Do Early Childhood Milestones Predict Who Your Child Becomes Later?
I found my tattered blue baby book tucked behind a box of old crib sheets in the basement last weekend. The pages are smudged with banana puree and faded pencil marks, where I checked off every milestone like I was filling out a college application. Next to “walks unassisted” by Lila’s name, my oldest, I wrote 10 months, 3 weeks, with a little star. For Milo, my younger, the same line has a question mark and the date 16 months, and a scribbled note: “Still too wobbly, doctor says monitor.”
I remember the family cookout when Lila was 18 months old. She walked right up to my aunt, who was holding a slice of strawberry pie, and said clear as day, “Can I please have a bite?” The whole table gasped. Everyone said she was so advanced, she’d definitely be a lawyer or a CEO someday. By the time we had the next cookout two years later, Milo was 2. He didn’t say a dozen words total back then. He just sat in the dirt by the grill moving a stick through an anthill for an hour, ignored all the attempts to get him to say hello, and I got a lot of quiet, sympathetic side-eye from relatives. I went home that night and stayed up till 2 a.m. googling “what does late talking mean for future IQ.”
Today Lila is 17, and Milo is 14. Lila, the early talker and early walker who everyone predicted would be a high-powered overachiever, paints murals for the local library and coffee shop, forgets to turn in half her math homework, and bounces from one new hobby to the next so fast she’s already moved on from three different instruments she begged to learn. Milo, the late talking late walker we worried would never keep up in school, can recite every starting college football quarterback’s stats from 1990 onward, can take apart and rebuild a lawnmower engine faster than my husband, and sits for three hours at a time building tiny model rockets that he launches at the park every weekend. His science teacher pulled me aside at a conference last fall and said he’s the most focused, detail-oriented student she’s had in 10 years of teaching.
That meeting was when I first started really questioning what all those early milestone checkboxes actually mean. For years I bought into the idea that hitting milestones early meant a kid was smarter, more likely to succeed, and hitting them late meant we’d be fighting to catch up forever. What I see now is that the age a kid hits a milestone mostly tells you what their brain and body were ready for at that moment, and a little bit about their natural temperament—not what they’ll be good at, or who they’ll grow up to be, 10 or 15 years later.
Lila was early to walk and talk because she’s always been impulsive and impatient. She wanted to get moving, she wanted to get what she wanted, so she figured out how to do it fast. That’s still who she is: she dives into new projects headfirst, gets bored when something gets too repetitive, and moves on. That’s not better or worse than Milo’s approach, it’s just hers. Milo was late to walk and talk because he’d rather stop and study every little thing around him than push to hit the next step. When he was a baby, he’d sit for 20 minutes spinning the wheel on his toy truck instead of practicing pulling up to stand. He still does that: he notices things no one else does, he sticks with a project for months until he gets it right, and that’s just how his brain works.
After seeing this play out with my two kids, I’ve started sharing small, doable things with new parents who ask me about milestone stress. None of it is fancy, just small shifts that take the pressure off. First, turn off the milestone alerts on your baby tracking app. Those alerts are designed to keep you opening the app, not to help you. I got a red alert when Milo wasn’t talking at 18 months, and I cried over it for a whole weekend for no reason—his receptive language was totally fine, he just didn’t feel like talking much. Turning off the alerts stops that unnecessary panic before it starts. Second, when you’re at a playdate and someone asks if your kid has hit a certain milestone yet, you don’t have to apologize or feel embarrassed. Just change the conversation to what your kid actually does: “He’s not walking yet, but he can sort all his toy cars by color for 10 minutes straight.” It stops the comparison game before it gets going. Third, if you’re genuinely worried about a delay, get it checked out—early intervention helps if your kid needs it—but don’t carry that label around forever. We did six months of speech therapy with Milo to give him a nudge, and we stopped when he didn’t need it anymore. I still thought of him as “my late talker” until that science teacher conference, and letting that label go was a bigger relief for me than it ever was for him.
I tucked the baby book back behind the box of crib sheets, closed the basement door, and went back upstairs. Lila was on the couch scrolling through paint color ideas for her next mural, Milo was arguing with the TV about a bad referee call. The pizza delivery showed up, we ate off paper plates, and nobody mentioned milestones or college or what they’re going to do when they grow up.
Some days I still catch myself looking back at those old checkmarks and wondering what I was so worked up over. The age they learned to walk or talk didn’t tell me anything about the way Lila remembers every regular customer’s order at the coffee shop she works at, or the way Milo leaves a bowl of cat food out for the stray that hangs around our porch every night. Those are the things that make them who they are, and you can’t check those off on a 12-month checkup form. We still don’t know what they’ll end up doing years from now, and that’s fine. I’m not in any hurry to fill in the rest of the blanks anyway.
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