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A lot of the developmental questions on this site are about Language, but I'm less anxious about missing language milestones than I am about other potential developmental milestones that I may be unaware of, for example "cognitive", "mobility", etc.

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Please don't go into specific details of what the actual milestones are, I'll raise seperate questions if I'm interested in specifics. I'm more interested in what types of development to be aware of and to monitor. – deworde Mar 15 '12 at 11:25
This is way too broad for this type of Q&A, where you're looking for an overall primer of child development. It is more useful to ask about specific questions you have, otherwise users are only guessing what information will actually be useful to you. There's nothing inherently wrong with asking "what should I worry about?" but such conversations are better suited to a threaded discussion forum than this type of Q&A. – Robert Cartaino♦ Mar 15 '12 at 14:55
@RobertCartaino Are we really saying that this isn't a direct answerable question? Because there's a pretty good answer below, and I'm sure there are other potential ones. I can't ask specific questions on milestones until I know what milestones to ask about. It's no good waiting till my child is behind in some area and going "Oh, should have checked for that". – deworde Mar 15 '12 at 17:54
I think this is a question that almost every parent is looking for, and while yes, I could look for a parental primer, I want to know where to start looking. (Again, see accepted answer). – deworde Mar 15 '12 at 18:03

closed as not a real question by Robert Cartaino♦ Mar 15 '12 at 14:55

It's difficult to tell what is being asked here. This question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form. For help clarifying this question so that it can be reopened, see the FAQ.

1 Answer

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Just off the top of my head, I thought of:

  1. Cognitive
  2. Social
  3. Emotional (sometimes this is combined with #2)
  4. Physical (which includes mobility but mostly fine and gross motor skills in general)
  5. Visual
  6. Aural
  7. Oral (This doesn't just include language, but also eating and the ability to properly manipulate the mouth/tongue which will influence language development)

Technically, 5 and 6 aren't true milestones, but from my own experience I truly believe that these two things are important enough to warrant a separate point. Before we got C's new RGP lenses, she was starting to get well behind on her development, but as soon as we changed she began hitting milestones like crazy and is completely caught up. The same is true with her language development. We had a really hard time with ear infections for a few months, and a couple of weeks after we had tubes put in her vocabulary just exploded. I can't prove that the tubes were the primary reason for that...it might just be that she was due for a vocab explosion anyway, but I don't believe it's a coincidence. I've listed a couple of websites below with some good general milestones (but it seems like every website has a different list).

  1. CDC
  2. Developmental Milestones Chart (newborn through adolescence)
  3. Visual development An interesting aside to this that I believe was pointed out to us by our pediatric ophthalmologist is that children's peripheral vision isn't fully formed until they're 10 years old! Ten! Takes on a whole new meaning when your child is fully mobile and sprinting for a parking lot with an on-coming car!
  4. Aural development
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What does C's new RGP lenses mean? I'm not familiar with the terms. – Torben Gundtofte-Bruun♦ Mar 15 '12 at 14:10
Rigid gas permeable contact lenses. My daughter (Charlotte) was born with congenital cataracts and had her natural lenses removed @ 10 and 14 weeks old so she now wears contact lenses to correct her vision and allow her visual cortex to develop properly so she won't be legally blind. Prior to this past May, she was wearing silicon lenses but we discovered that RGP's allow clearer, sharper vision than the silicons do and her development has improved tremendously. She wasn't really reaching for things, her mobility was suffering (she wasn't even really sitting up consistently), etc. – Meg Coates Mar 15 '12 at 14:19
Just to give you an idea of why this was worrisome: she was 10 months old in May. She certainly should have been reaching for things and sitting up. As soon as we changed her contacts, we saw a HUGE improvement in her development. – Meg Coates Mar 15 '12 at 14:25
Wow, what a success story! – Torben Gundtofte-Bruun♦ Mar 15 '12 at 14:31
Well, it will be an on-going battle her whole life, but you would never guess she wears contact lenses or that she was so developmentally behind her peers even just a few months ago. – Meg Coates Mar 15 '12 at 15:06
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