Research

1. Verbal Development

​As of writing this research, the child of our specific user is not yet fully verbal, only saying the odd word here and there. On the scale set by Stanford medicine, on children's health, a toddler, of 12 to 17 months with healthy speech development, should be able to answers simple questions nonverbally, and have a vocabulary of four to six words (Age-Appropriate Speech and Language Milestones, n.d.).

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2. Physical Development

From looking at blogs from Moms about commuting with kids using strollers, or stroller like alternatives, some common spread struggles can be noted. One blog looked at focused mainly on the way that they were treated by other commuters in the Netherlands. Commenting that many people ignore the pregnant women and stroller designated spaces featured on most public transport vehicles, and some people, not in need for these spaces, would protest to giving up the seats. In another blog a mom shares her first time experience taking a pushchair on the train in London, she reflects on how she got the pushchair on the train. Struggles she encountered where that the elevator she needed to take to get to the underground was out of order, luckily, she was able to balance to pushchair on the escalator, however this would not be very safe. She also comments on the changing facilities at the station and on the trains, and that those where far from appealing, and she would try her hardest to avoid using them, preferring looking for restaurants to change diapers. 

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3. Multilingualism

In the case of our specific user, they are raising their child in multiple languages. As said before, the father of the child natively speaks Portuguese, the mother speaks French and when communicating with each other, the parents speak English. Next to this, the child is exposed to Dutch at their preschool and later at their primary school. This results in four different languages being present in their life.
 

Being raised multilingual has proven to decrease the child's receptive vocabulary, the words that can be understood by an adult. This makes it common for children raised in multiple languages to display a delayed verbal development (Kanhere & Sunderajan, 2019). 

In older studies, there was a fear that raising a child in multiple languages would be too demanding for a developing mind and could lead to intellectual impairment (Darcy, 1953), the results of these studies were later found to be questionable because of methodological flaws (Barac et al., 2014). More recent studies show being raised multilingual can actually benefit some the childs skills, especially having advantages in executive control (Poulin-Dubois et al., 2010).

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