Infant and Toddler Care and Development

When you think about infants and toddlers, what words and images come to mind? William James imagined infants as experiencing a “blooming, buzzing confusion” (James, 1890). More recent and more accurate images consider infants and toddlers as young scientists making sense of their world as they actively engage with it (Gopnik, 2012; Gopnik, Meltzoff & Kuhl, 1999). The goal of this section is to briefly introduce you to infants and toddlers by presenting demographic information, guiding principles of infant/toddler care and education and to demonstrate why quality care and education for infants and toddlers is so important.