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

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

Developing this checklist

When we started consulting with mothers and fathers about their child's developmental process, we found out that many mothers and fathers do not understand much about the developmental process. Mothers and fathers would tell us stories about what their child did for the first time this week, but they had little knowledge that their child was demonstrating information about the developmental task on which the child was working.

Helping mothers and fathers understand the developmental process

We needed something that helped mothers and fathers understand the developmental process. We needed something that guided mothers and fathers to watch for important developmental signals. And, we needed something that would quantify a child’s developmental process. We tried several different forms, searching for something that was appropriate for mothers and fathers and caregivers, ourselves, and to other service providers who worked with the child.

We did not want to create a diagnostic instrument. 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 format was to have a better way of describing the overview of the status of the child’s developmental process. The standard way is to describe the child’s developmental age as a simple number of months and years.

What about this developmental age?

There are a lot of difficulties in this way of doing things. For example, what are the developmental accomplishments 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. . .) accomplishments? Which of these accomplishments is better 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 difficulties 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 started some tasks.

Broad spectrum developmental improvement

While working with our protocols the clients address the chinks in their movement through the developmental tasks. When we reported to the mothers and fathers the status of the child’s developmental process we wanted to give a picture of that broad spectrum developmental improvement.

If we are only using some narrow, select group of developmental accomplishments to define the developmental ‘age’ of a child, in one month’s progress we might miss developmental process in areas not used to calculate that ‘age.’ In one month a child might not make progress in the accomplishments used to define the ‘age’ and make a lot of progress in other developmental accomplishments. We decided our task was to demonstrate the broad spectrum developmental improvement that children were making, so we wanted something to describe that.

What about developmental warning-signs?

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 warning-signs.

These line-items are considered warning-signs of possible developmental difficulties. 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 should 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 improvement. Our Visual Overview page provides a way for seeing that. It demonstrates the current state of the child’s developmental process across each of the milestones. It also demonstrates any of the developmental warning-signs the mothers and fathers has identified.

Line-items details

Our free Developmental Checklist report also shows how the parent responded to 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 marked the last time they completed it.

Other service providers

We created the checklist report to be appropriate for medical, psychological, and educational service providers. They will find the report appropriate for tracking children's developmental process.

RC Bailey has degrees in Social Science and Educational Counseling. He provides gotofocus.com/ consulting for families, which unlocks the natural predisposition for growing up. Checkout his free Developmental Checklist developmental.gotofocus.com/. and his Blog developmentald.blogspot.com

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

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