Importance Of Touch In Child Development

The changes which happen within a child’s first few years of development are truly astonishing. Caregivers as well as professionals have noted this in children’s development when they do the most basic things, like touch, taste, smelling and even hearing. During this age the child starts to socialize and becomes cooperative with many other children when they are interacting together, while at the same time defining who they are themselves. They begin to acquire many important skills that assist them to get along with others: turn-taking, following the given instructions, sharing and even skills that will assist them in their academic life such as drawing, counting, reading, and writing.
“The Continuum of Development describes predictable sequences …show more content…
Touch can become a medium that provides security and creates a sense of comfort as well as exploration. When it comes to touch and exploration the child usually starts off at contact with the skin then the mouth and later on through their hands and fingers. Using this sense and developing it further allows the child to have a better chance of “surviving” in the world, for example through touch we are able to feel whether something is hot or not and able to stay away from it if it might burn us, if we didn’t know something was hot we would not be able keep our selves away from it.
Even taste and smell have already developed even before the child is born. From the day they are born, an infant already has the ability to show that they might dislike a smell or taste. This is because the amniotic fluid before birth and breast milk after, have gone through changes in terms of their taste and smell, which is caused by the a change in the mother’s diet, this provides the child a variety of experiences that assist to stimulate the senses of taste and smell to influence the child’s preferences at an early …show more content…
The development of their eyes is completed around 6 months after their birth, and they only begin coordinate with their eyes around 12 months after their born. Even though this sense is the least developed many people believe that it is truly the most important sense that we as humans have. The reason why some people believe this is because a large majority of a child’s early learning experiences as well as development are done through their vision in the first few years. Without the proper development of vision the impact that can be had on the early learning of the child, through “imitation, primarily visual imitation... communication, bonding, motor development, spatial concepts, balance, object permanence, language development and social interaction” , can be devastating. So without the proper development of the child’s vision there will be an equivalent if not greater impact on the child’s educational, social, and emotional development as well as in many other