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Essay on Infants and Toddlers
At the age of 15 months, a human is still more infant than child. Having just learned to walk, most toddlers have acquired perhaps a handful of words and a few conventional social skills, such as waving goodbye. However, over the next 20 or so months, children undergo enormous change: they develop elaborate language and social skills, and they begin to use these skills to learn about the wider world in which they live, to govern their emotions and their social behavior, and even to reflect on their own knowledge and abilities. Toddlers are not just egocentric and stubborn; they can be caring, polite, and generous. They can comfort, cajole, persuade, joke, and argue. In short, by 3 years of age, a child has become very much a person-someone who knows about and participates in the social life surrounding him or her.
Social-linguistic intelligence is what turns a human infant into a person. It is the capacity to understand and use accepted social means to interact successfully with others. There are many component skills a toddler must acquire in developing a social-linguistic intelligence, but its cornerstones are the abilities to use a language and to understand and explain social behavior as others in one's community do.
At least in Western societies, and very possibly in all societies, social understanding requires one to think about the mental states of both the self and others and to recognize when and how people's mental states can differ. With such skills, individuals can express their intentions, justify their behavior to others, understand and predict other's' behaviors, and negotiate with and adjust to others. At 3 years of age, children still have much to learn about when and how people differ and about the social rules governing their communities, but this case study reveal that by then a child's social behavior is well grounded in a basic social-linguistic intelligence......
