Child Development Facts

1 in 5 children with a disability will not be identified through a single developmental screening.

Disabilities are more likely to be picked up if monitoring and screening are continued in all well-child medical care visits

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40% of 3-month old infantsare regular viewers of TV and other screen media, and by age 3 nearly a third of children have a TV in their bedroom.

The American Council on Pediatrics recommends no TV for children under 2, and less than 2 hours a day for older children. Screen time for children under 3 is linked to delayed language acquisition, irregular sleep patterns, increased aggression, increased Body Mass Index, and lower math and school achievement later.

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Significant adversity impairs development in the first three years of life-and the more adversity a child faces, the greater the odds of a developmental delay. In fact, risk factors such as poverty, caregiver mental illness, child maltreatment, single parent, and low maternal education have a cumulative impact: children exposed to 6 or 7 of these risks face a 90-100% likelihood of having one or more delays in their cognitive, language, or emotional development.

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Play is essential and critical for a child's development. It stimulates the brain through the formation of connections between nerve cells. This process helps with the development of fine and gross motor skills. Play also helps children to develop language and socialization skills. Play allows children to learn to communicate emotions, to think, be creative and solve problems.

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Toxic stress experiences in young children have been shown to lead to permanent changes in learning (linguistic, cognitive, and social-emotional skills), behavior, and long term physical health.

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Babies who are maltreated or who witness family violence end up with significantly lower IQ scores as they grow older.


On average, children with such trauma exposure had cognitive scores that were about half a standard deviation lower than those not exposed - the equivalent of 7 IQ points. This effect is at least as great if not greater than the effects noted for lead exposure.

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Bilingual children have been shown to be better at multitasking than monolingual children, though they are also slower to acquire vocabulary.

Researchers often use the switching task in this study to gauge a set of mental processes known as executive functioning-generally defined as the ability to pay attention, plan, organize, and strategize. The task engages three mental processes: the ability to keep a rule or principle in mind (working memory), inhibition (the ability to refrain from carrying out one rule), and shifting (the ability to make the change and act on another rule).

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