Parents naturally have a interest in their child's development. Witnessing a child reach standard developmental milestones, such as walking and talking, in the expected timeframe, brings both satisfaction and reassurance. On the other hand, concerns about delayed or abnormal development can be very worrying.

The assessment of a child's development takes several forms. Parents make informal assessments of their child's development everyday. These are largely based on comparisons with older siblings or other people's children. GPs and Paediatricians make more formal assessments of development.

Medical professionals tend to assess development across a number of areas, including gross motor skills (e.g. crawling, walking, jumping), fine motor skills (e.g. holding and picking up objects, drawing), vision, hearing, language, and social skills (e.g. smiling, feeding, dressing). As an example of developmental milestones, 90% of children will by:

• 1 month: watch a face, lift their head momentarily when lying on their belly
• 3 months: follow objects with their eyes, laugh
• 6 months: roll over, reach for an object with their hands, turn to a voice
• 9 months: sit without support, feed themselves a biscuit, repeat syllables (e.g. Dada)
• 1 year: walk holding on to furniture, understand several words
• 1½ years: walk steadily, drink from a cup, use 5 words
• 2 years: scribble, point to one named body part, feed themselves with a spoon
• 3 years: pedal a tricycle, use 3 word sentences, put on clothes
• 4 years: copy a square, give their first and last name
• 5 years: hop on one foot, know some colours and their age, draw a person,

It is worth remembering several facts - most children will not be average in all respects, slow development is not necessarily abnormal and fast development does not necessarily indicate that a child is gifted. Also, it is important to remember that while medical professionals can perform developmental screening tests based upon expected milestones, evaluations tend to be one-off snapshots of a child's performance and may therefore not accurately reflect a child's true status.

Parents are therefore better-placed to monitor their child's development. They are usually the first to suspect that there may be a problem with their child's development. Where parental concerns exist, they tend to be highly sensitive predictors of an underlying developmental problem, a fact that holds true regardless of a parent's background and of whether or not he or she is caring for their first child.