Some scoot, some slide, some shuffle from here to there. How does your baby crawl?

Your baby has been learning to crawl since the minute she was born. All previous milestones—head lifts, push ups, rolling and sitting—were all part of the basic training for the physical adventure of crawling.

Crawling is a child’s first attempt at mobility—and getting there is more complicated than putting one hand and knee in front of the other.

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See how a smile grows from that first gassy grin into a sense of humor.

Babies’ smiles are so powerful, we make a mental rolodex of them to shore us up on lousy days. We feed off them.  Get fat on them. And it’s simply because there is no smile on earth that is more genuine or pure.

But a baby’s smile is more than an emotionally gratifying gesture. It is the start of a developmental journey that begins from an innate, involuntary act and transforms into a complex social expression of joy and desire in the course of a baby’s first year.

Here is the amazing step-by-step look at how this sweetest of milestones unfolds.

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The happy child is a healthy child.

Trauma and stress in early childhood can affect one’s health even after many years. The trauma and stress may already be resolved, but it could still result in weaker immunity in a child up to adolescence.

A study has revealed impaired immune function among teenagers who had experienced either physical abuse or had spent time in orphanages as youngsters. The report comes from the University of Wisconsin Madison and was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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