Babies' first words are often seen as a important and precious moment in their development, marking the beginning of their journey into verbal communication. For instance, when the baby looks at his or her parent and says "mama" for the first time, it brightens up the parent's face with joy but it is a meaningful connection in their bond that is growing. For parents, these are some sources of pride and joy. But how do you determine whether your child's speech and language are progressing?

Understanding the communication milestones will help monitor a child's development and spot potential issues before they become more serious. The milestones serve as benchmarks to guide health care providers on whether a child needs further assistance.

Importance of Communication Development in Early Years

The first five years of a child's life are the time of massive growth and brain development at an incredible speed. All domains of development find their roots within this period, including communication. From the day they were born, babies start crying to communicate, and within weeks or months, they begin to babble, imitate sounds, and eventually words. Communication is not only important to express needs but also for understanding the world and building relationships. It is an important tool that supports cognitive, emotional, and social development.

Speech Milestones by Age

Babies learn communication skills at their own pace. General milestones can, however serve as a guideline for typical development. Let's go through these milestones by age:

Newborn (0-3 Months)

At this point, the babies communicate mostly through crying. They give cues as to their needs by responding with actions like smacking the lips when hungry or arching the back when they feel overstimulated. At the end of three months, you may also observe:

• Smiles in response to your appearance.
• Cooing sounds.
• Quiets or smiles when spoken to.
• Your voice.
• Different cries for specific needs.

Upto 6 Months

By six months, babies start experimenting with sounds and use their voice to play. Major developments include:

• Making gurgling sounds during play.
• Babbling with different sounds.
• Vocalizing likes and dislikes.
• Responding to the change in tone of voice.
• Turning eyes toward sounds.
• Showing interest in music and sound-making toys.

Till 12 Months

By the first birthday, there are some significant communication milestones that have been achieved:

• Trying to imitate speech sounds.
• Speaking basic words like "mama," "dada," or "uh-oh."
• Responding to simple commands, such as "Come here."
• Recognizing common items by name, like "shoe."
• Turning toward sounds and voices.

Upto 18 Months

In this stage, children learn to understand and use words in a consistent manner. Some of the important milestones are:

• Knows the names of people, objects, and body parts.
• Responds to simple commands with gestures.
• The child says up to 10 words.

End of 24 Months

By two years of age, children usually have more developed communication skills:

• Using simple sentences, like "more milk."
• Asking one- to two-word questions, such as "Go bye-bye?"
• Following simple directions and answering simple questions.
• Saying 50 or more words.
• Being understood by family members at least half the time.

Ways Parents Can Support Development

Parents can be very supportive in developing the communication skills of their child. Here are some effective strategies:

1. Pay Attention to Hearing: Ensure your child responds to sounds and voices. Notice if they react to noise or look at you when spoken to. If you suspect hearing issues, consult your pediatrician promptly.

2. Engage in Conversation: Respond to your baby’s coos and babbles. Talk to them frequently about daily activities, like “Mommy is making breakfast,” or “We’re going to the park.”

3. Imitation Training: Teach your baby to imitate actions and gestures of others, such as clapping, waving, or peek-a-boo. These activities encourage her to understand turn-taking and even nonverbal communication.

4. Animals Sound: Learning time must be fun. Train your baby to imitate an animal's sound, "A cow says 'moo.'". This encourages sound production along with word association.

5. Read and Sing Together: Reading stories and singing songs expose your child to language patterns and rhythm. Make it a daily habit to promote vocabulary growth.

6. Use Your Native Language: Speak to your child in the language you’re most comfortable with. Early exposure to rich language environments helps babies learn effectively.

7. Strengthen Their Attempts: Cheer every time your child tries to speak. Repeat the words and sounds and gently correct as needed. A little "baby talk" is okay but clearly say simple words for them to imitate.

When to Seek Medical Attention

Though every child develops at his own rate, there are some delays that point toward professional intervention. Talk with your child's health care provider if:

- Doesn't turn toward sounds or his name.

- By 12 months, he isn't babbling, and by 18 months, he has not spoken a single word.

- Uses speech in a peculiar manner or shows delayed speech.

Your pediatrician can refer you to some specialist who could be an audiologist or speech-language pathologist for more extensive testing. In the case of a bilingual child, he will also be evaluated by a bilingual speech-language pathologist.

Communication milestones form a kind of roadmap in understanding how your baby develops. This means through conversation, play, and learning activities, you could be able to enhance language skills while promoting your child's development. When concerned about delay, consult professional help, as this might make all the difference by having communication skills set up to meet a great future for your child.

Communication Milestones: Birth to 1 Year. American Speech-Language-Hearing Association

We have often linked screen time with poor outcomes, especially when it comes to children's brain health. But a new Finnish study has learnt that children who spent more time on screens from childhood through adolescence tended to show better cognitive processing as teenagers.

The findings are based on an eight-year follow-up of the Physical Activity and Nutrition in Children (PANIC) study. It challenges the commonly believed idea of screen time being automatically harmful to children's developing brains.

The study was conducted by researchers from the University of Jyväskylä and the University of Eastern Finland and published in Pediatric Exercise Science.

However, researchers also emphasise that that the findings do not mean that children should simply spend more time on phones, tablets, or computers. What children are doing during that screen time may be more important than the number of hours alone.

Children With More Screen Time Performed Better On Cognitive Tests

The study is based on 260 adolescents composed of 124 girls and 136 boys, with an average age of 15.8 years. Researchers followed their physical activity, sedentary behaviour and screen use over a period of eight years. At the end of the study, the researchers examined learning, attention, and working memory.

They found that greater cumulative screen time from childhood into adolescence was associated with better cognitive processing during adolescence. Despite the suspected correlation, researchers did not establish that screen use itself improved children's cognitive abilities.

That distinction is important because the study was merely observational. It just identified a relationship between screen time and cognitive performance but could not prove cause and effect.

Also read: Lindsay Clancy Trial: What Postpartum Psychosis Really Looks Like, From A Survivor

Researchers Say What Children Do On Screens May Matter More

Petri Jalanko, a doctoral researcher at the University of Jyväskylä and first author of the study, said the findings suggest that screen use should not automatically be viewed as harmful. “The findings suggest that screen time can support children’s and adolescents’ cognitive processing.”

He said the type of activity children engage in could be an important factor. “Teachers and parents should encourage children to use devices and screens in such ways that promote active thinking, problem-solving, creativity and learning.”

This could include activities like educational games, creating digital content, researching topics, coding, solving problems, or using technology for learning rather than passive consumption.

Also read: Diabetics Must Undergo Retinal Screening To Protect Eye Health: AIIMS Doctors

Not A Free Pass For Unlimited Screen Time

The findings should not be interpreted as evidence that more screen time is always better. Researchers did not determine an ideal number of hours children should spend on devices. They also did not show that watching videos or scrolling social media for longer periods directly improves cognition.

Instead, the study reinforced the idea that “screen time” is not one single behaviour. A child using a tablet to solve a mathematics problem is doing something very different from a child spending hours passively scrolling through short-form videos.

Jalanko said, “We should not regard screen time solely as harmful but seek balance between physical activity and screen time that promotes active thinking.”

Eero Haapala, senior researcher in the study, and Jalanko emphasised that the relationship between physical activity, sedentary behaviour and cognition is complex.

Haapala said, “Our study indicates that the connections of physical activity and sedentary behaviour to cognitive processing are complex and depend on the sex, the type and assessment method of physical activity and sedentary time.”

For nearly a year after her first son was born, Belinda Stischok did not fully believe she was alive. In her mind, several realities had folded into one, and the life she was living felt like something else entirely - more like an afterlife, a different timeline, anything but the present.

This was not a dream or an ordinary breakdown.

It was — a condition most new parents have never heard of until it is too late — and one that is suddenly back in public conversation because of the ongoing Lindsay Clancy trial.

Clancy, on trial in Massachusetts, has told the court she heard a male voice in her head telling her, again and again, to kill her three children. She did so, and then jumped from a second-floor window, an act that left her paralyzed. Her defense says doctors repeatedly failed to grasp how serious her condition was and sent her home with heavier doses of medication instead of real intervention.

Diary entries read in court this week described a mind "desperate to get a mental break." Prosecutors have rested; the trial is ongoing.

For mothers who have lived through something similar, the case is not abstract. Belinda is one of them. Today she is healthy, married to her husband Kyle, and raising two sons in Florida. But getting there took nearly a year of a psychosis so consuming that, at its worst, she did not recognize her own child.

A Textbook Pregnancy, Then Silence

Also read: Lessons From The Lindsay Clancy Case: Can Families Spot Early Signs Of Postpartum Psychosis?

There was nothing about Belinda's background that suggested trouble ahead. A former personal trainer and competitive bodybuilder, she describes herself and Kyle as disciplined about health, careful about routine.

"Worrying about a mental health episode was never on the forefront of my mind," she said. "It wasn't anything I even knew could happen."

Her pregnancy was heavily researched and carefully planned - she wanted an unmedicated, natural birth. That plan started slipping the moment doctors pushed to break her waters during labor, against her wishes, and her own physician was not even available for the delivery. Looking back, she calls that her first real red flag.

At home with a newborn, she pushed herself hard, insisting on shifts, spotless floors, and constant vigilance. "Rest was never in my vocabulary," she said.

At her six-week check-up, she was given the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale, a routine nine-question screening. She lied on every answer. "You don't want to answer these questions and then hear, oh, you're not well, we're taking your baby," she explained. She never mentioned the test to Kyle. Even with the lies, she was flagged for mild depression — and dismissed it.

When Reality Started To Splinter

The real break did not happen for another nine months. Kyle began noticing things that made no sense — Belinda staring directly into the sun for minutes at a stretch, filling pages with disjointed writing and equations.

"It was very unnatural," he said. "The only thing I could relate it to is that your wife is being possessed, because it's no longer her."

From the inside, Belinda describes it as her timelines collapsing into each other. She stopped believing Kyle was her husband or that their son was their son. She believed she had already died, and that this new life - the one she had once been told medically impossible - was some form of afterlife.

It is a description close to what Clancy has reportedly told people close to her: an out-of-body sense of having left her own life. Both women have described hearing voices, being placed on shifting combinations of psychiatric drugs, and having thoughts of harming someone.

Belinda's first hospitalization came after she barricaded herself outside the nursery, terrified someone would hurt her baby. It was 2020, and because of the COVID-19 pandemic chaos, no one told Kyle where she had been taken. He had to call hospital after hospital to find her.

She was still breastfeeding and says she "begged for a breast pump" — instead, she was sedated. She was held 72 hours, sent home with medication she later threw out, and noticed her breast milk had turned a strange greenish-blue from the drugs. She spent days pumping and dumping before feeding her son again.

Two weeks later, after an argument with her husband in the middle of a rough night, she walked out of the house barefoot and kept going, hearing voices telling her there was "better for you on the other side." A friend spotted her and alerted Kyle, who called the police.

This time, she was held for nine days, medicated with the antipsychotic Abilify, and placed in isolation, at times without access to a bathroom. During that stretch, Kyle, frightened and out of options, took their son and left to stay elsewhere.

"He was protecting our child," Belinda said. "I have no resentment." Still, she says learning her husband and baby were gone was the hardest single moment of the entire experience.

What The System Missed

Read More: Why Miscarriage Needs Emotional Care At Par with Medical Treatment: Doctors Explain

What stays with both of them is how little warning they were given. "They hand you a pamphlet for the epidural," Belinda said.

"Why not hand me one on what it means if you're not sleeping, not eating, not showering?" She is also open about how quickly the system reached for medication over conversation. However, she credits later talk therapy with a postpartum specialist for helping her recover.

Watching Clancy's trial, Belinda sees both familiar and unfamiliar territory. She hesitates to call what Clancy has described pure psychosis, pointing out that Clancy was journaling and naming her distress as it happened — something Belinda says she was incapable of doing herself.

"When you're in psychosis, you're not aware enough to seek help," she said. "You're already gone."

Belinda and Kyle went on to have a second son, delivered at home under a midwife's strict instructions: rest, bond, nothing else. It made all the difference.

Kyle's advice to other fathers is simple: "Don't give up, there's a light at the end of the tunnel."

Belinda's, however, is about permission: "It's okay to not be okay. You just have to seek help when you notice it."

She is also wary of how the Clancy case might land on struggling new mothers. "It can help mothers understand this can happen to anyone," she said, "but I worry the hate people are throwing at Lindsay online will stop other moms from speaking up."

For Belinda, that fear is exactly why she chose to tell her own story out loud.

With the onset of the monsoon season, the heat of the summer is no longer an issue; however, it ushers in an invisible threat to public health. With stagnant water being the perfect breeding ground for Aedes and Anopheles mosquitoes, diseases such as dengue, malaria, and chikungunya cases increase dramatically among both rural and urban areas in India.

For the young ones who have not yet developed a fully functional immune system, a simple bite could cause dehydration, high fever, and other serious complications. However, in an effort to ensure their children are protected, the mothers use harmful insecticides which inadvertently end up putting their sensitive skin and breathing tract in harm’s way.

The Hidden Danger: Chemical Exposure vs. Vector Risk

The skin of a baby is 30% thinner than that of an adult and thus highly permeable, making it possible for chemicals absorbed through the skin to enter the body very fast.

It has been emphasized by international pediatric guidelines that babies under two months old should never come into contact with any chemical repellent on their skin.

Also read: Beware! Common Mistakes New Parents Make During Their Baby’s First Monsoon

The Gold Standard: Physical Barriers Over Chemical Sheaths

With regard to safety in infants, there is no question that non-chemical physical barriers are always the foremost priority. The use of cot, stroller, and window nettings that have apertures smaller than 1.2mm prevent mosquitoes from getting access to the sleeping areas without compromising air flow and without releasing any toxic chemicals into the nursery environment.

In addition, it is important to note that careful selection of appropriate clothes is essential; this means choosing loose-fitting and light coloured full body cotton clothes for the infant as they will naturally protect them as dark colours attract mosquitoes and tight clothes will give them easy access to the body for biting.

Also read: Milestone In Kala-Azar Treatment: WHO Updates Treatment Guidelines, Recommends Shorter & Safer Regimens

Smart Protocol: Fabric-Only & Botanical Innovation

As a method of active protection outdoors or for biting time in the early mornings and evenings, parents must resort to fabric application only. The natural roll-ons and patches that use botanicals such as Citronella, Eucalyptus, and Lemongrass oil must be used only on the outside of the hem of clothes, strollers, or cot corners and never on the body of the baby.

Also, the use of chemical vaporizers or coil repellants in an enclosed nursery where the child is sleeping must be avoided as these are inhaled and can cause irritation of the air passage.

By Dr. Bharat Jain, Senior Consultant Paediatrician and Neonatologist, Cocoon Hospital, Chandigarh