.    Academic excellence . Home schooling gives the parent the opportunity to focus academically on the child’s own level of mastery, versus a class room where he might be held back by his peers or left behind.  It gives the child the chance to work at his own pace – it is not a bell that indicates the time allocated to a certain subject.  The parent can work with the child’s own learning style in opposition to children at school who only get exposed to the teacher’s teaching style.
4.   Time as a family . The family get to spend more time together, without their child sitting in  a school environment for six hours a day from the age of 5 or 6.  The family get to be the influencing party, without the child being exposed only peers most of the time.

Home schooling can be a wonderful experience for both the parents and the children, but it is important to take it one year at a time.  The decision to send your child to school again can be just as difficult to make than the original decision to home school.  It is important at all times that the best interest of the child (socially, emotionally and cognitively) be kept in mind.

We find 6 different kinds of play , but elements of these types do overlap with each other.  This classification makes it easier to identify toys and tools that would assist in these kinds of playing.

1. Active Play : As the name indicates, active play involves moving and physical activity. When children are active, they are running, riding, building, swinging or even kicking. During active play the child gets physically challenged. Through active play the gross and fine muscles are exercised and an integration of muscles, nerves and brain functions takes place. Toys that promote physical activity are balls, bikes, bats, playground equipment, trampolines, jumping castles and rackets.
2. Cooperative Play : Cooperative play happens when two or more children interact in game that gives mutual pleasure.  This involves group play and can be inside or outside. This type of play is important in your child’s development, seeing that children learn through watching other children interact in a positive social manner.  Children learn acceptable social interaction through pretend play.  Type of games that require cooperation are sports, board games and pretend play.
3. Creative Play : This type of play includes all kinds of imaginative games, constructive games, music, dance, building, painting, molding and other crafts.  Play dough, pencils, paint, building blocks and musical instruments will stimulate creative play.  Do make sure to provide the appropriate equipment and environment, otherwise your little painter might use your walls for his masterpiece. Creative play is the type of play which gives children a sense of accomplishment and empowers them to become good at manipulating words, ideas and concepts.
4. Dramatic Play : Again, this type of play is built on the imaginative powers of the young ones.  It entails make-believe, dress-up, dolls and puppets.  Through dramatic play children start role-playing often imitating social interactions and scenes that they have seen before.  Dramatic play requires flexible thinking and future oriented thought.  Children can live out their experiences and dreams in a risk free environment.
5. Manipulative Play : Manipulative play involves the development of hand-eye coordination and finer motor skills.  Children use tools to color and cut and manipulate pieces of a puzzle to fit.
6. Quiet Play : This is the type of play that gives parents a breather.   Children intellectually engages in reading or paging through books, building puzzles or blocks or maybe even beading.  Quiet play gives your child a chance to think and reason, with his mouth closed and his mind open.

Children’s play develop through different stages:

1. Uninvolved Play : During this type of play the child does not seem to be playing, but merely keeps himself busy through watching anything that he finds interesting.  If he cannot find anything in the environment that fascinates him, he will play with his own body, climb on and off furniture or just sits in the room looking around.
2. Solitary Play: Here the child plays on his own with toys and does not try to make contact with other children.  He carries on on his own, despite what other children might be doing.
3. Spectator Play : The child watch other children playing.  Even though he might be asking questions and talk to these children, he does not participate in their game.
4. Parallel Play : Here the child plays independently next to other children, but not with them.  They might even be playing with similar toys, but no interaction takes place between the children.
5. Associative Play : Finally the child starts playing with other children. Talking is the most common activity, but the passing of toys to each other and also following each others cars or dolls take place.  The child still does what he feels like, not taking the other one’s wishes into consideration.
6. Cooperative Play : Children play in groups organized to reach a certain goal – the making of something or winning a formal game (hide and seek).  The children accepts certain role responsibilities and sees the group as an exclusive group with its own identity.

Even though play might from the outside look meaningless and a frivolous spending of time, different types of play equip children for the expectations held for older children and adults in our society.  It is therefore important to encourage a variety of play, maybe even  a variety of playmates to help children develop optimilay.  Play is hard work for children.

We can notice their cognitive growth even in their play.  Children start to pretend play.  In their pretend play they often imitate adults’ actions and language.  We often only become aware of our own unique little habits when we see our children imitate us. Where a lot of the childrens’ play were directed earlier at objects, it now shifts to people and events.

Your toddler’s language skills develop quickly.  They can give names to certain objects.  They understand words and commands given to them, and can respond appropriately to those commands.  It is important to remember during this phase, your child understands more than he can express – which leads to immense frustration when he cannot convey what he feels accurately.  Because his attention span increases, he can concentrate for longer and can recognize and identify familiar objects in storybooks with your help. He can also match similar objects or pictures. At 19 months a average child would be able use about 20 words accurately.  This increases to 100 words at 24 months.  A two year old starts combining his words to form two word sentences.

During the toddler years he starts recognizing himself as a person apart from his mother.  He forms a sense of self, becomes more independent and starts exploring his environment with enthusiasm.  Being not connected to his mother, he can start imagining threats and become clingy. Often toddlers become fearful of strangers due to an overactive imagination. A toddler becomes aware of his own body and can usually identify different body parts accurately.

In addition to these skills, they also develop certain practical skills:

• They can throw things out of containers
• They can tear paper
• They can pull things over
• They can put things in containers and take it out again
• They can solve simple problems and
• They can throw objects.

A parent needs to watch a toddler with hawk eyes – they are quick, innovative and extremely daring.  Some people will even go as far to say toddlers can be innocently destructive in their behaviour – who can be angry with the child drawing his first picture of him and mommy on the wall?

Contrary to most parents’ descriptions, newborns are not exactly pretty – they have a swollen bluish and reddish face, a broad flat nose, swollen eyelids and ears that seem somewhat misplaced.  Sometimes the shape of the face is misshapened due to the long path down the birth channel.  The little body is covered in a white substance, vernix caseosa, which protects the baby from infection and dries off in a few days. Some babies are still covered in fine hair, lanugo, which falls out during the first month. Newborns exhibit prominent external sex organs and both sexes’ nipples are swollen due to high amounts of estrogen in the mother’s blood before giving birth.

In addition to these features, the body proportions of newborns differ substantially from the proportion of an adult body.
The head makes up one fourth of the total body in contrast with the eighth of an adult’s. The neck muscles are not able to keep the head up at this point in time.

The average weight of a newborn varies between 2.5 and 4.5kg, with most weighing between 3 and 3.5kg.  Girls tend to weigh less than boys at birth and firstborns tend to be lighter than siblings.

Most parents experience that their infants lose up to 10% of their body weight in the first couple of days in hospital, but will regain it with a week or two once feeding is established. Boys tend to be taller than their counterparts, with the average length being around 45 to 56cm. A newborn baby’s heartbeat varies between 120 and 150 beats per minute, going up when stressed and down when resting.

The apgar-scale is used to evaluate an infant at birth.  This evaluation gets done twice – one minute after birth and again 5 minutes after birth.
A:     Appearance (Colour)
G:    Grimace (Reflex irritability)
P:    Pulse (Heartbeat)
A:    Activity (Muscle tone)
R:    Respiration (Breathing)

Each of these aspects gets scored as zero, one or two, with zero being the worst score and two the best score. The scores get combined with a maximum score of ten.  Most babies score 7 or more.  A score of 4 is indicative of further evaluation and treatment.

The debate between breastfeeding and bottlefeeding is ongoing with the proponents of breastfeeding pointing out the following advantages:

• The anti-bodies in breastmilk provides the baby important immunity against various illnesses like allergies, bronchitis and pneumonia.
• Breastfed babies tend to have healthier teeth and are less likely as adults to develop arteriosclerosis early in life.
• Breast milk has the advantage of being easily digested by babies and the fat in mothersmilk gets absorbed almost 100%, while on average only 80% of the fat in formula gets absorbed.
• The risk of obesity in bottlefed babies is higher than for breastfed babies.    The most commonly accepted explanation being that babies being breast fed stop sucking when they are not hungry anymore, whilst a mom bottlefeeding might believe that the bottle should be emptied.
• Breastfeeding is more practical – being more economical, always available and at the right temperature. This mother also does not to carry all the preparations necessary for bottlefeeding when leaving the house.
• Breastfeeding can give the baby an extra sense of security with the advantage of better bonding.

Their counterparts believe:

• That bottlefeeding can give a similar bond between mother and child and does not hold any negative consequences for social relationships in the future.
• It gives the mother a feeling of physical freedom which the breastfeeding mother does not have.
• Substances like tabaco, alcohol and medicines can be transferred to the baby via breastmilk. This will not happen when the baby is bottlefed.
• Some mothers cannot or do not want to breastfeed.  If these mothers can bottlefeed without the negative association with breastfeeding, the bonding process can continue unscathed.
• The threat of transferring HIV to an infant should also be considered as a potential draw-back of breastfeeding.
• It gives the working mother the opportunity to continue with her career, knowing that her child is getting sufficient nutrition.
• Babies can be affected negatively by certain foods, and may even be allergic, this impacts on the mother’s ability to choose food and can lead to alot of anxiety around food choices.

The group of people supporting bottlefeeding are not by any way saying that  breastfeeding is bad, they would just like more tolerance and respect for mothers who decide to go the route of giving their child formula.

In the first two years of a child’s life he has to master certain tasks:

1. He learns to walk.
2. He learns to ingest solid food.
3. He learns the basics of communication through language.
4. He starts to learn to use the toilet.
5. He falls into a routine of sleep, eat and interacting.
6. He develops an emotional communication with his parents and siblings.

The degree of success attained depends largely on the opportunities the child gets and the help and direction the child receives from significant others.

Most parents will be able to describe their baby as one of these three temperament types:

• The Easy Child :  This is the child whose parents walk around with a smile on their faces the whole day long.  These parents cannot fathom why other parents burst into tears from frustration and tiredness, because their baby is such an angel!  This baby is able to easily adapt to her surroundings and is generally in a good mood.  About 40% of parents are lucky enough to report their babies to be “easy children”.

• The Difficult Child :  These parents basicly sleep walk and have dark rings under their eyes.  They often feel guilty for not enjoying their child and question their parenting abilities. This baby has irregular sleeping and eating patterns, finds it difficult to adjust to a strange environment, reacts intensely to any stimuli and cries alot.  About 10% of parents feel their child is “difficult”.

• The Slow-to-warm-up Baby :  15% of parents report that their baby falls into this category.  This child is inactive, reacts slowly or little to stimuli and is experienced by the parents as somewhat negative.

The remaining 35% of parents felt their children had a combination of behaviour patterns.

Temperament affects the relationship between the parent and the child and as a result of that also the bonding process between them.  Three different types of bondedness have been identified:

• Secure Bonding : This baby uses her mother as a security base from which she can discover the world.  When separated from her mother she will show unhappiness and will be delighted when reunited.  She loves physical contact from her mother, and when she comes into contact with strangers she will react positively when her mother is around.

• Avoidant Bonding : This baby seems unaffected when her mother is around, barely taking notice of her.  She does not become upset when her mother leaves and avoids her when she comes back. She doesn’t explore her world when they are together and seems indifferent to the presence of strangers.

• Ambivalent Bonding: This baby becomes anxious even before her mother leaves her.  When the mother does leave, she becomes extremely upset. On her return the baby behaves ambivalently – on the one hand she tries to make contact, while on the other hand she cries, kicks and hits her mom.  These babies are anxious and will not dare to explore their environment.  They do not like strangers even when their mother is present.

The way in which you bond with your baby is very important.  This is the first relationship that she forms in her life and it will affect future relationships.  The stronger the bond with the parents, the easier it will be for the child to leave her parents.  Babies also form important relationships with their fathers, siblings, grandparents and other care takers.

During the baby years, parents find themselves constantly scolding their baby and the word “no” seems to be a recurring theme.  This is the process of socialization where parents teach the young one what is right and what is wrong, what is expected from her and what is generally acceptable in their society.   The mother becomes the teacher.

Babies from as young as six months start interacting with their peers – they smile, touch and make little noises to communicate with each other.  These interactions are important in the socialization process.  Interaction between children evolves from being centered on a object like a toy to trying to elicit reactions from the other babies to being able to change roles with each other (for example giving toys to one another).

As parents we should foster our relationship with our baby and encourage positive peer interaction.  This should give her a good basis for future relationships that she will need to form through out her life.

In addition to your one year old growing slower, you will notice that he eats less at mealtimes, but like to snack through out the day. Toddlers are very mobile and explore their environment through all five senses.

During the second year most toddlers will master the following milestones:

• Walk independently without support.
• Be able to walk backwards.
• Climb step.
• Start to feed themselves.
• Drink from a cup when helped.
• Build a tower with blocks.
• Scribble with a pen.

As they become more confident in their own abilities they start to become even more daring, testing parents’ nerves to the limit.  From age 2 to 3  children should generally accomplish the following:

• Walk confidently
• Run
• Climb stairs
• Dig
• Throw and kick a ball
• Jump with two feet together
• Take things apart and reassemble it
• Screw and unscrew lids
• Become aware of toilet habits.

Mastering one milestone enables your child to move on to the following learning experience.  It should be kept in mind that children are unique and achieve milestones in their own time, we cannot rush growing up.

Before a baby can speak, they are able to understand language.  In the process of acquiring language, a baby goes through different phases of vocalization:

• Undifferentiated crying (from birth to one month): During this phase the baby uses crying as a call for attention.  The cry is undifferentiated, because the listener cannot differentiate between a cry indicating hunger, thirst, fear, discomfort or pain.  This tyope of cry is seen as a reflex.
• Differentiated crying (from about 2 months): During this phase the parents are able to distinguish between the different types of crying.  The baby uses different pitches and sound patterns to indicate their needs.
• Cooing and Babbling (from about 2 to 6 months): Cooing refers to the throat sounds babies make when they are happy and content or even excited.  Babbling refers to the repetition of simple vowel and consonant-combinations, for example “da-da-da” or “ma-ma-ma”.
• Seven to Eight Months: The baby repeats words and sounds that he hears. This repetition is accidental or incorrect, but forms a necessary foundation for communication.
• Nine to Ten Months: This is the phase where you find repetition of words and sounds.  Here the sounds and words are more correct and purposeful.
• Single word sentences (from one year onwards): During this phase the baby starts saying understandable words.  He uses these words to communicate with others.  Single words are often meant to communicate complex ideas or requests, for instance the word “bottle” can mean “I am hungry” or even “I finished my bottle of milk”.
• Use of Sentences: This is the final stage of language development.  Two word sentences is the first  sentences used, for example “Baby hungry” or “Mamma gone”.  Baby starts using more words in sentence construction, but often with grammatical mistakes.  Gradually the child becomes able to use more complex sentences to communicate with those around him.

A child of two years generally have a vocabulary of about 300 words.  At three it increases to 1000 words, at five  2000 words and when going to school he can use 3000 words accurately.  Girls tend to acquire language faster than boys, as well as children of higher social economic groups.  Intelligence also plays a role in language development.

• Through the first two years in a baby’s life it is important to integrate perception and action. Babies learn how to use visual, auditive and tactile inputs to direct their grabbing and walking.

• During this period the baby starts to form the concept of object permanence.  This refers to the fact that the child will keep on looking for a toy even if they cannot see it anymore.

• Children learn to imitate and copy others.  This means that a child develops symbolic thought.

Piaget divided the first two years into 6 stages:

• Stage 1: The use of reflexes: This period is from birth to one month. Babies respond automatically to people, events and objects in their environment through crying, suckling or grabbing.

• Stage 2: Month 1 to 4: During this stage the infants learns how to use his inborn reflexes on the basis of experience.  Reflexes turns into learned habits.  The baby is primarly focused on his own body, but have the ability to when he accidentally discovers an action, to deliberately repeat it.The child starts to react to external stimuli and will turn his head in the direction of a sound.  The baby starts to realize there are objects outside of himself.At this stage there is no sense of object permanence, if he cannot see a toy the toy does not exist anymore.

• Stage 3: Month 4 to 8: At this stage the baby starts incorporating external objects into his behaviour.  If he drops his rattle and hear the sound, he will repeat the action by picking up the rattle and dropping it again.Object permanence develops to the level where he is able to recognize the object even if only part of it is revealed.  If the toy is dropped he will look in the direction of where it fell and if his play with the toy is interrupted, he will return his attention to the toy again.The baby now starts imitating behaviours from others.  These behaviours are however limited to his own observable body parts and actions that he has mastered before.  He will not be able to imitate his mother’s facial expression, because he cannot see his own face.

• Stage 4: Month 8 to 12: The child now develops the skill to execute goal oriented behaviour.  If for instance there is a bottle between him and his toy, he would be able to push the bottle out of the way and grab the toy.  He combined two actions in order to achieve his goal.Object permanence developed to such an extent that he will search for an object that he cannot see.  He wil go and search first in the place that he is used to retrieve it, even if he saw someone else placing it in a different spot.  This is because he was not responsible for that action, and remembers his previous action.At this stage imitation has developed to the point where he is able to imitate actions like facial gestures.

• Stage 5: Month 12 to 18: This is a stage of discovery and experimentation.  The child is able to walk and therefore comes into contact with a wider world.  He is able to vary certain actions in order to observe different results.  He will for instance drop a ball from different heights to see how the ball’s bounce is affected. Through this he learns that different objects have different qualities and properties.Regarding object permanence, a child is now able to search for a toy in the place he has seen it being moved to. The child is able now to imitate behaviours that does not form part of his own behaviour repertoire.   The model has to be present in order for him to imitate behaviour.

• Stage 6:  Month 18 to 24: Children start to develop complex solutions to problems through combining different actions that has been mastered in other contexts, to this particular problem.  They master symbolic representation.They are now also able to copy or imitate behaviour that they have seen previously.  This can be in the absence of the person they are imitating.

The period from birth to toddlerhood, shows immense development – from a child that can only use reflexes to interact, to a child that can solve problems on a concrete level.