If your gut is alerting you about your child’s progress with motor development, I recommend always consulting your pediatrician and/or physical therapist.

Sometimes, babies are not “on time” meeting their milestones, but are developing perfectly fine, and will get it on their own timeline. And sometimes, there is an underlying reason why a baby hasn't reached a certain skill yet.

Physical therapists that work with babies are experts at assessing the overall picture, and being able to determine if there is a reason your baby isn’t meeting their milestones, yet. They do this by assessing the quality of your baby’s movement patterns, strength, balance, coordination, motor planning, and other physical systems and skills.

Usually, if a baby is making progress through the continuum of gross motor skills, and there are no interfering movement patterns (a simple example being: using one side of the body more than the other), then a slight delay is not a red flag.

If your baby was born pre-term, you should find the stage that describes the motor skills that your baby is currently working on. Meet your baby where they are at, and continue through the levels.

The only difference will be that the “Expected Age Ranges” will apply to your baby’s adjusted age, not their chronological age. There are adjusted age calculators available online.

Most importantly, if your baby was born pre term, they should be closely followed by their pediatrician and other appropriate developmental specialists, to ensure that they are meeting their milestones, and to provide one-on-one individualized support.

This guide is not a substitute for those important services. This guide is for educational purposes only and it is not considered physical therapy.

A better question is “WHY is my baby skipping this milestone?” You want to keep an eye on why they are skipping a particular milestone. Each milestone is uniquely important, so I am hesitant to brush it off if a baby skips a milestone. Including one like crawling.

Your baby could be skipping a milestone because there is something interfering with their ability to perform it. It is usually not because they are choosing to skip a milestone, or because they are so advanced that they skipped right over it.

The good news is that even if your baby skips a milestone, they can still go back and learn that particular skill. The sooner the better, since gross motor skills build on one another. This is a great reason to work one-on-one with a physical therapist for activities specific for your child’s needs.

Every developmental milestone can be broken down into smaller components. These smaller components are “micro-milestones.” It’s how we typically develop. One mini-milestone at a time, building on the previous micro-milestone. And before you know it, a major-milestone!

The micro-milestones hardly ever get noticed by the untrained eye because they can be pretty subtle... like learning to weight shift in a certain position while turning the head or reaching an arm. They tend to be movements that you didn’t even realize our bodies do to accomplish a specific milestone.

But when we know what those micro-milestones are, we can better understand exactly where our babies are in the progression of gross motor development. And if they are having difficulty with a specific major-milestone, we can better understand where to focus.

You will need to make this decision based on what you think is best for you and your baby.

You’ll notice that most of the activities in this guide are hands-off, and instead focus on strategic toy placement and arrangement of the play space in order to elicit movement responses.

To facilitate any activity, you want to think about meeting your child where they are at (as in, their current level of capability). And remember to provide the least amount of hands-on assistance required – this gives your baby the opportunity to problem solve and learn.

When it comes to trial and error, “errors” do not mean failure! They are the presence of an active learning process.

I recommend that you pause, and wait, before you assist your baby to allow this process to occur. Of course, safety is always the first priority, so if your baby is in an unsafe position or situation, you should intervene or assist them immediately.

Prioritizing tummy time provides your baby with the opportunities they need to develop the balance and strength required for skills that come after sitting, like learning how to get in and out of sitting on their own, pre-crawling and crawling milestones. Those skills originate from tummy time, not from sitting.

As you navigate this guide, you may notice that there are some activities that are carried over from one stage to another. This is done purposefully. There is quite a bit of overlap throughout the continuum of gross motor development. The progression of activities will sometimes reflect this overlap.