Ditch The Milestone Lists!

Often Mums are asked what advice they would give to other Mums and one of mine would be that Every Child Is Different!

With our first son, we joined NCT and we often joke, as I’ve heard other parenting friends do too, that you do NCT to buy friends.  I am eternally grateful to Rory for the friendships I have with some of the NCT mothers six years on.  However, because the children are all the same age, you can’t help but compare them.  I can remember thinking ‘Little Johnny is rolling, why isn’t our son rolling?’ or ‘Little Johnny is sleeping through, why isn’t our child sleeping through.’  And then of course, there’s Google and the websites with lists telling you at what age children ought to do things.

Parenting Rowan, our second son, has definitely felt more liberating because I don’t have other babies around us who are his precise age.  Also, and I’m not sure why, but I haven’t felt the need to keep consulting those dreaded lists to see what he should be doing.

It’s fascinating to me that that our boys have the same parents and have been raised in the same parenting style and yet they could not be more different!  In almost all aspects of their lives they are polar opposites.  When Rory was a baby, he loved to co sleep and he wouldn’t fall asleep unless you stayed with him until he was completely asleep.  In contrast Rowan finds having someone in his room far too over stimulating and he just wants to play.  Bedtimes for him consist of milk, stories, songs and then a goodnight kiss followed by a swift exit.

Sometimes it is hard to believe it but we are all doing a great job.  We do the very best we can for our children and we make choices for them because we know them and we do what we believe is best for them.  The online lists of milestones don’t know your child.  Children excel at different things and they develop at different rates.  Letting go of these lists, is so liberating because you lose the worry.

For the purpose of this post, I had a little look at what Rowan should be doing at his age.  One of these lists suggests that at 20 months children should be learning ten new words a day.  Rowan doesn’t speak other than a collection of animal noises.  He can mimic plenty of sounds but at the moment he doesn’t chose to blend these together into words.  Should I have been following the list, I’d be going barmy by now as to why he wasn’t talking.  What good is that doing?  It’s not good for my self esteem as a parent to feel like I’m failing and its not good for the child to be potentially harassed into talking.  He’s going to talk at some point and can confidently use baby signing to express himself so there’s no need for the stress of the monthly milestone expectations.

I’d thorough urge you to have a milestone detox and ditch the list too!  Instead, take time to celebrate the milestones, big and small, as your child achieves them.