One frequent question we hear from parents is “Is my child normal?”. The question is generally asked in the context of development. This is of course a very broad question and if we are being honest it is usually asked with some specific incident or developmental milestone in mind. There are a few very good resources we are aware of when it comes to understanding what those milestones should be and when they should occur. Stanford University School of Medicine, WebMD and the CDC all have outstanding resources when it comes to understanding development.
Developmental milestones are binned into different categories.
– Gross motor skills
– Fine motor skills
– Language skills
– Thinking skills
– Social interaction
At Greystone House, we use these broad categories as gauges on a daily basis to monitor developmental progress, to identify areas where we may want to apply a little extra emphasis in the classroom, and also to alert you as parents if we feel there may be signs of a developmental delay. We are not diagnosticians – so with regard to that last one – when we react it is because we feel that seeing a diagnostician may have some merit.
We see a very broad range of development that qualifies as normal. Some of what is viewed as normal seems slow compared to our Greystone House timelines. For example, guidance for young children being able to drink from a cup (not a lidded cup, but rather an open topped cup) is 18 months old. At Greystone House, children who leave our infant room have already been sitting at a community table using real cups to drink at mealtimes for months. Similarly, five year olds are listed as needing to be able to use silverware. Again, this is something that is mastered by age three at Greystone House as we are exclusively community dining. The point here is that on items such as these, the padding for what is considered normal is pretty big. If a child could not do these things by this age and had been attending Greystone House, we would have already raised a flag.
Other items vary as well, but seem to have a narrower band of concern. In other words, we wouldn’t raise a flag until the expected age unless there was something clearly and dramatically off. Examples that come to mind include doing somersaults or climbing on a play structure. While most children master these just fine before the age of five, some children simply don’t show an interest in this sort of play until later on, but prove perfectly capable of doing so when pressed.
Ultimately, it is you as a parent who needs to understand appropriate development. Not at the level of the people who study it of course, but rather at a broad enough level to recognize when a comment to your pediatrician, or a question to one of our teachers, may be warranted. We are incredibly fortunate to live in a time where not only do we have the tools to understand how children develop, but also the ability to intervene early and have an effect on outcomes. People like speech therapists, child development specialists, and pediatricians are resources that have become ever more skilled over time. Combine this with signs of increased social maturity among adults (aka – grown ups grasping that there is a range of normal and not being so “judgy” as a result) and the future looks bright. There is no reason not to get your child some additional help if it is needed.
