Infants' Daily Routines Shape Opportunities for Perceptual-Motor Exploration

How infants spend time in everyday life is an important source of day-to-day, infant-to-infant, and age-related variability in development. Here, we measured the frequency of macro-level activity categories-playing, eating and drinking, napping, going on errands, bathing and dressing, watching media, book reading, and being comforted-in infants aged 4-7 and 10-13 months recruited from across the United States (55% female assigned at birth; 40% male assigned at birth; 5% unknown). Unlike past work that used retrospective estimates, we used an ecological momentary assessment sampling method to obtain direct reports of activities from infants' caregivers via text-message surveys. The resulting data illustrate that play is the most frequent activity within the first year, accounting for half of infants' waking time. Other frequent activities, such as mealtimes and errands, contribute significantly to how infants spend their time. Older infants spend more time playing and eating/drinking and less time napping and being comforted than younger infants. Importantly, different macro-level activities facilitate or constrain infants' moment-to-moment behaviors, such as holding objects, sitting, and standing, suggesting that the composition of infants' daily routines shapes opportunities for perceptual-motor learning.