The Hidden Pressure of The Baby Development Milestone
I remember the early years of my children’s lives for many reasons and the least fun of those were the incessant measurements and milestones.
These would be set out beautifully in your “how to do a baby” manual from the NHS and in your little red record book. Of course, all these are set out as guidelines and to help you, but in your anxious, ‘what the bleep am I doing’ phase, they can be terrifying. The way most of these guidelines are set out imply you have some control over them. Now, ten years on from my first new born baby phase, I am pretty certain you have control over nothing.
The first thing you are tasked with is growing the baby. This is likely to involve a regular visit to a weighing clinic. Your baby’s performance – read your feeding performance, is calibrated on a graph of percentiles. This was just terrifying for me as daughter was little, on the 25th percentile. For some reason, I saw that as a poor performance, especially when you are surrounded by mega pro breast feeders getting their graph’s marked in the 98th.
I used to tactically feed Holly just before the weigh in, my heart sinking if she did a poo. I look back on this now and just realise, she was a small baby; born small, staying small, but also merrily thriving.
I think what’s also a blessing and a curse is the minefield known as your NCT group. Oh, I know everyone has got a lovely ‘we’re friends for life’ story, but don’t tell me you didn’t feel the pressure to have the first baby to do things. I definitely did.
Only now, nearly ten years on can I be honest about sitting there, Mr Tumble in the background, Holly on her Fisher Price Rainforest play mat, watching hopefully as she wriggled around. Come on Holly, I’d think, looking at my watch, just, you know, roll over!
Then you’d meet up at ‘group’ and Hannah of the 98th percentile would pop out her travel play mat and proudly present Alfie, rolling off the mat like a breakdancing baby ninja. DAMMIT.
Rolling over though, that’s like the Golden Globes of milestone awards. A short while after comes the Oscars, and that my anxious, vulnerable mother friends, is the ‘first baby to walk’ award. It is here that I can draw on actual research findings to back up this pressure. A new independent study from nationwide preschool activity class franchise, Toddler Sense shows that more than a third (37%) of parents admitted they felt under pressure for their child to walk quickly*.
A further 20% of parents said they had faced negative comments and criticism from their own family members in the ‘race’ for their child to become fully mobile.
And it’s here I’d like to present you with my own lovely walking stories. My daughter, took her first steps aged 23 months. Yep, no lie, we were last, by miles. For nearly 18 months she got around happily and safely by means of her own special technique known as bum shuffling. Then, one day, on Bournemouth seafront she got out of her buggy and walked. My son took his first steps aged… wait for it people… 23 months.
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Today, aged 9 and 6, one is a high kicking, tap-dancing, acro-tumbling ballerina, the other plays football, runs and, get this, can do THE RUNNING MAN! I was 42 when I finally mastered that.
Dr Lin Day, child development expert and founder of Toddler Sense explains: “Important milestones such as taking first steps causes a lot of undue worry for new parents and added pressure from family, friends and social media, to get their child to walk before they’re developmentally ready. Some babies walk as early as eight months and others as late as two years.” *My offspring sailed close to the wind there!
So, if you are a new parent or know of one who may be worrying about any of this, please share this article to them. I say keep a loose eye on the milestone guidelines, but spend most of your effort on getting your cuddling into the upper percentiles.
In my tiny experience of having had two babies and around six consecutive years of worrying about things like this, cuddling is the main thing that matters.
