The baby steps to development
LINDEN – A local author writes her 11th book on the stages of development, this time babies and toddlers.
Established author, developmental specialist and founder of Mind Moves Institute and BabyGym, Dr Melodie de Jager, has written yet another book.
Mind Moves is a Non-profit Organisation (NPO) that focusses on the various stages of development, from babies to the elderly. At the NPO, De Jager trains people how to educate and assist in baby, toddler and child development.
She is also a mother of three and talks passionately about the nuances of development one ordinarily does not think of.
“What you learn as a baby, the stages you go through, the steps, all these things influence the way you function later in life, say in the corporate world. If you miss just one little stage, it will impact you later in life,” De Jager explained.
She said the book was written as a push-back against the Department of Education’s new zero- to three-year curriculum which assesses babies and toddlers the way they do in school.
“The way babies and toddlers learn is completely different to how children do in school,” she explained.
De Jager feels that babies and toddlers should to learn through play and instead of being put under pressure through assessments, there should simply be a checklist of what they have accomplished.
In De Jager’s latest book, Learn Play Grow (also available in Afrikaans as Speel-Speel Slim), she takes parents and caregivers back to basics through the nuanced yet simple stages of development of babies and toddlers in that age group.
There is a checklist for parents and caregivers to monitor their babies or toddlers at the end of each stage in the book. She said the checklist, unlike an assessment, is less pressure on children, parents and caregivers.
This will be De Jager’s 11th book and she suggested she still has many more in her.
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