Cerebral Palsy And Child Development

Developmental delays are a hallmark of cerebral palsy (CP), but they may not become evident until the child reaches eighteen, even thirty months of age. The sooner parents and health care providers spot developmental delays indicative of cerebral palsy, the sooner they can provide targeted interventions designed to improve the child’s comfort and quality of life. Detailed below are a few typical growth milestones and how they can indicate CP if delayed or missed altogether:

Reaching For Toys and Other Objects

Most babies begin exploratory play – for instance, searching out of curiosity for desired objects – by three or four months. Children with CP have very limited range of motion, however, and they may not be able to reach for or grasp objects until much later.

Rolling Onto Back

Rotating the trunk and other parts of the body can be a huge struggle for children with CP, as they suffer severe muscle and joint stiffness. This stiffness may prevent them from reaching the common developmental marker of rolling onto their back at four or five months, and flipping from back to stomach at five or six months.

Sitting Without Assistance

Children without developmental delays ordinarily begin to sit without help from a caregiver at approximately six months. Posture problems related to CP may prevent sufferers from sitting unassisted until far later. When assessing for developmental delays, physicians may look not only for when children sit on their own, but also the specific posture problems that prevent them from doing so and the ways they adapt their movement to be able to sit. Many sit with their legs positioned in a “w” to avoid falling over.

Walking Without Assistance

Children typically begin to walk when they reach somewhere between ten and fourteen months. Due to muscle stiffness and other symptoms, children with CP may not begin to walk unassisted until much later — or they may never be able to walk at all.

Language Delays

In addition to suffering motor impairment, children with CP often lag behind the major communication milestones. In fact, their struggle to convey themselves may lead adults to think that they have developmental delays that don’t actually exist. Language delays indicative of CP may include the inability to form single words after twelve months or a very limited vocabulary by two years (typically, children have a vocabulary of over fifty words by the time they reach two years of age).

Not all developmental delays indicate cerebral palsy, but in monitoring closely, parents and health care providers stand a better chance of catching the problem early and providing the targeted treatments young CP patients require.