This episode of the Parenting Tutor is about an hour and covers the key elements of the physical/doing dimension from the infant times to the teenage years. Below are excerpts from each of the sections Sharon focuses on in the tutorial. Listening to the tutorial gives you a good foundation as you live and grow with your child. We hope you enjoy the tutorial and find the tips and suggestions helpful.

Your Growing Child: Your baby starts her journey into adulthood with very little going for her other than an inborn potential to grow and become. Within the first few weeks of life, she begins the lifelong process of experiencing, exploring, and expressing herself. This is a very physical/doing time of life for baby. She spends most of her waking hours looking, making noises, learning to hold up her head and turn over, squirming and moving around, trying and then learning to pick things up, usually putting them in her mouth, and gradually organizing her life around the major goals of getting to things and getting into them. As your baby becomes a toddler (around the age of eighteen months), the circle of her world starts to expand. There are myriad things to get into and to learn to stay out of, to climb on and around, to explore and experiment with, to take apart and throw around. There is a long list of things to do, such as learning to talk, to use the bathroom, and to feed herself, figuring out new ways to get others to pay attention, finding out about rules and restrictions, getting better at moving around without falling down - generally discovering the physical world. …

TOUCHING AND PHYSICAL CONTACT: All infants have a strong and very real need for physical contact. Without it, the deprivation is very real and may be permanent. Your baby's need for touching and cuddling is like food for physical and emotional growth. Your infant's need for physical contact strongly suggests this physical/emotional/social being also needs to be "fed." Without such contact, your child "starves" physically, emotionally, and socially. …

TOILET TRAINING: When should toilet training begin? First, it should not begin until your child seems to know what the potty is for and can relate the idea to "making messes" in her clothing. For most children, this relationship does not become clear until they are about twenty-four months old. By that age children have enough bowel and bladder control to participate in the toilet training process. If you wait until your child is about thirty months old, she will probably start training herself. …

LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT: Sometimes we are told making baby talk with an infant is a bad idea. Common sense says this is not so. If your infant makes a sound, it is appropriate for you to try to duplicate it. Pretty soon, your infant is trying to duplicate the sounds and noises you make. Once this happens, verbal communication has really begun. Even with an infant only a few hours or days old, it is good to interact with sounds and words. Call the rattle a rattle. Ask him if he wants some juice. Call people by their names. Talk to him about things going on around him. Does he understand? No, not at this very early age. But your infant does need to hear language from a variety of people. By the time your infant is fifteen to eighteen months old, he likely starts referring to some people and things with specific words. Perhaps only you understand, but nonetheless, this is the beginning of verbal communication. He also understands more words than he is able to produce. By the time he is two, he understands a large vocabulary and has available several dozen words for "talking." …

SPEECH PROBLEMS: A special note should be made of speech problems in children. First, some toddlers and preschoolers do not talk clearly, or stutter and stammer, talk too fast, use words incorrectly, or have other difficulties with the production and flow of speech...