From the moment you have a baby, everyone talks about milestones in their growth or development. Their birth weight, weight gain, ability to fix and follow with their eyes, fine motor skills, gross motor skills, speech, walking, etc.

The entire journey is plotted out based on average data and every child is measured on that data.

In no way do I want to discredit what paediatricians and health visitors do, but when you have a child like Woody, milestones are an absolute kick in the teeth. His health has been complex from the moment of conception, yet these universal development markers are still used to see what Woody is or isn’t achieving.

And it DOES feel like a measure of achievement – can he do this? Can he do that? “No, no, no.” Or as the written questionnaires put it “not yet, not yet, not yet”.

And as a parent (especially with my first born), it has made me feel like a failure from day one. Even without the official milestones, every single day, I would see more evidence that my child was developing and learning more slowly than his peers. And of course, I started to wonder what I was doing wrong. Am I parenting wrong? Am I neglectful? Have I missed something that I’m meant to be doing? Am I being judged?

It’s clearly not his fault, so it must be mine.

One day, I remember the health visitor coming to the house. She didn’t say a word to Woody, sat on the sofa, got her paperwork out and said to me “he’s not walking yet. I’ll need to make a referral to the community paediatrician.” What she couldn’t see was how far Woody had come, he was crawling and pulling himself up. Yes, he was a year and a half but this was huge for him, and for me.

But there was no recognition of this progress, only of what he wasn’t yet doing. I walked into the kitchen and quietly cried at the kitchen sink.

I felt like yet again, I’d failed. Even though I could see how far Woody had come and how hard I had worked to support him. Still, we’re failing.

We don’t know why it’s taken longer for Woody to learn to walk, talk, etc and we’ll probably never know. He’s had open heart surgery, lots of ICU time, as well as many other health challenges. But these milestones are robbing me of the opportunity to celebrate when Woody does learn something new. They only focus on what he’s not doing and it’s heartbreaking.

My mental health has been pretty fragile from the moment Woody entered the world. But along with his dad, I have worked tirelessly to care for him and allow him to learn, grow and play. There is nothing we wouldn’t do for him.

Since having a second baby, it has become very clear that I didn’t in fact do anything wrong or miss something that has impeded Woody’s learning. I did everything right, because I’m doing it again and Robin is learning and developing well (by “well”, I mean, aligning to her milestones, of course).

Like all children, Woody will learn and he will do things in his own time. And we WILL celebrate what he can do. I just wish the whole milestone concept was dealt with a little more carefully, I think it would help with issues of maternal mental health. For children, who have encountered challenges early in life, they will always be classed as failing against this markers and that feels horribly unfair for both the children and their parents.