Baby? Toddler? Preschooler?
Posted by Arwen Mosher in Family on Wednesday, February 24, 2010 10:22 PM
My Blaise, who is thirteen months old, has made big strides this week. Just days ago he would take three tentative steps from the couch to the coffee table; now he walks boldly across the room unassisted.
Often he falls down. Still, he walks. I guess it’s time to start calling my baby a toddler?
This seems weird to me, because it feels like mere minutes ago that we started referring to Camilla as a preschooler instead of as a toddler. In fact, she and her cousin happily called themselves “the toddlers” well into their fourth years of life. Now, since neither of them took to the term “preschooler,” they’re the proud Big Kids. Their little siblings are the Babies.
(Except the Babies have now become the Toddlers. The cycle continues.)
I was flabbergasted recently when someone tipped me off that the popular parenting website BabyCenter defines two-year-olds as “preschoolers.” I guess some two-year-olds do go to preschool, but I’ve always thought of one- and two-year-olds as toddlers and three- and four-year-olds as preschoolers.
Obviously the important thing is the child himself; the nomenclature is beside the point. Still, I was curious, so I delved a little deeper (okay, I Googled) and I found that people like to discuss this topic. Along with the toddler-preschooler distinction - I was happy to see that most people seem to think that kids don’t become “preschoolers” until they’re at least two-and-a-half - there is endless discussion of the baby-toddler distinction.
Now, I always thought that was an easy one. When a baby starts walking, otherwise known as toddling, he’s a toddler. Simple!
But apparently some people want to call all one-year-olds toddlers, and some people don’t like to call a little walking child a toddler if he hasn’t had his first birthday yet.
Yikes. My head was starting to spin.
I’m sure many parents who are more sensible than I am haven’t given the topic a moment of thought, and they’re probably better off for it. But after reading dozens of different definitions, I decided that since this has absolutely no bearing on how a person parents, it’s just a matter of personal preference. You can call your eight-month-old a preschooler and your five-year-old a toddler if you want to, and it’ll make no difference. (It might confuse people, and the five-year-old might get mad, but those are risks you take when you’re a rule-breaker.)
In case you’re wondering, though, here are the definitions I like:
Baby: birth to whenever the child starts to walk
Toddler: walking-age until around age three
Preschooler: age three until the child starts kindergarten
Big Kid: after that (or from whenever the child decides that he or she is “Big, Mama! I’m big!” And heaven forbid you fail to recognize it.)
My own mother, of course, has no regard for these definitions. Twenty-seven years later, she still calls me her baby.
How do you like to define the stages of early childhood?
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