Socio-emotional

Development
Of Infants and Toddlers
 Attachment
• For healthy socio-emotional development, the
infant needs to establish an enduring emotional
bond characterized by a tendency to seek and
maintain closeness to a specific figure,
particularly during stressful situation. This is the
social phenomenon of attachment.
 Dr. John Bowly
• The father of attachment theory
• The beginnings of attachment occur within the first 6 months of a
baby’s life with a variety of built-in signals that baby uses to keep
her caregiver engaged.
• The baby cries, gazes into her mother’s eyes, smiles, etc. In the next
few months, the baby develops in her degree of attachment to her
parents. She smiles more freely at them than at any stranger whom
she seldom sees.
 Temperament
• Temperament is a word that “captures the ways that people differ,
even at birth, in such things as their emotional reactions, activity
level, attention span, persistence, and ability to regulate their
emotion”.
• Reaserchers Thomas, Chess, and Birch described the different
temperament categories: Nurturing Infant-Toddler Attachments
in Early Care Settings.
 Active Level
 Mood
 Threshold for distress
 Rhythmicity
 Approach-Withdrawal
 Distractibility
 Adaptability
 Persistence
• Alexander Thomas and Stella Chess studied babies’s
temperament and clustered temperaments into 3 basic
types:

1. The easy child

2. The difficult child
3. The slow-to-warm-up child
 Easy child
Easily readily establishes regular routines, is generally cheerful, and
adapts readily to new experiences.

 Difficult child
Is irregular in daily routines, is slow to accept new experiences and
tends to react negatively and intensely to new things.

 Slow-to-warm-up child
It shows mild, low-key reactions to environment changes, is
negative in mood, and adjusts slowly to new experiences.
 References;
• Book
• https://www.virtuallabschool.org/infant-toddler/social-emotional/lesson-2
• https://www.slideshare.net/mahalckocirovie/socio-emotional-development-
of-infants-and-toddlers
Thank You

Reporter By: Guro, Nashidah C.