Question

Why must an educator understand the typical development and developmental milestones of a young child? List one specific milestone that you think is important and discuss why.

Answer 1

For a young child, monitoring development is very important for the early diagnosis of developmental disabilities. Developmental milestones will be observed in many ways like motor development, language development, emotional development, spiritual development and social development.

Roll over, crawling, nech holding, walking, running, jumping and climbing etc., are considered as major milestone of development of a child. Now a days a globe is growing along with the burden of developmental disabilities like ADHD and Autism. Specifically observing one milestone will not be effective for early diagnosis of developmental disabilities.

Language, social and intellectual milestones should be observed for a healthy young child. However, language plays vital part in these development. Communication is a basic human being skill which helps to maintain social and intellectual level of a young child. So it is necessary to communicate with a child to know about their language development. The following can be observed:

* Mono syllabus

* Bisyllabus

* Using single word

* Talking with small sentence without meaning

* Concrete thinking

* Level of attention

By observing all these we can identify the developmental disabilities in an early stage for proper guidance to the family members.