Is This a Phase? Child Development & Parent Strategies, Birth to 6 Years
By Cheryl Murfin
Where was Helen Neville when my daughter up and decided on her second birthday – literally, during her birthday party – to use the potty and never had an accident from that day forward? As in never, ever. Was this normal, we wondered? Was it a sign that she’s advanced?
Or when our son, so unlike his sister, was still decidedly not potty-trained at age 5? Where was Neville’s book then?
Here’s a secret for parents of today’s infants through preschoolers: You have it made.
Luckily for you, Neville, a registered nurse, shares the vast knowledge and insights she’s gleaned as a parent educator, pediatric advice nurse and infant temperament expert in the comprehensive new guide, Is This a Phase: Child Development & Parent Strategies, Birth to 6 Year, published by Seattle-based Parenting Press.
Decades of fielding parent questions and ferreting out the answers has resulted in a jam-packed, authoritative reference guide that covers everything from how teeth develop to how children understand the concepts of numbers and time as they move through the early years. A book like this would have saved my husband and me a lot of time and worry and taken much of the guesswork out of divining the mysteries of child development.
Alas, when my kids were small, we had to cobble together the whats and whys of little kids’ behavior from numerous single-topic books, magazines, flyers in the doctors’ offices, mysterious developmental notes that arrived unsolicited in the mail from the state Department of Health and calls to out-of-state grandparents. We had to dig through numerous resources and meet with many professionals to figure out that our daughter was not a miracle pooper – she was developing no faster or slower than other girls her age – and to learn that our son has high-functioning autism.
In fact, Is This a Phase might have gotten us thinking about our son’s developmental delays sooner, say at 4 months of age when he struggled to make eye contact and fussed excessively. I have a library full of books about parenting, autism and infant brain development. But if I had one thing I would give to parents of newborns, it would be Neville’s chapter titled “Help – Is My Child OK?”
Parents begin asking, “Is this normal?” “Is this a phase?” from the moment their child arrives. This detailed list is one of the best I’ve seen outlining when to be concerned about a child’s development or lack thereof and when to seek help. Equally important, it offers rest for the worried – either sending them elsewhere for further information or assuring them that their child is just fine.
“‘Is this a phase?’ is something we hear a lot,” says Neville, who was approached by Parenting Press to write the guide, which took her eight years to finish. “The book reflects over 30 years of working with parents, 15 years leading parent support groups and 20 years as a pediatric nurse. All the questions in it are questions parents have asked, many of which I remember thinking, ‘That’s a great question!’ When I got the opportunity to write the book, I thought, ‘Here’s a way I can use all these great questions and to help parents help themselves.’”
Neville, who has used many resources in answering parents’ questions through the years, says that many parenting books, magazines and Web sites provide good information on child development but fail to put parents’ worries to rest.
“A lot of books say your child should be doing this between this age and this age, but it doesn’t say when you should worry if your child isn’t doing that,” Neville explains. “Parents really want to know, ‘Is my child OK?’ ‘My child is 14 months and he isn’t walking and all the kids in our playgroup are – is he OK?’
Neville says one of her main goals was to reduce the worry factor for parents. “Parents are way more worried than they were 30 years ago,” she says. “They know a lot. I’d like to have parents not worry about things that they don’t have to worry about.
“What the parent of the child at 14 months learns in this book is there is a range and her child is OK,” she says. “Or when someone says to me, (and says) ‘My 2-year-old won’t share. Is she normal?’ … Most 2-year-olds don’t share. Unless you have information, you don’t know that you don’t need to worry.”
Is This is a Phase is uniquely designed to provide information to readers in two ways. Part One is sorted by ages and phases of development for both parent and child – it explains everything from how parent and baby fall in love to how each works toward the child’s independent entrance into kindergarten around age 5. Neville offers useful lists of expectations for children at different ages and offers helpful and specific ways to understand, engage and support young children and build solid foundations for the future. Each chapter ends with a section on when to get help.
Part Two is organized by topic and built around common themes and questions Neville has tackled in her work with parents. It covers everything from how kids can help around the house at different ages to games that encourage impulse control.
“I often find parents of fours come in, and they are working so hard and trying to use their skills, but they are using skills that were for their 2-years-olds,” Neville says. “Most of the data out there is age-by-age, and it can pigeonhole parents because they can’t see the bigger picture of what is normal. We’ve presented the age-by-age overview and then offer information by topic so parents can get the flow of it. If they see the chart on some aspect of their child’s development, they can at least see what’s ahead as well and that there is a wide range of normal.”
Neville is an expert on infant temperament – the unique, innate qualities that dictate how people do things and how they respond to the world’s stimuli. She has written books on this topic alone. Her overview of nine inborn traits in this book is easy to understand and explains how parents can work with a child’s environment to complement his or her temperament. More importantly, she offers parents some sense of timing. For example, spirited children who are fussy and needy as infants tend to become much easier after 3 months of age.
If someone had told me one month into my spirited son’s life that things would get easier two months later, I would have been marking my calendar. And when it didn’t happen, I would have sought help sooner, again in that 4 month range rather than at age 2, when we began to see more obvious signs of developmental concern.
“Most books don’t talk about temperament or explain how it weaves together between you and your child,” says Neville. “Obviously your temperament does affect how you parent. If you are low-energy parents and you have a high-energy kid, you need to find a way for him to burn off his energy.”
In addition to presenting critical parenting clues, Is This a Phase? offers fun facts that make the parenting journey so enjoyable and surprising. Neville’s favorite: the height equation. Neville had heard that at age 2, kids measured exactly half of what their eventual full adult height would be. Fact or myth?
“I thought, what the heck, and I pulled out my book. Out of sheer curiosity, I looked at growth charts for girls and boys and in fact, for girls it isn’t true – they reach half their adult height at 18 months. But in general, and certainly for boys, the concept is true,” she says.
All of her tips and facts have played out in her own life, Neville says.
“The reason the height thing was an issue in our family was because our daughter was an ardent gymnast,” she says. “When she was younger she kept saying, ‘I don’t want to get taller, I don’t want to get taller.’ If I’d known the truth about toddlers and adult height I could have assured her she didn’t have to worry!”
When my kids were young, the phrase “Is this a phase?” came to my mind at least weekly.
Would they ever stop whining? Would she ever start sharing? Was this kid over-emotional? Was I crazy? Would he grow out of hitting or did I have a hoodlum in my family?
If only I could’ve pulled Helen Neville’s book from my shelf.
Lucky you.
Cheryl Murfin is a Seattle-based freelance writer and mother of two.
Editor's Note: This story has been corrected since it was first published to note that girls reach half their adult height at 18 months, not 14 months.
