Understanding your child's developmental stages and what to expect.
"He just can't concentrate on anything" is one of the most common parental concerns about toddlers, and it is usually a description of entirely age-ap...
A two-and-a-half-year-old who has been chatting away suddenly starts repeating "c-c-c-can" or getting stuck at the start of every sentence is showing...
"Wait and see" is one of the most common pieces of advice parents get when they raise a worry about their toddler's speech, and it is also one of the...
The first word feels like a switch flipping, but the real work has been going on quietly for months. Babies start picking up the sounds and rhythms of...
The eighteen-to-thirty-six-month stretch is the window where a child who could barely string two words together starts asking why the dog is sad. It i...
Parents often notice speech delay before anyone else does. The child who is not saying as many words as a friend's child of the same age, or who is no...
Some toddlers resist certain textures of food so intensely that mealtimes become a battle. Others cannot walk on grass without distress, or fall apart...
From the moment of birth, babies are taking in sensory information from the world around them — and while the senses are immature at birth, they are a...
Selective mutism is frequently misunderstood. Parents find it perplexing that the child who talks constantly at home is silent at nursery. Teachers so...
Children who arrive at school unable to read are not failing — they are about to start learning. But children who arrive with a rich vocabulary, the e...
Shared book reading is one of the most consistently recommended activities in early childhood, and one of the few where the evidence is genuinely robu...
Holding a premature baby up against a standard milestone chart will, more often than not, produce unnecessary worry. Those charts assume 40 weeks of g...
Potty training is one of the developmental milestones most influenced by cultural and family pressure, with significant variation in expectations abou...
A 14-month-old you've never met sees you sip from a cup. Two days later you walk back into the room and they wordlessly hand you the same cup, watchin...
The companion piece to this article (Object Permanence: What It Is and Why It Matters) covers the practical day-to-day picture for parents — what the...
A 4-month-old drops their rattle off the changing mat and looks up at you. They've done this thirty times today and you're losing your mind. You hand...
"I was always rubbish at maths" is one of the most common things parents say to their toddlers, and it's also one of the few things that will measurab...
A baby's senses do not all come online together. Touch is functional from around 7.5 weeks of gestation, hearing well before birth, vision still matur...
A newborn placed at the breast can see your face clearly at that distance, hear your voice as the same one heard for months in utero, and recognise th...
Most parents witness the Moro reflex in the first 48 hours: lay the baby down too fast and the arms throw out wide, eyes go big, and they cry. It look...