Your baby, who used to play so nicely, suddenly seems less attentive and appears to have difficulty concentrating.
There could be a good reason for this—it could be that he is beginning to walk. New research at the Faculty of Education of the University of Haifa found that a baby's learning to walk affects his play skills. "Parents need to know that they should modify their demands from their child during certain periods of change and development in order to encourage their child and enhance his feelings of mastery and competence," said Dr. Eleanor Schneider who conducted the research under the direction of Prof. Anat Scher.
The research was based on the assumption that the domain of play reflects the interaction between the child and his environment. When a child begins to walk, the way in which he experiences his environment changes. This change may be manifested in the way he plays. In order to examine this assumption, sixty children were evaluated at ages 10, 12 and 14 months. The researcher measured the child's play using three parameters: persistence and engagement in a specific task while playing with objects, attention span and concentration and the level of sophistication of object play.