Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder: Keeping Track Of And Showing Developmental Progress

As part of our consulting business specializing in the movement through the developmental milestones, we needed a method for demonstrating developmental progress from month to month. The result is our free Developmental Checklist. Our clients use it to track the movement through the developmental milestones of their child. It is helpful for mothers and fathers of children with developmental problems to see and understand the status of their child's movement through the developmental milestones. It is also useful for all mothers and fathers to understand and to track the movement through the developmental milestones of their child, without respect to the developmental situation.

Developing this checklist

When we started consulting with mothers and fathers about their child's movement through the developmental milestones, we discovered that many mothers and fathers do not understand much about the movement through the developmental milestones. Parents would tell us stories about what their child did for the first time this week, but they had little understanding that their child was demonstrating data about the developmental task on which the child was working.

Helping mothers and fathers understand the movement through the developmental milestones

We needed something that helped mothers and fathers understand the movement through the developmental milestones. We needed something that guided mothers and fathers to watch for important developmental signals. And, we needed something that would quantify a child's movement through the developmental milestones. We tried several different forms, looking for something that was useful for mothers and fathers and caregivers, ourselves, and to other service providers who taught the child.

We did not want to create a diagnostic tool. We wanted something to help mothers and fathers understand and to track developmental progress of their child.

One of the objectives we had for the form was to have a better way of displaying the overview of the status of the child's movement through the developmental milestones. The standard method is to describe the child's developmental age as a simple number of months and years.

What about this developmental age?

There are numerous problems in this way of doing things. For instance, what are the developmental tasks 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. . .) tasks? Which of these tasks is best at showing the child's age?

Even more of a difficulty is that for each milestones (commonly established at 12, 18, 24, 36, 48, and 60 months), a child with developmental problems will have completed some tasks and not completed others. These children have begun some tasks and not completed them. They have begun some other tasks and completed them. And, they have not even begun some tasks.

Broad-based developmental advancement

Working with our process the children round out the chinks in their movement through the developmental stages. When we reported to the mothers and fathers the status of the children's movement through the developmental milestones we wanted to give a visual representation of that broad spectrum developmental advancement.

If we are only using some narrow, select group of developmental tasks to define the developmental age' of a child, in one month's progress we might miss movement through the developmental milestones in areas not used to calculate that age.' In one month a child might not make progress in the tasks used to define the age' and make a lot of progress in other developmental tasks. We considered our task was to show the broad spectrum developmental advancement that children were making, so we wanted something to show that.

What about developmental red-flags?

In the 12-month and 24-month milestones, there are some line-items which are not developmental tasks. There is also an additional group of line-items, shown in our Developmental Checklist as 6+ years. These sections are developmental red-flags.

These line-items are thought to be red-flags of possible developmental problems. By themselves, when a child is demonstrating behaviors shown in these line-items, this does not mean that there is a developmental difficulty. If a parent sees multiple of these line-items, the mothers and fathers might request 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 mothers and fathers the overview of the broad spectrum developmental advancement. Our Visual Overview page provides a method for seeing that. It demonstrates the current state of the child's movement through the developmental milestones across each of the milestones. It also demonstrates any of the developmental red-flags the mothers and fathers has identified.

Line-items details

Our free Developmental Checklist report also shows how the parent marked each of the line-items, from each of the milestones. If mothers and fathers want to use the checklist on a monthly basis, or to use it at the end of each milestones, these line-items details makes it easy to keep track of the answers provided the last time they completed it.

Other service providers

We designed the checklist report to be useful for medical, psychological, and educational service providers. They will find the information useful for tracking any child's movement through the developmental milestones.