Important Milestones: Your Child at Two Years

How your child plays, learns, speaks, and acts offers important clues about your child’s development. Developmental milestones are things most children can do by a certain age.

Check the milestones your child has reached by his or her 2nd birthday. Take this with you and talk with your child’s doctor at every visit about the milestones your child has reached and what to expect next.

 

What most babies do at this age:

 

Social and Emotional

• Copies others, especially adults and older children
• Gets excited when with other children
• Shows more and more independence
• Shows defiant behavior (doing what he has been told not to)
• Plays mainly beside other children, but is beginning to include other children, such as in chase games

 

Language/Communication

• Points to things or pictures when they are named
• Knows names of familiar people and body parts
• Says sentences with 2 to 4 words
• Follows simple instructions
• Repeats words overheard in conversation
• Points to things in a book

 

Cognitive (learning, thinking, problem-solving)

• Finds things even when hidden under two or three covers
• Begins to sort shapes and colors
• Completes sentences and rhymes in familiar books
• Plays simple make-believe games
• Builds towers of 4 or more blocks
• Might use one hand more than the other
• Follows two-step instructions such as “Pick up your shoes and put them in the closet.”
• Names items in a picture book such as a cat, bird, or dog

 

Movement/Physical Development

• Stands on tiptoe
• Kicks a ball
• Begins to run
• Climbs onto and down from furniture without help
• Walks up and down stairs holding on
• Throws ball overhand
• Makes or copies straight lines and circles

 

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children be screened for general development using standardized, validated tools at 9, 18, and 24 or 30 months and for autism at 18 and 24 months or whenever a parent or provider has a concern. Ask your child’s doctor about your child’s developmental screening.

“Learn the signs. Act early.” materials are not a substitute for standardized, validated developmental screening tools.

 

Adapted from CARING FOR YOUR BABY AND YOUNG CHILD: BIRTH TO AGE 5, Fifth Edition, edited by Steven Shelov and Tanya Remer Altmann © 1991, 1993, 1998, 2004, 2009 by the American Academy of Pediatrics and BRIGHT FUTURES: GUIDELINES FOR HEALTH SUPERVISION OF INFANTS, CHILDREN, AND ADOLESCENTS, Third Edition, edited by Joseph Hagan, Jr., Judith S. Shaw, and Paula M. Duncan, 2008, Elk Grove Village, IL: American Academy of Pediatrics.