How Your Child's Sensory System Develops - AbilityPath (2024)

Sensory

What is sensory development? In general, it refers to the maturing of the five familiar senses: hearing, smell, taste, touch, and vision. It also involves the way your baby or child’s nervous system receives input from these senses and then forms an appropriate motor or behavioral response. This is known as sensory processing or sensory integration.

Besides organizing the input from the five basic senses, sensory processing also focuses on the sensation of movement. Your baby explores and discovers the world through her senses. Babies are born with most of these senses nearly fully developed. But some subtle changes occur through the end of a child’s second year.

A problem with just one sensory system can greatly affect your child’s overall health and development. For example, when a baby’s hearing is not optimal and remains uncorrected, her speech and language development, communication, and learning may be delayed. You will want to understand how your child’s sensory systems develop. And be aware of any signs of concern. This will help ensure your child reaches her full potential.

What changes can I expect in my baby’s sensory development?

It’s helpful to watch for these changes in your child’s sensory development.

  • Hearing: Newborns can’t hear certain very quiet sounds. But, for the most part, their sense of hearing is already well developed. After about three months, sh e will show you she hears a sound by turning her head toward the direction of the sound. By four to eight months, she will hear the full range of sound frequencies.
  • Smell: A newborn’s sense of smell is so acute that she can already tell the difference between the smell of her mother’s milk and that of another mother. Researchers conducted experiments where two breast pads (one from the infant’s mother, the other from another lactating mother) were placed at the sides of the newborns’ heads. The babies reliably turned towards the breast pad of their own mothers. By about age five, your child can identify some foods by smell.
  • Taste: A newborn can distinguish between sweet, salty, sour, and bitter tastes. She shows a preference for sweet taste, such as breast milk, and for salty tastes later on. Your baby will achieve a full sensitivity to taste by 12 to 19 months.
  • Touch: The term touch here is used to describe all of the physical sensations that can be felt through the skin. Touch is actually not a single sense, but several. There are separate nerves in the skin to register heat, cold, pressure, pain, and touch. At birth or shortly after, your baby can distinguish between hot and cold temperatures and feel pain. Your baby’s hands and mouth are especially sensitive to touch. Between one to nine months of age, she will be able to distinguish differences in textures with hands and mouth. As a preschooler, she will be able to distinguish size and shape differences by touch.
  • Vision: Newborns can focus on objects about eight to 15 inches away. By one month, she will see about three feet away. At birth, she has limited color vision. But by two months, she can discriminate between basic colors. She will achieve full color vision between four and seven months of age. Depth perception develops between three and seven months. It will achieve full adult acuity (20/25) during her second year.
  • Sensory Processing: Given all of the sensory information a newborn can take in, she must begin to develop her processing skills and learn how to use the incoming sensory information to effectively act on her environment. When overstimulated by all of this sensory information, an infant will need help to calm herself. As she matures, she will learn self-regulation and display the skills needed to calm herself. In tandem with developing better control of her motor skills, her system will be learning to process the sensation of movement coming from her body through the vestibular and proprioceptive nerve receptors. As she matures, she will then learn to use all of the sights, sounds, and other sensory information in the environment to explore and learn about herself and her world.
How Your Child's Sensory System Develops - AbilityPath (2024)

FAQs

How Your Child's Sensory System Develops - AbilityPath? ›

At birth or shortly after, your baby can distinguish between hot and cold temperatures and feel pain. Your baby's hands and mouth are especially sensitive to touch. Between one to nine months of age, she will be able to distinguish differences in textures with hands and mouth.

How does your child's sensory system develop? ›

Sensory development begins when a baby is still in the womb and peaks in the first two years of life. While engaging a child's senses continues to be important as they grow, for most children, their senses will be developed by their second birthday, with each sense having developed on its own timeline.

What are the sensory skills of development? ›

Sensory development relates to our senses (vision, hearing, touch, taste, smell) which allow us to explore the world around us. Social skills refer to our interactions with other people.

How do the senses play a role in child development? ›

By engaging in activities that stimulate their senses, children can enhance their cognitive, motor, social, and emotional skills. Playful activities that engage all the senses provide a safe and enjoyable environment for children to learn, explore, and express themselves.

What is the sensory processing ability? ›

Sensory Processing refers to the way a person's nervous system receives sensory messages and turns them into responses. These senses include sight (vision), sound (auditory), touch (tactile), taste (gustatory), body position (proprioception) and movement (vestibular).

What are the development of sensory abilities during infancy? ›

At birth or shortly after, your baby can distinguish between hot and cold temperatures and feel pain. Your baby's hands and mouth are especially sensitive to touch. Between one to nine months of age, she will be able to distinguish differences in textures with hands and mouth.

What are the 5 sensory capabilities of a child? ›

Children will learn that their bodies have many different parts, each with special functions. They are eager to hear, touch, see, smell and taste to help them make sense of and be a part of the world.

What does sensory ability mean? ›

Sensory processing is the ability to organise and interpret information received through the senses to produce a response, including visual, auditory, gustatory (taste), olfactory (smell), tactile, proprioceptive and vestibular information.

Why is sensory important for development? ›

Benefits of Sensory Play for Babies

Babies learn and develop new connections in their brain through play. Sensory play also helps babies to learn more about the world around them and supports language development as they learn to respond to different stimuli.

What do children learn from sensory play? ›

Sensory play is a lot of fun. It also offers many benefits for child development, including: Helping children understand how their actions affect what's around them. Supporting brain development, enhancing memory, complex tasks and problem solving.

What are sensory motor skills in early childhood? ›

Sensory motor skills allow a child to express through physical activity the information they receive through their senses, including sight, hearing, touch, balance, and proprioception, or awareness of knowing where the body is in space is used.

How to support sensory development? ›

A logical place to begin promoting SI is by providing frequent opportunities for movement, ideally whole-body, unstructured play multiple times a day. However, a variety of movement opportunities is also important. Children are internally driven to run, jump, swing, climb, balance, and spin, especially outdoors.

What are the 4 types of sensory processing? ›

There are the four patterns of sensory processing: low registration, sensation seeking, sensory sensitive and sensation avoiding.

What are sensory needs in early childhood? ›

What Are Sensory Needs? Sensory needs or issues occur when a child has difficulties receiving and responding to information from their senses. Children with sensory issues may have find it hard to cope with anything that triggers their senses, including sound, light touch, taste, or smell.

How does a child develop sensory issues? ›

It's not clear what causes sensory issues in children, though researchers believe it may have something to do with the way the sensory pathways in the brain process and organize information. Sensory processing difficulties are common in autistic people.

Do most kids grow out of sensory issues? ›

"Sensory dysregulation tends to get better with neurological maturation, but in many cases, it does not go away altogether," says Allison Kawa, PsyD, a Los Angeles child psychologist. "Most people learn coping strategies as they grow up.

How does the brain process sensory information for kids? ›

The path starts with one of your senses detecting something. When this happens, a signal is sent through the nervous system to the brain. The brain processes the information and then decides on the action to take. It then sends a signal through the nervous system to the body part to take action.

What is sensory stimulation in child development? ›

Sensory stimulation is the input and sensation you receive when one or more of your senses is activated. This type of stimulation is important for infant development and can be used to improve the well-being of developmentally disabled adults, people with neurocognitive disorders, and older adults.

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