Your Two Year Old
Developmental Milestones
How your two-year old plays, learns, speaks, acts, and moves offers important clues about your child’s development. Developmental milestones are things most children can do by a certain age.
What’s unique to your two-year old? What is typical of a two-year old?
Developmental Milestones Two Years
Social and Emotional Milestones
- Copies others, especially adults and older children
- Gets excited when with other children
- Shows more and more independence
- Shows defiant behavior (doing what he has been told not to)
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- Plays mainly beside other children, but is beginning to include other children, such as in chase games
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Communication Milestones
Language/Communication
- Points to things or pictures when they are named
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- Knows names of familiar people and body parts
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- Says sentences with 2 to 4 words
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- Follows simple instructions
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- Repeats words overheard in conversation
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- Points to things in a book
Physical Milestones
Gross motor/Fine motor
- Stands on tiptoe
- Kicks a ball
- Begins to run
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- Climbs onto and down from furniture without help
- Walks up and down stairs holding on
- Throws ball overhand
- Makes or copies straight lines and circle
Cognitive Milestones
Learning, thinking, problem-solving
- Finds things even when hidden under two or three covers
- Begins to sort shapes and colors
- Completes sentences and rhymes in familiar books
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- Plays simple make-believe games
- Builds towers of 4 or more blocks
- Might use one hand more than the other
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- Follows two-step instructions such as “Pick up your shoes and put them in the closet.”
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- Names items in a picture book such as a cat, bird, or dog
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- At 18+ months, toddlers are also starting to pretend and use their imagination…
- Did you know that “make believe” play can help your young child’s executive functioning?
Birth – 3 months 3 – 6 months 6-9 months 9-12 months 18 months 2 years 3 years
CHILD DEVELOPMENT
FAMILY FUN
PARENTING CORNER
COMMUNITY