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In an excerpt from one of our previous webcasts, Hanna Perkins Therapist Deborah Paris, LISW, BCD, explains what the experts mean when they talk about “child development.”

Image courtesy of David Castillo Dominici/Freedigitalphotos.net

“One of the ways to think about child development is that it’s the course of a developing personality that forms different organizations – and then as the body and the mind and the emotional life develop, that organization gets sort of disorganized and has to be reorganized around new information,” Paris says in the video.

“So when children begin to walk, all of a sudden the world’s a different place and they have to integrate that, and think about it and use different parts of their personality. When a child goes to school, all of a sudden the world has become a bigger place again.

“But in terms of the child development piece of it, growing out of their earliest experiences keeps organizing and disorganizing the mechanism.

“And our job as parents is to try and figure out where are they in development. What can their organization – this person – actually tolerate and what can’t they tolerate.”