Today Tile Triggered Content

Mindfulness approaches help us to focus on the moment and can help us to feel calmer, be more self-aware and choose how to respond to our thoughts and feelings.^[1] These techniques might be helpful for you, especially when life is busy, but have you ever thought of teaching your toddler some mindfulness techniques?  

Researchers are becoming increasingly interested in finding out more about how learning mindfulness techniques together can support both parents and children.  

When your toddler was a baby you might have tried some simple massage, maybe you even went to a baby massage group to hone your skills. You might not think about touch in quite the same way now, but it can be an important part of supporting emotional well-being, building your relationship and even helping your toddler pay attention.  

While there isn’t a lot of research about the relationship between touch and learning, the psychologist Lone Svinth identified studies that found an association between massage and visual attention. Researchers found that a short massage just before a task that involved focusing on a particular image was linked with greater attentiveness and quicker learning.[1]  

Our sense of smell is fascinating – it links to emotions, memories and preferences. Your toddler is beginning to show you the connections they are making.  

Our sense of smell is more specific than our other senses, and this could explain why we link smells with particular people, places or events.^[1]  

Your child is developing control of their position, posture and balance all the time. They are also gaining more awareness of their body and can make judgements about the position of their body – you’ll see them make small adjustments as they sit. 

Despite all this amazing development, you might notice that your child moves a lot when they are sitting and perhaps they are not still for very long at all!  

Your child uses their senses to understand the world around them. Processing information from their senses has helped them to form ‘mental representations’ of familiar objects. This means that they can think about an object and also think about parts of the object that they cannot see.   

Your child’s mental representations help them to think about what other people can see too. You might notice your child understands this when they turn a picture round to show it to you.  

Many of us have songs we associate with specific moments, people and places. Your child may be beginning to create these connections as well, and they may soon have a collection of songs that they relate to parts of their lives. 

We often find comfort in music, and it's great for bringing people together 

Sensory development is perhaps something we don’t think about as often as other aspects of our children’s learning. This development is important for so many things your toddler does now and will do in the future. Our senses help us read and write, move, and respond to our emotions (among other things) and developing these skills is not just about hearing better, seeing better, or noticing the sensations from our body, but also about how we bring the information from all our senses together to respond to what is happening around us. 

What is sensory integration? 

Hair love by Matthew Cherry 

Do you look at your feet as you walk upstairs or at your arm as you push it into your sleeves? You might if the steps are uneven or if there is a bit of twisting involved in getting your arms in the right position. The reason you don’t need to look every time is that you have developed a good proprioception – the sense that enables you to be aware of your body’s position and movement. Your toddler is still mastering these skills and they are particularly tricky for them as they are growing all the time, which means their body awareness constantly needs to change.  

Proprioception is the sense that enables us to be aware of our body’s position and movement.  

When someone tells you they have butterflies in their stomach, you probably immediately understand how they are feeling. This feeling when nervous or excited is produced by receptors inside our organs and skin that are interpreted by our brain. The sense which provides us with information from inside our body is interoception – sometimes referred to as our ‘eighth sense’. 

Interoception is a sense that you might not have heard very much about before, but it helps your child understand what is going on inside their body