By Marissa Khosh 
We all know how competitive mamas feel about baby milestones. Whether we openly admit to it or not, we all have a mental clock ticking down the weeks or months until our precious little genius needs to learn how to roll over, sit up, crawl, walk, and talk, among other things.
Not only do we not want our baby to be behind his peers, we want him to be miles ahead! Even if we don’t brag about it out loud, we are secretly thrilled when our Einstein-in-the-making rolls over weeks before other babies.
We just love the comments from strangers about how intelligent our baby is. We beam with joy when relatives are shocked and amazed by all she is doing at such a young age.
Or . . . We watch and wait, feeling that timer tick down the weeks, the months as our baby takes longer than others to learn a new milestone. As he remains seemingly stuck in one stage for a time, our pride and competition eventually move out of the way to make room for concern and anxiety.
Gone is the need for our little one to be the best, the fastest, the earliest to meet baby milestones. Replaced instead by what was meant to be there in the first place: The simple desire to see her thrive in a way and time that means she’s making healthy progress.
We’re no longer entangled with the social pressure to make sure our child is a winner in the baby milestones department. Suddenly, the world and its superficial expectations and judgments are completely irrelevant and forgotten.
Because now all that matters are his particular needs. Addressing his challenges and roadblocks in a way that helps him. Giving him space to learn and grow how he needs to in order to have a successful future (“successful” being a relative word that means different things for different children).
My heart warrior taught me this valuable lesson. The lesson that baby milestones are not meant for playing the comparison game. They aren’t meant for pasting superficial labels on children. Their purpose is not to discriminate between achievers and non-achievers.
Baby milestones are quite literally a medical tool and should be respected as nothing more and nothing less. Baby milestones are meant to help evaluate health and, when necessary, target interventional therapies. They should not be our babies’ social status. And they do not measure intelligence or ultimate ability.
My baby has not had nearly the setbacks and struggles that some other children I know have had. In fact, were it not for the presence of her NG feeding tube, most people watching her now at 13 months old would never know she had any medical history at all.
But she was in heart failure for the first seven months of her little life. She spent a cumulative two months in the hospital over the course of her first summer. She had two major surgeries before her first birthday. And those things affected her baby milestones. Some more than others. While she was not severely delayed, she was quite a bit behind my mental trajectory for her milestones.
The biggest challenge and concern was her inability and unwillingness to crawl on her hands and knees. After having her sternum cut through twice and several weeks of inactivity surrounding her surgeries, her chest, shoulders, and arms were weak.
That weakness both caused her delay in crawling and created the need for her to persevere through it. I was so grateful for her physical therapist at this time more than any other. Without her guidance, I would have been encouraging my daughter to start standing and walking like she wanted to. But her physical therapist educated me on the importance of this milestone. It was important, not so that we could say that she did it, but because it could impact her long-term health and well-being. It was important that she learn this skill and regain her strength, regardless of what age she mastered it.
And let me tell you. When my 10-month-old daughter crawled across the room for the first time on hands and knees, I could not have been more proud. It did not matter that her sister had mastered that same skill at 6 ½ months old. It did not matter that she was expected by strangers and relatives to be well into cruising by that point. Nothing mattered. Except for the fact that my daughter had just met a baby milestone exactly at the right moment—the moment when she was ready and able to.
by Maria Hilger 
by Mia Carella 
by Neely Richer 
