Baby’s Development at the age of Four months
As your baby turns four months old, its time to revise her diet chart and introduce solid food only upon the favorable advice of her health expert. Now her stomach has grown bigger, which in turn generally implies feeds automatically reduce to four to five times a day. As she gets older, her diet pattern and frequency of intake starts to come closer to that of older children and adults. Whats troublesome is that her attention is generally attracted towards people and things during feeding times. So it becomes almost unavoidable to feed her in quiet.
Physical Growth
When placed on the stomach, your baby is able to lift her head and shoulders high using the support of his arms. This also acts as an exercise for the baby as she tries to get a better view of the scene by adjusting her position using the support of her arms. By four months of age, your baby may learn to roll over from her back to front and vice versa. This act of rolling over must be encouraged by the parents so that the child feels more confident while attempting newer physical activities.
The fourth month also marks the beginning of teething time for most babies, which is many a time indicated by increased dribbling by the baby. With physical and cognitive developments, your baby is now able to easily grab an object of interest. Possibly due to teething, as well as, her mouth being her lone source of exploring things, she instinctively puts objects of interest directly into her mouth after a slight inspection. The first teeth of the baby do not surface before five to six months of age. Further, it is always advisable to encourage your baby to explore and play with a variety of objects so as to gain invaluable experience and understanding as regards cause and effect relationship within various objects, like bell, level and so on.
Other Newfound Skills
By this stage, your baby can muse himself and play engagingly with his own hands and feet for minutes together. In other words, you can enjoy reading your newspaper more avidly, as your baby requires lesser of your attention. According to expert studies, your baby now understands the basic sounds that make up her native language. She even may try to imitate sounds produced by you, like Boo, Dada, Mama etc.
Though babies can see colors since birth, they have natural liking for contrasts like black and white. This is also because the infants cannot distinguish between various tones of a single color. However, between second and fourth month, you baby has gained refined color recognition, enabling color distinction even among colors having similar tone/ shade.
Responding to your Voice
Your baby is now more responsive to your voice, presence and facial expressions. She starts kicking legs and waving her arms as soon as she concludes your presence around in the room. This is her way to indicate willingness to be picked up or served or played with. Now your baby may not enjoy crowd and behave choosy about his company. Generally, your baby may take more time in getting comfortable in a large group of unfamiliar people. However, you may also find her noisier and more boisterous when in your lap, even while interacting with stranger people.
Solid Foods – Yes or No
As regards solid foods, it is a dilemma faced by most of the parents as to when to start with solid foods with their child. While breast milk and formula milk meet all her dietary requirements till she turns six months old, parents are often eager to start earlier. So, it is advisable to visit a health expert before you carry on with solid foods for her. Generally parents are discouraged from starting solid foods to their babies before six months of age because relying on breast milk or formula milk reduces the danger of allergic reactions, as well as, makes sure that the diet of child is not dominated by anything other than milk.
And at last, each baby develops at her unique pace of growth, which may be slightly delayed or sped up than the standard situation mentioned above.