Developmental Delay: Tracking and demonstrating the developmental process

As part of our consulting business specializing in the movement through the developmental stages, we needed a method for reporting the developmental process over time. The result is our free Developmental Checklist. Our clients use it to track the movement through the developmental stages of their child. It is helpful for families of children with developmental difficulties to see and understand the status of their child's movement through the developmental stages. It is also useful for all families to understand and to track the movement through the developmental stages of their child, no matter the developmental situation.

Developing this checklist

When we began consulting with families about their child's movement through the developmental stages, we discovered that many families do not understand much about the movement through the developmental stages. Moms and dads would tell us stories about what their child did differently this week, but they had little knowledge that their child was demonstrating data about the developmental task on which the child was working.

Helping families understand the movement through the developmental stages

We needed something that helped families understand the movement through the developmental stages. We needed something that guided families to watch for important developmental signals. And, we needed something that would quantify a child’s movement through the developmental stages. We tried several different forms, looking for something that was useful for families and caregivers, ourselves, and to other service providers who taught the child.

We did not want to create a diagnostic tool. We wanted something to help families understand and to track the developmental process of their child.

One of the outcomes we had for the form was to have a better way of demonstrating the overview of the status of the child’s movement through the developmental stages. The usual way is to describe the child’s developmental age as a single number of months or years.

What about this developmental age?

There are many difficulties in this approach. For instance, what are the developmental steps used to decide the ‘age’ of the child? Do we use walking or talking? Do we use gross motor, fine motor, social/emotional, sensory (, etc. . .) steps? Which of these steps is best at showing the child's age?

Even more of a difficulty is that for each milestones (commonly established at 12, 18, 24, 36, 48, and 60 months), a child with developmental difficulties will have completed some steps and not completed others. These children have begun some steps and not finished them. They have begun some other steps and finished them. And, they have not even started some steps.

Broad-based developmental advancement

While working with our method the clients accomplish the holes in their developmental progress. When we reported to the families the status of the child’s movement through the developmental stages we wanted to provide a visual representation of that broad spectrum developmental advancement.

If we are only using some narrow, select group of developmental steps to define the developmental ‘age’ of a child, in one month’s progress we might miss movement through the developmental stages in areas not used to calculate that ‘age.’ In one month a child might not make progress in the steps used to define the ‘age’ and make a lot of progress in other developmental steps. We thought our task was to show the broad spectrum developmental advancement that children were making, so we wanted something to show that.

What about developmental warning-signs?

In the 12-month and 24-month milestones, there are some line-items which are not developmental steps. There is also an additional group of line-items, shown in our Developmental Checklist as “6+ years.” These sections are developmental warning-signs.

These line-items are thought to be warning-signs of likely developmental difficulties. By themselves, when children are demonstrating behaviors shown in these line-items, this does not mean that there is a developmental difficulty. If a parent sees multiple of these line-items, the families should consider testing and diagnosis. Our Developmental Checklist is no used for diagnosis, only a licensed professional can do that kind of testing and diagnosis.

Visual Overview

We wanted to give families the big picture of the broad spectrum developmental advancement. Our Visual Overview page provides a way for seeing that. It demonstrates the current state of the child’s movement through the developmental stages across each of the milestones. It also demonstrates any of the developmental warning-signs the families has identified.

Items details

Our free Developmental Checklist report also shows how the parent responded to each of the line-items, from each of the milestones. If families want to use the checklist on a monthly basis, or to use it at the end of each milestones, these line-items specifics makes it easy to keep track of the answers provided the last time they used it.

Other service providers

We organized the checklist report to be useful for medical, psychological, and educational service providers. They will find the information useful for tracking children's movement through the developmental stages.

Rodger C Bailey, MS has degrees in Social Science and Counseling. He provides www.gotofocus.com/ Developmental Discovery System™ consulting for families, in English and Spanish), which awakens the child’s concealed facility for developing. Checkout his Blog developmentald.blogspot.com/ Blog and his free Developmental Checklist www.developmental.gotofocus.com/

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