Babies Birth to Year One

Babies -- Birth to Year One Thomas Balmes' 2010 documentary Babies portrays the stage of development that infants undergo from their birth to their first year. Focusing on four culturally diverse families and lifestyles, the film gives its viewers insight into how a child's cognitive and physical developments manifest throughout 12 months of life. One surprising aspect of the child's development stage that was shown in the documentary was the fact that even through the different parental backgrounds the basic stages that infants undergo remained ultimately the same.

The children cried at certain physical impacts, they gurgled and laughed at forms of amusement, they began to speak and form words in their own languages, and they moved on to crawl, stand, and walk by the end of their first year. Regardless of nationality -- Namibian, Japanese, Mongolian, and American -- and the methods used by cultural and lifestyle constraints, there seems to be that constant approach to child-rearing that leads to similar results. 1.

Child Raising Methods In Opuwo, Namibia, Ponijao grows up with plenty mother figures and brotherly figures surrounding him. In this African town, Ponijao undergoes what seems to be a typical village rearing; his mother focuses attention upon the child, even while she works and prays. This becomes a positive reinforcement of caring, and Ponijao certainly does not lack in female attentions. The film, however, does not show strong, fatherly figures around Ponijao.

Most of the child-rearing is left to the women and the older boys -- perhaps even Ponijao's own brothers. Bayar faces a dissimilar fatherless existence in Bayanchandmani, Mongolia. There is a father in the sidelines. The careful method that his mother undergoes to care for him are commendable and filled with forethought. One situation involves the mother's use of a matchstick as a safeguard against the child from choking on a piece of meat.

The constrictions placed on him at the beginning months, however, seemed to limit Bayar's movements, a drawback for infants, who use their movements to view the world. San Francisco, California houses Hattie, who was reared in a calm, soothing environment. Her parents emphasized the use of speech, sound, and language, evident in the books her mother read and the language her grandmother spoke. Most of Hattie's beginning stages, however, seemed constricted to the home, and there was almost never any interaction with other children her age.

When Hattie did interact with other children, she spent most of that time walking to the door and trying to open it. Mari's Japanese family in Tokyo seemed to be the ideal rearing style that one can closely relate to. She was reared with a wide degree of intellectual and physical pursuits, from the jungle gym to geometric problem-solving puzzles.

The mother and father were both present; Mari lived vicariously through the mother, who brought the child almost everywhere she went: the groceries, to her friends' places, out for a regular stroll. There was a slight downside over the parents' indifference during work-hours, though it appears that Mari found ways to occupy herself while her parents had to continue their work. 2. Stages of Development Piaget's theory of development consists of four different stages, the first stage occurring during the child's birth to his or her acquisition of language.

The sensorimotor stage has six cycles, each broken up into months of the infant's development. The stage begins with simple reflexes -- usually beginning at birth to the child's first six weeks. In this cycle, children are acquainting themselves with their environment, mostly with the use of their senses. Mari is staring up at a rattle being shaken above her, intrigued. Hattie looks at her own reflection in a mirror and begins to laugh, amused at the image her. Later on, the children become more logical, more experimental.

Bayar realizes that if he wants the entire roll of toilet paper, he has to pick the entire roll up. Ponijao finds that if he walked straight, the object on his head would not fall. Meanwhile Mari is frustrated because every object she tries to insert her peg into does not fit. This cycle is the fifth in the sensorimotor stage, usually occurring between 12-18 months of development, where children become fascinated with objects and try to find ways in solving problems.