Why there’s no such thing as normal in child development

For parents, carers and teachers, it’s often tempting to base our thinking on a child’s development around what we understand as “normal”. Much of the time we do this without thinking, describing a child as “doing well” in one subject and “behind” in another.

Whenever we make this sort of comparison, we have some sort of mental benchmark or yardstick in our head: for example, a toddler should be able to climb on furniture by age two. Increasingly, child development researchers are arguing that the same thing happens in child development research — the study of how behaviours and abilities such as language develop.

Many of the studies that claim to research child development either implicitly, or explicitly, claim that their findings are universal.

There could be many reasons for this. Sometimes there’s a temptation to oversell conclusions, sometimes it might be the way findings are interpreted by readers or the media. The upshot is that what’s been found in one group of children is then taken as the standard — the yardstick against which future research is compared.

Most of the research into how children develop comes from wealthier, western countries, in particular the US, the UK, the Netherlands, Germany and France. Chances are, if you’ve heard of milestones in child development, they were developed in one of these countries.

This is so much so that it can be challenging to do basic research on child development in developing countries, as peers and reviewers will ask for or demand comparisons to western populations to put findings from these regions in context. Of course without realising it, these peers and reviewers have set up western children as a norm.

But is it fair to make these comparisons? One of the tricky things about researching child development is that it occurs within a cultural and social context it can’t be removed from. But this context is often messy. Differences in physical environment, parenting styles, location, climate and so on all interact to shape how children grow.

Besides these differences, there is individual variation as well. These could be, for instance, curiosity, shyness and neurodiversity, which can all frame how a child shapes their own learning environment.

Take for example the field of motor development in infancy – the study of how children learn to move. Many parents in particular might be familiar with charts showing when they can expect their child to sit, crawl, stand and run. The existence of these charts make it seem pretty universal, and often a child’s motor development is judged accordingly.

This makes sense. Early research was preoccupied with finding out what was normal, and it makes sense to try to support children who might be at risk of falling behind. The timing and order investigated back then led to the norms and scales we still use today.

Is something like motor development timing universal? It’s easy to imagine that it might be. When there are no physical or cognitive barriers we all learn to sit and stand, so on the surface it seems fair to say this could be.

But it turns out that the context that children develop in plays a huge role even in something as seemingly universal as this. In countries and cultures where babies routinely receive firm massages from caregivers, such as in Jamaica, motor development is accelerated. It’s clear that a norm developed in one culture might not translate well to another.

Beyond norms

It’s clear to see that the problems highlighted above are not unique to motor development. In areas like language development or social development the cultural component is even more compelling.

There is simply no way of understanding these elements of child development without also understanding the context in which they take place. Every child is developing within a context and however normal our own culture feels to us, there is no objective context-free norm that we can compare other children to. That is, to say, we should embrace the mess.

If we think of normal child development as being something that just happens, researchers miss out on understanding the dynamics of development itself. But worse, educators and caregivers might not realise development is something we can act upon, and miss an opportunity to enact change.

An important part of seeing child development as being intertwined with culture is that it doesn’t just mean collecting data from other cultures, but involving local communities and research perspectives. Understanding communities means listening to them, empowering them and making space for them to have a voice.

Moving beyond a western-centric understanding of child development won’t just benefit researchers and lead to more accurate science, but hopefully benefit everyone working with children around the world.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.