Every child develops at their own pace. Some children will accomplish certain milestones before other children, and professionals use guidelines in the form of checklists to gauge a rough estimate of when each child should hit those milestones. If a child doesn’t hit the milestone around the average time, it’s okay. My daughter, as a personal example, did not start crawling until she was fourteen months old. Most children begin crawling before a year, and begin walking before eighteen months. The checklists gave me a guideline of what I should expect to be her next steps so to speak.

As an Early Childhood Educator, I use these checklists within my home daycare to keep track of the milestones that my client’s children achieve while they are within my care. This way, if the parents or the child’s doctor ask for my professional opinion, I am able to hand them the checklist that I compiled by following the ELECT (Early Learning for Every Child Today) document.

I broke the document down and divided up the checklists based on age. I have separate checklists for infants (0-18 months), toddlers (18 months – 3 years) and preschool (2.5 – 4 years). Sometimes a child will achieve all of the milestones on their individual checklist quicker, and I move them up to the next one despite their age, and the same is true for the opposite. If I feel they need more time to work on their milestones and achievements from the younger list, I delay the transition to the next one.

I’ve attached the lists below. Please feel free to use them for your own personal use. If you choose to re-post them elsewhere, please give credit to me @publishingmotherhood.

Developmental Checklist Infant

Developmental Checklist Toddler

Developmental Checklist Preschool

All of the files are .word documents.