Harvey Howard is the owner of My Gym Children’s Fitness Center in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. He is a certified special education teacher, elementary teacher, guidance counselor, and student assistance professional located in New Jersey. Here he discusses why parents shouldn’t overreact if their child is taking a little bit longer to master certain skills.
Within groups of children who are the same age and have roughly the same abilities, it can be amazing to see the differences in terms of when each child is able to accomplish certain tasks.
One of the biggest examples of this is in regards to when kids start walking. Children can typically begin walking anywhere from 7 months of age all the way up to 15 or 18 months of age. And to be completely honest, by age 3 nobody can tell who was an early walker and who was a late walker. These are just developmental differences that everyone accomplishes on their own timelines. However, what parents do not want to do is to start worrying if they don’t think their child is progressing in certain skills, like walking for example, as fast as his peers might be.
While there are basic benchmarks that have been put in place, there is also a wide latitude in terms of when different kids reach specific milestones. It is important that parents remember that and keep it in mind if their child progresses a little slower than other kids. They don’t want to get into the habit of saying, “My neighbor’s kid walked at 8 or 10 months. My child isn’t there yet, so something must be wrong with him.” Being critical of something your kid can’t control is just unfair and it is pushing your little one too hard.
So there are age norms as to when certain skills should be coming along, but those are norms that go over large spans of children and time. They are rarely hard and specific when we’re talking about 3-year-olds, 2-year-olds, or little ones who may be less than 18 months. More than anything else, these milestone norms are just guidelines.
Parents need to not overreact if their child isn’t meeting every single one of these guidelines. Instead, they should be looking at these milestones as developmental areas of standing that are meant to show the path to which things are accomplished—essentially what should be coming up next.
