9 month visit
I have had lots of parents in recent weeks tell me that they are enjoying reading my posts. I appreciate the positive feed back and I hope we can keep the momentum going. Our baby is now 9 months old. At earlier visits we were monitoring the early stages of development, but at 9 months this becomes a more formal and standardized part of our evaluation. For Pediatricians, one of our most important roles is to monitor for appropriate developmental milestones – and if a child does begin to exhibit delays, to coordinate them getting the proper evaluation and therapy. To aid in this process, Developmental Specialists created a series of highly standardized assessment tools called the Ages and Stages Questionnaires. The ASQ as it is known, allows us to carefully and accurately track a child’s development over time. It is a series of questions that parents answer regarding what tasks their child is doing – from communication to gross motor, fine motor, problem solving, and personal social interactions. We are able to quickly score the parents responses to give a really good picture of a child’s development in each category and we can then take steps to get that child the appropriate help to catch them up quickly. As always, feel free to respond with any questions. At our next check up, our child will be 1 year old – they do grow up so fast.