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As part of our consulting practice specializing in the developmental progress, we needed a method for tracking movement through the developmental stages over time. The result is our free Developmental Checklist. Our clients use it to track the developmental progress of their child. It is useful for parents of children with developmental difficulties to see and understand the status of their child's developmental progress. It is also helpful for all parents to understand and to track the developmental progress of their child, no matter the developmental condition. Developing this checklist When we started consulting with parents about their child's developmental progress, we recognized that many parents do not know much about the developmental progress. Parents would tell us stories about what their child did new this week, but they had little knowledge that their child was showing information about the developmental step on which the child was working. Helping parents understand the developmental progress We needed something that helped parents understand the developmental progress. We needed something that guided parents to watch for important developmental signals. And, we needed something that would quantify a child’s developmental progress. We tried several different forms, searching for something that was helpful for parents and caregivers, ourselves, and to other service providers who taught the child. We did not want to create a diagnostic instrument. We wanted something to help parents understand and to keep track of movement through the developmental stages of their child. One of the concerns we had for the format was to have a better way of showing the overview of the status of the child’s developmental progress. The standard way is to describe the child’s developmental age as a simple number of months or years. What about this developmental age? There are numerous difficulties in this way of doing things. For instance, what are the developmental factors 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. . .) factors? Which of these factors is better at describing the child's age? Even more of a difficulty is that for each stages (commonly established at 12, 18, 24, 36, 48, and 60 months), a child with developmental difficulties will have completed some tasks and not completed others. These children have begun some tasks and not finished them. They have begun some other tasks and finished them. And, they have not even begun some tasks. Broad-based developmental improvement While working with our approach the children fill-in the holes in their movement through the developmental stages. When we reported to the parents the status of the children's developmental progress we wanted to provide a picture of that broad-based developmental improvement. If we are only using some narrow, limited set of developmental factors to define the developmental ‘age’ of a child, in one month’s progress we might miss developmental progress in areas not used to calculate that ‘age.’ In one month a child might not make progress in the factors used to define the ‘age’ and make a lot of progress in other developmental factors. We considered our task was to show the broad-based developmental improvement that children were making, so we wanted something to show that. What about developmental warning-signs? In the 12-month and 24-month stages, there are some items which are not developmental tasks. There is also an additional group of items, shown in our Developmental Checklist as “6+ years.” These sections are developmental warning-signs. These items are thought to be warning-signs of likely developmental difficulties. By themselves, when a child is demonstrating behaviors shown in these items, this does not mean that there is a developmental difficulty. If a parent sees multiple of these items, the parents might think about testing and diagnosis. Our Developmental Checklist is no used for diagnosis, only a professional can do that kind of testing and diagnosis. Visual Overview We wanted to give parents the overview of the broad-based developmental improvement. Our Visual Overview page provides a way for seeing that. It demonstrates the current state of the child’s developmental progress across each of the stages. It also demonstrates any of the developmental warning-signs the parents has identified. Line-items details Our free Developmental Checklist report also shows how the parent marked each of the items, from each of the stages. If parents want to use the checklist on a monthly basis, or to use it at the end of each stages, these items specifics makes it easy to keep track of the answers marked the last time they used it. Other service providers We created the checklist report to be helpful for medical, psychological, and educational service providers. They will find the report helpful for tracking children's developmental progress.
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Rodger C Bailey has degrees in Social Science and Educational Counseling. He provides Developmental Discovery System™ consulting for families, (English & Spanish), which cultivates the hidden proficiency for improvement. Checkout his Blog and his free Developmental Checklist.
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