Owning the Milestones

Family fun day
at the Jr. Blind camp

It is a parent’s God-given right, neigh, duty to watch, record, celebrate, and unfortunately fret over their children’s milestones as they grow. Some little ones are right on schedule – a parent will read in a book that their baby should start babbling on a given week, and presto! The baby starts babbling. Sometimes kids are little behind and sometimes they shoot out ahead of the pack. In the end, they basically all are able to walk, talk, use a potty, stack blocks, drink out of a sippy cup and eat with a spoon.

Unless… you have a special needs child. First off you can just throw the existing milestone chart right out the window. Adios! Those are no good to you now. You have to create your own sets of milestones now – some are created by your PT, some are created by your own research and seeing what other kids with similar diagnosis can do, and some just by getting to know your baby and knowing what he or she can accomplish and when.

Now the normal milestones are not forced upon a child, they are generated based on the idea that all things being equal most children will accomplish these tasks during this range of time. It’s a little different with a special needs child. The milestones, while not “forced” per se, are definitely pushed ahead by loads of hands on exercise and instruction. That’s how I coined the term – “Own (or co-own) the Milestones”. As a parent of a special needs child, you co-own every milestone that your child meets.

I want to state that I am in no way taking away the important influence that parents have over so-called “normal” children. When your child hits those milestones it’s definitely in great part due to the environment you’ve created, the practice you've done, the love you give, and, of course, the genes you’ve bestowed on your little one.

With a special needs child however, there are usually hundreds of hours of work and multiple people behind getting your child to accomplish just one of the tasks on that milestone list – usually months and months after other kids in his age range. Here are some examples:

• Ethan couldn’t sit up without falling over until he was over 10 months old – 5 months of physical therapy
• Ethan couldn’t reach out his arms fully extended until he was 14 months old – 9 months of physical therapy
• Ethan didn’t begin cruising on his own until he was 13 months old – 8 months of physical therapy
• Ethan has not yet taken a single step without the aid of a push cart or a person. Just to get him to take a single step with a push cart took 8 months of physical therapy.
• Ethan has not crawled one single crawl on his own ever… we’re at 10 months of physical therapy and he just flat refuses to do it.
• Ethan cannot transition from one movement to another – sitting to kneeling, kneeling to crawling, kneeling to standing, standing to sitting (he just falls backwards), kneeling back to sitting. He needs to be physically moved from one to the other – 10 months of physical therapy and counting....

Congratulation to
us all!

So – when Ethan meets one of these milestones, I not only celebrate his achievement, I congratulate myself and I congratulate Terry on our achievement.  I also thank our parents, I thank his teachers and mostly I thank his Physical Therapists. It’s not a milestone Ethan has met, it’s a milestone we all busted our buns to meet together. We co-own it.

Because of this I am now going to do a monthly blog called Ethan’s Monthly Milestones, outlining the milestone achieved, the amount of time we’ve been working on it, the normal milestone date, the date we were aiming for, and the date accomplished. Also, we will give the appropriate thank yous to everyone who helped him accomplish his milestones.

And to end this I will thank everyone who keeps reading these blogs. You give me my own set of milestones to achieve! J