Milestone Madness

I recently launched a new series on my social media accounts called “Milestone Monday”. In this series, I will be discussing the milestones for speech and language from birth to age 3. For instance, the “cooing” we see at three months and the word combinations we see emerging at two years.

As the parent of a toddler who was late to talk, language milestones dominated my life for over a year. In fact, they stole a lot of the joy that I should have felt raising a little human who was otherwise thriving. Instead of celebrating everything he could do, I was fixated on the milestones he had not met. And because there was a long period of time that passed as we waited around for that ‘golden’ milestone (first words!), it only exacerbated the worry and stress over time. When we finally heard those first words at 20 months, it was thrilling! But I was also hung up on all of the milestones that he hadn’t reached in that time. So it felt like we were playing ‘catch up’ with some of these milestones seeming very far out of reach. Looking back now, I wish I had honoured his journey and celebrated the wins along the way. It wasn’t a race to the finish line. Rather, he was on his own trajectory and timeline. I just needed to trust it.

Don’t get me wrong. Milestones are useful, of course. They are evidence-based markers of healthy development. They assist health care professionals in determining when extra support may be needed in a given area. And they can serve as a general guide for parents in what to expect when it comes to their child’s development.

But they are not the “be-all-end-all”. Milestones do not define a child, nor do they represent the full picture of a child’s growth. They are merely a tool in our toolbox.

My goal for this series is to shift our mindsets around milestones. Yes, I will be reviewing the main speech and language milestones because they help us understand how speech and language develop over time. But I will also discuss the wide range of variation that can occur, which is certainly the case with late talkers. We’ll review what to look for and also how to support the skills you’re seeing or have yet to see.

I want parents to view milestones are guideposts rather than report cards. Join me every Monday as we navigate these developmental markers. I look forward to interacting with you there!

— Meg

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