Your 14-Month-Old: Imitating, Pointing, and the First Running Steps
By the Growbaby team · Published Aug 4, 2026
Written against AAP, CDC and WHO guidance. How we write these guides
At a glance
- Household actions get copied, often within minutes of being seen.
- New words arrive in bursts rather than at a steady rate.
- Pointing is used to ask, to show, and to share attention.
- A brush goes to the hair and a spoon to the mouth, mostly.
- Walking speeds up into something close to a run, with unreliable brakes.
Copying becomes the main way your toddler learns this month. Sweeping, stirring, tapping at a phone, wiping a table: whatever you do repeatedly is likely to come back to you in miniature. It looks like play, and it is also study.
Alongside the imitation, vocabulary grows, pointing turns into a genuine conversational tool, and the legs find a faster gear. These weeks cover imitation games, new words, pointing, using objects for what they are for, and the first attempts at running.
What is new this month
Imitation is how a toddler tests a theory. Watching an action, storing it, and reproducing it later needs memory that holds across time, which is why the copying you see today may be of something you did yesterday. Using objects for their intended purpose comes from the same place: the spoon means eating because that is how the spoon has always been used nearby.
Pointing does a great deal of work before speech catches up. A point paired with a glance at your face is a request for a shared moment, not only for an object, and answering it with the word for the thing feeds vocabulary directly. Naming whatever your toddler points at is one of the simplest ways to add words without turning it into a lesson.
Running at this stage is mostly a walk with the volume turned up. Stopping and turning are harder than accelerating, so open spaces are kinder than corridors full of furniture. Some toddlers run within days of walking well and others take months, and both patterns are ordinary.
Week by week, in the app
Our paediatric specialist wrote one thing to notice and one thing to try for every week of the first three years. Here is what this month covers. The app works out which week your child is in from their birth date and brings each one to you on the day.
- Week 57Your baby Plays Imitation Games
- Week 58Your baby is Increasing Their Vocabulary
- Week 59Your baby Communicates by Pointing
- Week 60Your baby Uses Objects Appropriately
- Week 61Your baby is Starting to Run
This week, for your baby
Growbaby works out which week your baby is in from their birth date and brings that week's activity to you on the day, so you are not looking up where you are. Plus adaptive soothing for the nights and Growy for the questions in between.
This guide is for general informational purposes only. Growbaby is not a medical device and does not provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Every baby develops at their own pace; for any question or concern about your baby's health or development, always consult your pediatrician or another qualified healthcare provider.