Around the age of one year, the average human will stand on two legs and start walking. For some reason, parents think this is a good thing, forgetting how convenient it was to strap them into a car-seat-carrier and have total control over their whereabouts. Of the three primary childhood milestones – walking, talking and potty training – the only one that offers an immediate benefit is potty training. Walking and talking are distant runner-ups. Still, parents continue to worry about all of The Big Three.
Fundamentally, we parents are ceaseless worriers. It’s in our code base. Perhaps natural selection favors a dominant worrier gene, or maybe we see our progeny as little models of the self we are determined to get right on the second try. Suffice it to say that parents worry about every single developmental indicator along the road to adulthood. Becoming an adult is the consensus final objective, defined as the point at which a young person is financially independent.
After The Big Three are traversed, the ensuing milestones are not so well defined. Children will master their colors, shapes, numbers and alphabet to varying degrees at differing ages. Those who feel their child may be lagging a bit in some of these key areas will often point to Albert Einstein, the iconic and eternal example of genius, and claim that he too was slow to develop. This comparison is both pointless and incorrect.
