Understanding Your Child’s Development
Spend a few minutes watching children arrive at nursery and you’ll notice that no two children approach drop off in quite the same way.
One child runs confidently through the door without looking back. Another pauses for a cuddle and tightly grips onto a parent or carer’s hand. One heads straight for the painting table, while another becomes completely absorbed in building with blocks.
As parents, it’s easy to notice these differences. It’s even easier to wonder whether they mean something. Why does my child seem more cautious? Should I be worried that my child isn’t doing what everyone else seems to be doing?
Over the years, I’ve noticed that many of my conversations with parents begin in exactly the same way. Although every family is different, these conversations almost always lead us to the same place.
To understand children’s behaviour, we first need to understand children’s development.
Development is much more than milestones
Spend a few minutes watching children arrive at nursery and you’ll notice that no two children approach drop off in quite the same way.
One child runs confidently through the door without looking back. Another pauses for a cuddle and tightly grips onto a parent or carer’s hand. One heads straight for the painting table, while another becomes completely absorbed in building with blocks.
As parents, it’s easy to notice these differences. It’s even easier to wonder whether they mean something. Why does my child seem more cautious? Should I be worried that my child isn’t doing what everyone else seems to be doing?
Over the years, I’ve noticed that many of my conversations with parents begin in exactly the same way. Although every family is different, these conversations almost always lead us to the same place.
To understand children’s behaviour, we first need to understand children’s development.
Why every child is different
Every child begins life with their own unique combination of biology, temperament and family. Some children are naturally cautious, preferring to observe before joining in. Others throw themselves enthusiastically into every new opportunity. Some seem endlessly curious, asking questions from morning until night. Others communicate through movement or creativity.
As children grow, these individual differences continue to interact with the relationships they experience and the environments around them. Parents influence children, children influence parents, and together they shape one another through thousands of everyday interactions.
Children develop through conversations at the dinner table, games of peekaboo, climbing at the park, bedtime stories, disagreements with siblings and cuddles after difficult moments.
These ordinary moments become the building blocks of development.
This idea extends beyond the family. Development is also influenced by the wider environments children experience, including nursery, school, friendships and the communities in which they live.
Development is rarely a straight line
One of the questions I hear most often from parents is:
“She was doing so well, and then… what happened?”
Perhaps a child who had been confidently using several words but now seems quieter or has returned to pointing rather than speaking, or a child that had settled happily into nursery for months suddenly becomes clingy at every drop-off. A toddler who had been sleeping through the night starts waking again. Parents often worry whether something has gone wrong. They can feel as though development has stalled, or even reversed.
In reality, development rarely follows a perfectly straight line.
Children’s brains are constantly adapting, growing and changing to everyday experiences, relationships and opportunities to learn, known as plasticity. Development is characterised by periods of rapid growth, consolidation and adaptation. During periods of transition, such as starting nursery, welcoming a new sibling or learning a complex new skill, it is not unusual for previously established skills to become temporarily less consistent.
Looking beyond behaviour
As parents, it’s very easy to focus on the behaviour we can see. We can all do it. We may compare children at the park, at nursery, or at school. On some days, we even compare our child with the version of them we had last Tuesday. Sometimes, if we’re honest, we compare ourselves with other parents too.
Perhaps the next time something leaves you scratching your head, whether that’s tears over the wrong bowl, a sudden reluctance to go into nursery, or a skill that seemed to disappear overnight, before asking, “Why are they doing this?”, you might ask, “What might this behaviour tell me about where my child is in their development?”
When you understand development, everyday behaviour starts to make more sense. And sometimes, it changes the way parents feel about themselves as well.