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. As a collective, the term “infants and toddlers” refers to children from birth to three years of age. More specifically, infancy refers to children between birth and one year of age, while toddlerhood refers to children between 1 and three years of age. In many texts,
infants and toddlers are perceived as a homogenous group (i.e., Maguire-Fong, 2014); however, recent research highlights the importance of recognizing the individual differences between children under three years of age (Frank, Braginsky, Yurovsky & Marchman, 2021; Kidd, Donnelly & Christiansen, 2018; Pérez?Edgar, Vallorani, Buss & LoBue, 2020). It is now undeniableone cannot consider all infants or toddlers to be developmentally similar or to have similar experiences. There are important, early forming and long-lasting individual developmental differences (Marchman & Fernald, 2008). Infants and toddlers in the U.S. represent a diverse group demographically. The organization Zero to Three conducts a large annual report revealing state and national data on infants and toddlers (Keating et al., 2021).