How to Hit Developmental Milestones
Telling you when your child should achieve a milestone does nothing to help them actually achieve it.
Don’t get me wrong, knowing developmental milestone age ranges is important and should be something all parents know. But fixating on the age number that correlates to a certain skill does not do anything to help the child work towards the skills.
So, instead, more time and effort should be spent on the how. During evaluations and treatment, I like to use the phrase, “Let’s meet him where he is at.” That means that we should identify the skills that the child has and make a plan to work towards more age-appropriate skills.
Additionally, I have found that in practice, when I say, “Ok, results of the formal evaluation revealed that your child is functioning at a 2 year old level, so he is about a year behind his typically developing peers…”- the parents stop listening. They are so focused on the fact that their child is developmentally delayed by a large margin that they don’t hear the best part of my speech: how we are going to help him make progress.
So, I stopped telling parents how delayed their child is in terms of age-level, because how is that helpful? It’s not.
If a child qualifies for treatment, then I say that. I list their strengths and weaknesses, and then parents are more open to hearing what I have to say regarding a treatment plan.
Eat Play Say’s mindset is to focus more on HOW to reach milestones and less on WHEN they should be reached. Check out my free downloads to see how I do just that!
