Milestones

A new article from Slate persuasively argues that developmental milestones for children—when they learn to walk, when they start speaking—are meaningless.

Babies take different routes to the same destination. There’s no right way to learn to walk, for example, and there’s scarcely even a right time: The accurate range for when babies should start extends from 8 months to almost 20 months—an amazingly, almost meaninglessly broad stretch of time. The most interesting research on motor development in recent years treats it as the product of many different systems: the infant’s environment, personality, nervous system, and personal physical limitations. When all these variables interact, you get a lot of different results, as countless studies have made clear. You don’t get a chart that looks like something out of The Ascent of Man.

But the idea of the typical child is ever with us, never mind the volumes of research disproving it. As several prominent developmental psychologists have written, somewhat despairingly, "Ages and stages so thoroughly pervade our conception of motor development that every pediatrician’s office and developmental textbook sports a requisite table of developmental norms." These charts and tables make us anxious and shrink our sense of the possibilities of infancy. There’s no chart that can make sense of this photo of an 11-month-old Efe infant, in a rainforest in the Democratic Republic of Congo, carefully cutting a fruit in a half with a machete.

Of course, parents want some sense of what their children should be doing, and knowing that their baby girls technically might be able to use a machete won’t help much. But false milestones and misleading developmental narratives aren’t helping, either. It’s a sorry state of affairs: Even as developmental psychologists have discarded the idea of universal developmental milestones, those milestones are the only things many parents know about developmental psychology.

In the Preddy house, we’ve sorta figured that was the case. I learned to walk when I was 11 months old. Jordan learned when she was 9 months. I have a coworker whose twins started walking at 14 months. All within a “normal” timeframe.

But understanding the essential meaninglessness of these milestones doesn’t mean we aren’t excited and proud to see Patrick a few weeks away from taking his first steps when he’s barely 8 months old. For the proud parent, that’s the nature of the beast. You get excited about the big changes.

Here’s video evidence of Patrick’s new skills.

In case you were wondering, this is perfectly normal.