Like many parents, I remember visits to the pediatrician’s office in my daughter’s earliest years as overwhelming — a swirl of weights and measurements, rushed conversations about sleep training, breastfeeding and tummy time, all while trying to keep the featured attraction (my wiggly baby) from derailing everything.
The visits felt especially cramped when someone handed me a heavy electronic tablet with prompts to answer what seemed like an endless list of questions about my daughter. Was she sitting up? Making eye contact? Naming objects? Crawling? Talking? Sleeping?
Many parents like me take for granted the slightly bothersome, yet very necessary, rite of passage that involves filling out developmental screening questionnaires, typically during the nine-month, 18-month and 30-month pediatrician visits.
But as I reported recently in a story published in partnership with The New York Times, many parents never see the screeners, whose results are often the first step in diagnosing a disability or developmental delay — and getting a child life-changing help.
Nationally, only about 36 percent of parents report having completed a screener in the previous 12 months, according to the latest National Survey of Children’s Health. In New York state, where I focused my reporting, that number falls to 28 percent.
The state’s Council on Children and Families just this month announced a campaign to help address the issue. And a growing network of local organizations, in New York and across the country, called Help Me Grow is taking its own approach: bringing the screenings and information about child development to libraries, farmers markets, zoos, wherever families can be found.
As Kate Ryan, director of the Adirondack Birth to Three Alliance puts it, when it comes to screenings, “it’s exceptionally important to do them early and often.”
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This story about developmental screening was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter.