Nothing 'normal' about child development

Researchers make a case about how 'universal' findings related to child development should not be considered a yardstick. Here's why

For parents, carers and teachers, it's often tempting to base our thinking on a child's development around what we understand as "normal". Much of the time we do this without thinking, describing a child as "doing well" in one subject and "behind" in another. Whenever we make this sort of comparison, we have some sort of mental benchmark or yardstick in our head: for example, a toddler should be able to climb on furniture by age two. Increasingly, child development researchers are arguing that the same thing happens in child development research - the study of how behaviours and abilities such as language develop.

Many of the studies that claim to research child development either implicitly, or explicitly, claim that their findings are universal. There could be many reasons for this. Sometimes there's a temptation to oversell conclusions, sometimes it might be the way findings are interpreted by readers or the media. The upshot is that what's been found in one group of children is then taken as the standard - the yardstick against which future research is compared. Most of the research into how children develop comes from wealthier, western countries, in particular the US, the UK, the Netherlands, Germany and France. Chances are, if you've heard of milestones in child development, they were developed in one of these countries.

Challenges in child development research