Important Milestones: Your Child at Four 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 4th 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

• Enjoys doing new things
• Plays “Mom” and “Dad”
• Is more and more creative with make-believe play
• Would rather play with other children than by himself
• Cooperates with other children
• Often can’t tell what’s real and what’s make-believe
• Talks about what she likes and what she is interested in

 

Language/Communication

• Knows some basic rules of grammar, such as correctly using “he” and “she”
• Sings a song or says a poem from memory such as the “Itsy Bitsy Spider” or the “Wheels on the Bus”
• Tells stories
• Can say first and last name

 

Cognitive (learning, thinking, problem-solving)

• Names some colors and some numbers
• Understands the idea of counting
• Starts to understand time
• Remembers parts of a story
• Understands the idea of “same” and “different”
• Draws a person with 2 to 4 body parts
• Uses scissors
• Starts to copy some capital letters
• Plays board or card games
• Tells you what he thinks is going to happen next in a book

 

Movement/Physical Development

• Hops and stands on one foot up to 2 seconds
• Catches a bounced ball most of the time
• Pours, cuts with supervision, and mashes own food

 

“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.