Your Baby At 12 Weeks: These Are The Things You Should Consider

A baby at 12 weeks is incredibly attentive and becomes more and more interested in his environment. At the latest now, when your baby is 12 weeks old, he is particularly receptive and curious. Read to your baby at 3 months. First short stories or sing him a few nice lullabies.

Even if he can’t understand the content at this age, he will react to the pleasant stimuli, to pictures, to your voice, gestures and facial expressions.

What Changes When Your Baby Is 12 Weeks Old?

In the 12th week of life, a remarkable growth spurt is noticeable in the baby. Your little treasure will now react more strongly to its environment. It begins to smile “genuinely” because at 12 weeks, a baby instinctively understands that it is an expression of social connection.

If you smile at it, it will smile back. Depending on how it feels or how a baby understands things at 12 weeks, it will be altogether more aware of smiling, making sounds and perceiving its home or social environment with even more curiosity.

When a baby is three months old, he will usually be strong enough to lift his head on his own when lying on his back. In the prone position, he will now be able to use his little arms to briefly push himself off the pad.

These involuntary “strengthening exercises” in the area of the upper body are the first prerequisites for your little bundle of joy to make the first crawling excursions in its little world during the next growth spurt of a baby – around the fourth month.

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Your Baby’s Next Growth Spurt – Look Forward To It

At 12 weeks, the world becomes more colorful and adventurous for your baby. He perceives it more and more “with sense and understanding”. However, it is not yet afraid of certain dangers.

Therefore, caution is advised when reaching for sharp or hot objects. The risk of injury and accidents is therefore already quite present in a baby at 12 weeks. When it comes to fine motor skills, a lot happens as soon as your child is three months old.

In this article, you’ll find out how you can develop and promote these new skills in a targeted manner and what else you need to bear in mind when your baby is 12 weeks old.

Your Baby At 12 Weeks – An Impressive Growth Spurt For Your Baby

As soon as your baby is 12 weeks old, you will notice the next remarkable growth spurt in your baby. The coordination of the little hands has developed further, and he now reaches more purposefully for your hands or for colorful toys.

Now, when your baby is 3 months old, you can start buying special developmental toys or baby gyms, etc. With toys of this kind, you will not only please your baby at 12 weeks, but you can additionally push your baby’s development.

Support Your Baby’s Developmental Push

You can get a lot out of your baby’s growth spurt now not only with pedagogically well thought-out toys or with child-friendly training equipment, but rather through even more targeted interaction.

Therefore, now that your baby is 12 weeks old, spend more time with him or her. If the opportunity arises, attend a PEKiP course or take part in a baby swimming course. The movement exercises taught there help to improve motor skills and support the baby’s developmental spurt in the long term.

Participation in courses of this kind is, of course, always voluntary. The sole purpose is to give parents the opportunity to support their little bundle of joy through new influences and to make the best possible use of the baby’s growth spurt.

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Courses of this kind are also an advantage, so that moms and dads can socialize with each other if they want to.

Note

As important as it is to support your baby’s development at the age of 12 weeks with specific play and swimming activities or similar, it is also essential that you spend a lot of time together as a couple or as a trio within your little family.

Because the child’s attention and interest in its environment is already so great, it makes sense to use this phase to strengthen the family bond through lots of love and attention.

When the baby is 12 weeks old, a lot of positive things stand out, both in terms of the physical development spurt in the baby, but also in terms of language skills. As soon as a baby is 3 months old, it can recognize the faces of familiar people and even pick them out among strangers.

It is now increasingly able to perceive things and form “matching” sounds to them. The baby’s hearing, smelling and cognitive abilities also improve rapidly during this growth spurt.

Here’s What You Can Do To Encourage Your Baby’s Sense Of Language

  • Talk and sing a lot with your baby now that he or she is 12 weeks old.
  • When a baby is 3 months old, he or she enjoys making sounds or imitating noises. Singing and talking games are therefore very useful at this stage of baby’s development.
  • Explain to your child the things that are special right now. For example, shopping, changing diapers, doing housework, etc.
  • By telling you frequently, your baby will get used to your voice and your way of speaking by the time he or she is 12 weeks old. By using a high-pitched voice, you can lovingly encourage your baby to respond to what you say.
  • Encourage your baby to “sing-along” when you start a song.
  • The presence of strangers, grandparents, friends or neighbors can help your child learn about voice and language diversity and adjust to “new sounds”.
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Tip

Do you have a different mother tongue than your child’s father? Do you want your child to grow up bilingual? If so, now that your baby is 12 weeks old is the ideal time to take advantage of this developmental boost in your baby.

An Extremely Valuable Development And Growth Spurt For The Baby

The fact that a growth spurt in babies in the 3rd month of life has a positive and lasting effect on their fine motor skills and enables them to reach, grasp and touch in a more targeted way is particularly important for parents.

The baby’s growth spurt can therefore be combined very well with the skills developing in the speech center. At 12 weeks, a baby can control touches and tactile sensations that may previously have been more random – and, above all, perceive them in a “meaningful” way.

Through playbooks, touch games or learning to grasp games, you can support your child so that he or she can perceive what he or she feels more consciously and with greater intensity, and can express and make himself or herself understood more easily in his or her own childlike way.

Direct attention is also fundamental during this phase. Loving caresses, touches and perhaps even gentle massages further deepen your child’s sensory perceptions of feeling, sensing and touching.

Your Baby At 12 Weeks – The Baby Growth Spurt In A Nutshell

  • From the time of birth, a baby at 12 weeks has gained between 500 and 1,200 grams in weight.
  • The shoe size is now about 15 to 16.
  • The clothing size of a baby when he or she is 3 months old is about 56 to 68.
  • The circumference of the head is 38 to 40 cm.
  • Sight, speech, hearing and touch improve.
  • Fine motor skills improve and the baby can kick more vigorously.
  • The stability of the head and neck muscles improves and becomes stronger overall.
  • At the age of three months, your baby needs between 15 and 18 hours of sleep per day.
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Promoting The Growth Spurt In Babies – This Is How It Works

In order to optimally promote the development of your child, regular intimate attention, as well as frequent talking, loving explanations, singing and playing, are elementary. By attending play, movement or swimming classes, you can additionally support the specific skills of a baby at 12 weeks.

Fabric, tactile and play books are optimal now, and also reading books as well as play arches, crawling blankets made of different materials are very important for the child’s development. Soft plush balls for playing and grasping as well as wooden and plastic toys are useful additions for a baby at 12 weeks.

The so-called 12-week growth spurt in babies is the third of a total of eight significant developmental or growth spurts that a person goes through in the first 12 months of life. But if your baby can’t do all the things that are “normal” for babies during this growth spurt at 12 weeks, it doesn’t have to be a cause for concern.

For some children, development can still be a little slow in the early days. To be on the safe side, you should definitely consult your pediatrician in case of doubt.

Of course, it is also important to attend regular check-ups at the pediatrician’s office. There, every growth spurt in the baby is closely monitored – and possible delays or other abnormalities are explicitly investigated.

Conclusion

Parents often tend to compare their child with other babies of the same age. If, in the course of this, moms or dads discover that the offspring of other parents is possibly making more progress in its development than their own child, worries and fears sometimes arise.

However, such concerns are often unnecessary. Support your child from the beginning and spoil him with lots of love and affection. You can have all medical questions clarified medically during the regular initial examinations.

In any case, it is wonderful to be able to witness how the dear little ones develop from the first day of their lives.

Sources

https://www.hallo-eltern.de/baby/baby-12-wochen-alt/

https://www.windeln.de/magazin/baby/entwicklung-baby/ihr-baby-im-3-monat.html

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