What are "developmental milestones"?
So, developmental milestones are ways for pediatricians to track how a child is growing and developing and developmental milestones are broken up into different categories. There are motor milestones which are how we move and there's language milestones in how we are speaking and then there are behavioral milestones. And doctors look at every visit on what a child is doing and correlate that with other children in their age group to see if it's appropriate. Now the most important thing to remember with milestones is these are not fixed in stone. If you go on the internet, if you read a book, it says at one year of age your child walks. And development and milestones do not work like this. Yes, many one year olds walk, but if your child doesn't walk at one, it's absolutely normal as well. I think of milestones as a trend and we always want to look at the trend. If you're doing something today that you weren't doing a month ago, or six months ago and we're moving in the right direction, that's what's important. It's not what we're doing today as a fixed point in time. And that's really important for parents to understand because with all the literature and all the things we can read nowadays, I know parents get concerned about my child doesn't do this, but Sally does, and remember everybody develops at a different rate and there are many different ranges of normal.
