12 Developmental Milestones of an 11 Month Old Baby

Your 11 month old is soon approaching their first birthday. This growing age is crucial to determine heath or growth concerns and rectify them. Understanding your baby’s needs is imperative for parents. Encouraging them to learn and grow is also a responsibility for them. Identify cognitive and physical needs to ensure the proper growth of your 11 month old.

Your baby has travelled a long way from the first newborn days, unable to lift their heads, to now, at 11 months. Your baby is almost a toddler with various capabilities and is reaching milestones. This article provides information for monitoring your 11 month old baby’s milestones and growth patterns.

At 11 months, your baby strongly prefers people, foods, books, toys, and other items. Most babies at 11 months are also more mobile and start crawling, pulling themselves up to stand, and even taking steps. They are active in studying their surroundings. Most say simple words like "mama" or "dada"; they can grasp basic commands.

In addition, your baby can begin to seem to like one parent more than the other. Socially, they show preferences between these people and express joy or frustration. These babies like playing games interactively and even mimic adults when they do specific actions.

Movement Milestones for a 11 month old:

• Cruising: Cruising over the furniture, with sideways steps while holding onto it.
• Standing Up: Standing alone can be obtained for a couple of seconds
• Transitioning: Transition from sitting to standing and vice versa more effortlessly.
• Fine Motor Ability: Can grasp small objects and play with toys more finely.

All these milestones can be motivated through safe exploration spaces.

Visual Milestones:

At 11 months of age, babies make huge leaps in visual development, which increases their ability to understand and comprehend the environment.

• Depth Perception: The baby can determine objects' distances better and thus move around confidently.
• Tracking Objects: They can quickly move their eyes smoothly by tracking moving objects.
• Colour Discrimination: Begins to recognise different colours and shows a preference for specific colours.
• Hand-Eye Coordination: Coordination between hands and eyes to grab toys improves over time.

Hearing Milestones:

At 11 months, babies improve their ability to hear, express, and respond to sounds and things around them.

• Recognition of Name: Responds correctly and even turns around when a name is called.
• Responding to Sounds: Responds to known sounds, like voices, music, and toys and looks for them.
• Imitating Sounds: May imitate some sounds and gestures and show interest in communication
• Awareness of Rhythms: Shows ability to respond to sounds and music and move to the rhythm.

These steps represent their expanding recognition of their surroundings, thus forming part of their cognitive development.

Smell Milestones:

At 11 months, the baby can improve its sense of smell by discriminating between known smells and being sensitive to new smells in the environment.

• Perception of Familiar Odours: Infants can perceive familiar odours, such as the smell of their parents or favourite foods.
• Reaction to Novel Odours: Infants will be interested or even frightened by novel smells and demonstrate an awareness of sensory experience.
• Food Smells: Greater response to different food smells, showing like or dislike. This may be what they prefer.

Touch Milestones:

Babies enhance their touch sense by using their hands to explore and interact with different textures, which is important for overall development at this age.

• Exploratory Touching: The use of hands to touch objects, figuring out their shapes and textures so that they understand the surroundings better.
• Development of Fine Motor Skills: Able to grab, hold, and manipulate objects with more excellent dexterity with both or one hand.
• Sensitive to Textures: They like certain textures, either soft and smooth or rough and complex, which influences their play.
• Bilateral Coordination: Development of using both hands to function in an activity, such as clapping or playing with certain toys.

All these milestones present an expanded sensory experience critical for cognitive and physical development.

Sleep Milestones for a 11 month old:

• Consolidated Sleep: Babies usually settle into sleeping all night, often all 11-12 hours, waking only a few times.
• Daytime Naps: Most babies take two naps daily, usually within one to two hours, in the morning and evening.
• Routine Sleep Schedule: Establish a stable bedtime routine so they can associate sleep time and experience a higher quality of sleep.
• Self-Soothing: Babies begin to self-soothe, which causes them to fall asleep for themselves if they wake up.

These are all signs of well-being and play a significant role in their actual growth in health and mind.

Feeding Milestones for a 11 month old:

• Self-Feeding: Most babies start feeding themselves with their hands or with spoons. Self-feeding activities develop these babies' fine motor skills.
• Diverse Diet: They can easily have more diet items than previously, like soft fruits, vegetables, and small meat pieces, which reflects their growing palates.
• Chewing Skills: Improved chewing skills allow them to adopt a diet with more textured foods and discontinue purees.
• Drinking from a Cup: Most children continue weaning from bottles into sippy or full cups and can drink independently.
• Displaying Preferences: They will start to have food preferences indicating that their taste and appetite are coming forward.

These skills are still contributing to healthy development, especially as they near one year of age.

What to Feed:

Here are key cognitive milestones for a 11 month old:

• Object Permanence: This means that babies start to realise that objects exist even when they are out of view, much like during a peek-a-boo game.
• Problem-solving Skills: They display an improved ability to solve simple problems, such as figuring out how to reach a toy that is only slightly out of their reach.
• Imitation: Babies tend to imitate everything they see others do, so here's evidence of how learning through observation happens.
• Understanding of Names and Labels: Most can recognise and respond to known objects, and even people, by name- this is a tool for their language development.
• Understanding Cause-and-Effect: Babies may start to learn simple cause-and-effect relationships, like they know hitting one button lights up a toy.

These cognitive developments are significant because they prepare children to master even more complex learning in the succeeding months.

Here are key social milestones for a 11 month old:

• Stranger Anxiety: Most babies become fearful or anxious about strange individuals, indicating attachment to the caregivers.
• Social Referencing: Babies start to look back at their caregivers for guidance on acting when new events arise, illustrating trust and a need for reassurance.
• Emotions: They can produce more varied and intense emotions, such as happiness, irritation, and affection, portrayed through facial expressions.
• Attachment Behaviors: The attachment towards the primary caregivers is more pronounced as the babies mostly seek solace in them and do not like staying away.
• Parallel Play: They don't play with other children, but they can be seen playing parallel to other children and are interested in the plays surrounding them.

These 'landmark' events reflect their growth in social skills and increasing emotional knowledge, which will later form the basis for other relationships.

Language and Speech Milestones Development for a 11 month old:

• Babbling: Infants test to take their babbling to the next level by combining sounds and testing intonation, eventually leading them toward speech.
• First Words: They say their first recognisable words, "mama" or "dada." They tend to say these with purpose.
• Responding to Simple Commands: By this time, infants begin responding to simple requests, such as "Come here," and show an understanding of words.
• Use of Gestures: They use gestures, such as pointing or waving, to convey their needs and interests and improve their nonverbal communication.
• Imitation of Sounds: Many children start imitating the sounds and speech patterns they hear from adults, which encourages more language development.

The following are some of the significant milestones in the process. They describe an increase in their ability to express and comprehend, which then gradually develops into more complex speech.

Play Milestones for a 11 month old:

• Exploratory Play: Infants become much more active explorers of the environment. During this stage, they use their senses to discover new objects and textures.
• Functional Play: At this point in life, babies begin to use toys purposefully, for example, to stack blocks or to move cars to demonstrate how things work.
• Imitative Play: Most babies imitate what they have seen adults do, like making sounds as if they are on the phone or feeding a doll. 
• Interactive Play: They enjoy playing simple interactive games, such as peek-a-boo or pat-a-cake, which encourage social interaction and bonding.
• Parallel Play: While playing alongside other children, they only learn to play cooperatively, evidencing an interest in peers and their activities.

These milestones show how important play is for developing growth across the various domains of development.

Physical and Motor Milestones for a 11 month old:

By 11 months, the baby has progressed tremendously in physical and motor development as an indication of their growing strength and coordination.

• Crawling: Crawling is mostly on hands and knees, but some kids may crawl on all fours or resort to other practices, such as scooting.
•  Pulling up to a stand: They can pull up to a standing position by holding onto furniture or similar supports, which shows improvement in leg strength.
• Cruising: With the support of furniture, sideways steps may begin while holding onto the body for balance. This is a form of preparation for independent walking.
• Independent Standing: In this stage, they can stand alone without support for at least a couple of seconds to prove that they are doing well in walking.
• Mastering Fine Motor Coordination: Better dexterity helps them hold tiny objects, pick up food, and play with toys much better.

1. Sensory Play

2. Stacking Blocks

3. Interactive Storytime

4. Instrument Play

5. Crawling Obstacle Course

6. Push and Pull Toys

7. Water Play

8. Finger Paints or Crayons Art

9. Basic Puzzles

10. Imitation Play

11. Treasure Hunt

12. Ball Play

1. Encourage Communication

2. Read Together

3. Encourage Movement

4. Make Sure They're Safe

5. Make Mealtime Fun

6. Get Enough Sleep

Delayed Milestones:

Language Problems:

Social Interaction Issue:

Protracted Crying:

Changes in Behavior:

Feeding Issues:

Sleep Problems:

Vaccination Questions: