How to support your child’s development without comparing
Most people find themselves comparing their children’s development at some point. It might be when you see a few videos of babies rolling in your WhatsApp group, or a ‘helpful’ relative reminds you that your cousin’s toddler can already have a full conversation. Even when you’re determined not to compare, it’s hard not to get pulled in. Our journey is designed to help you stop comparing and instead see and support your child’s progress.
When are milestones useful?
Our child development team are all qualified and experienced teachers, we’ve worked with babies and children from baby rooms in nursery through to reception classes. We know how important it is to understand each individual child’s development.
Sometimes, part of that understanding is getting information from a specialist professional, and milestones can be a useful tool for helping us know when to get more advice. They’re used in some of the development checks your child has with health professionals.
Often in these checks, a skill’s ‘milestone’ will appear across several months, as there's a range of ages when this might be thought of as typical – you might not always see that range as you just fill in one check based on your child’s age.
Milestones tell us about averages, but we all know that children are individuals not averages.
The age a milestone is linked to is often decided by when a certain percentage of children achieve it. It can be hard to find out exactly how the milestone has been decided (some are based on research, others on clinical opinion) and it’s not always clear when you find a milestones list if the ages they give are based on when 50% or 75% of children will do it.[1.2]
Knowing that 50% of children master a particular skill by a certain age doesn’t mean that a child who hasn't mastered it at that point always needs extra support or specialist advice.
We’d always say to trust your instincts, and if you’re ever concerned about your child’s development chat to a health professional (a doctor or health visitor) or childcare professional who knows your child.
Even if your child needs some different approaches or extra support, using the app to help them master skills means you’re doing just what they need right now. You’re looking at the skills you know they can’t yet do, and discovering more about the development happening so you can help them master it.
Using your child’s skills journey
Your child’s journey in the app shows you which skills you can support them with now, so you can help them to keep making progress and celebrate every little step.
We’ve got a few tips to get the perfect journey for your child:
Check your child’s skills regularly
You might be surprised by how many new skills they mastered which seem small at the time but have a big impact later.
We suggest checking at least once a week, and marking anything you notice in between your regular checks too. This keeps your activities up-to-date and just right for your child.
If you want to know more about a skill before you mark it as mastered, tap the skill tile to find more information. You’ll also find more details in the activities, which are all linked to the skills you’ve told us your child is working on mastering now.
Look at the coming up skills too
We’ve used research and decades of experience to write our skills journey. As you help your child to master skills, we’ll tell you which skills are likely to be next.
This means that most of the time you will see the skills your child is working on in the active list, but as every child is different sometimes there might be skills in the ‘coming up’ list that you think need to be active.
Enjoy the journey
We know it’s a bit of a cliché but we’re passionate about bringing the joy back to parenting, and particularly to supporting and seeing our children develop.
Not that every moment will be joyful, but taking joy from the knowledge that every child is learning and developing all the time – and that you as a parent are doing a brilliant and important job every day.
By looking at your child’s individual journey, you can see they’re making progress and mastering skills so you can be confident that you’re doing just what they need right now.
If you there’s anything you want to know about the skills in your child’s journey, or if you have questions about child development, drop our child development team an email at askusanything@mffy.com or pop a question in our Facebook community where our community manager Becki will be happy to help.
References:
[1] Finnerty, T. (n.d.) Developmental milestones – OSCE guide. https://geekymedics.com/developmental-milestones/
[2] Zubler, J.M., Wiggins, L.D., Macias, M.M., Whitaker, T.M., Shaw, J.S., Squires, J.K., Pajek, J.A., Wolf, R.B., Slaughter, K.S., Broughton, A.D., Gerndt, K.L., Mlodoch, B.J., Lipkin, P.H. (2022). ‘Evidence-Informed Milestones for Developmental Surveillance Tools’. Pediatrics, 149 (3), Article, e2021052138. 10.1542/peds.2021-052138