Provide a safe environment for your baby to crawl, move around in and explore. Schwarzer, Gudrun & Freitag, Claudia & Schum, Nina. (2013). How Crawling and Manual Object Exploration are Related to the Mental Rotation Abilities of 9-Month-Old Infants. Frontiers in psychology. 4. 97. 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00097. Bai, Y., Shang, G., Wang, L., Sun, Y., Osborn, A., & Rozelle, S. (2018). The relationship between birth season and early childhood development: Evidence from northwest rural China. PloS one, 13(10) Parlakian, R. (2019). Zero to Three - Tips for choosing toys for toddlers. Retrieved from: https://www.zerotothree.org/resources/1076-tips-for-choosing-toys-for-toddlers
i) Putting up child-proof grilles and gates to prevent your baby from moving to potentially dangerous areas.
ii) Putting up corner bumpers so your baby will not knock into furniture.
iii) Keeping toys with strings and plastic packaging away from your baby to prevent strangulation and suffocation.
iv) Making sure toys do not have small parts that may be swallowed. Babies may explore objects by mouthing, and toys with small parts can pose a choking hazard.
Creating a safe environment for babies to move freely and explore objects with their senses will help build their cognitive skills. A German study on nine-month-old babies found that infants who had the opportunity to crawl around were better at spontaneously observing and exploring objects than those that did not.
Play gives children the chance to discover how things work and to practise new skills repeatedly. Exploring toys that allow children to figure something out on their own, or with a little coaching, builds their logical thinking skills and helps them become persistent problem-solvers. These toys also help children develop spatial relations skills (understanding how things fit together), hand-eye coordination, and fine motor skills (using the small muscles in their hands and fingers). Some examples of such toys include puzzles, shape-sorters, blocks, nesting blocks or cups, art materials like clay, paint, crayons or play-dough.
The environment where young children are playing and exploring should have minimal distractions. Researchers discovered that learning during early stages of development might not be beneficial to a baby if there is overstimulation. In an experiment, they conditioned babies to turn their heads to the buzzer sound. The training for the task began either at birth, at 31 or 44 days. He discovered that babies took many more trials and days to learn the task if they learned from birth than those who learned later. While babies need stimulation, too much stimulation could distract them from other tasks. It could also replace other more crucial activities to their development, such as social interaction.