Global Developmental Delay: Helping Your Child at Home

Who this program is for

• Children under five who are behind in two or more areas of development at once
• Older children whose skills still sit well below what is usual for their age
• Parents who feel unsure where to start and want a whole-child plan rather than five separate ones
• Families waiting for an assessment, or working in the gaps between therapy appointments
• Children with a known cause — cerebral palsy, for example, or Down syndrome, which has its own step-by-step home program — where the daily question is still “what do I work on next?”
• Anyone who wants to help without pressure, at their child’s own level

Your step-by-step roadmap

Move at your child’s pace, not the calendar’s — the “weeks” are just a gentle order, not a race. Feel free to repeat any stage for as long as it’s helping.

1. Stage 1 — Notice where your child is now

   Map your child’s current level in each area, so every target you set is one step away instead of a year away.
   • Over one ordinary week, watch five areas: how your child communicates, how they move, how they play, how they work things out, and how much of eating, dressing and washing they manage.
   • For each area, write down what your child can already do without help. That, not their age, is your real starting line.
   • Then write the very next step in each area. If you cannot picture your child doing it within a few weeks, it is too big — halve it.
   • Keep the list where you will see it. When we assess a child, this is close to what we are building too, and a parent’s week of notes is often more accurate than anything we see in one clinic hour.

   Try this: Aim just one step above where your child is right now — close enough to reach, so success comes often. If a blank page is hard to start from, our free 2-minute development check asks about the same areas and gives you a written summary to work from.

   Mark week done

2. Stage 2 — Connect and communicate

   Build back-and-forth interaction first, because it is the ground everything else stands on.
   • Get down to eye level, find what your child is already interested in, and join that instead of redirecting them to what you had planned.
   • Treat every sound, look, reach or gesture as a whole message, and answer it as though your child had spoken.
   • Add a simple sign, gesture or picture alongside your words. Signs and pictures do not stop speech coming — for many children they give a way to communicate while speech catches up.
   • Keep your own sentences just above your child’s level: if they use single words, you use two. Long sentences give a delayed child more to filter out, not more to learn from.

   Try this: Wait longer than feels natural after you speak — that quiet gap is often the moment your child steps in. Those shared moments have a name — joint attention — and early on they matter far more than how many words your child has.

   Mark week done

3. Stage 3 — Move and explore

   Support movement, because a child who can get to things gets far more chances to learn everything else.
   • Build short bursts of active play into each day at your child’s level — reaching, rolling, sitting, pulling up, cruising or walking.
   • Put a favourite toy just beyond easy reach to invite the next movement, and support at the hips rather than the hands so your child does the work.
   • Break each new movement into small parts and practise the part your child nearly has, not the finished skill.
   • Floor time beats long stretches in a walker, a pram or a chair. Children learn to move by moving, and delayed children simply need more turns at it.

   Try this: Pop a favourite toy slightly out of reach — it gives your child a gentle, motivating reason to move towards it.

   Mark week done

4. Stage 4 — Play and think

   Grow play skills, because play is how young children do their thinking.
   • Match play to your child’s level, in the usual order: cause-and-effect toys first, then posting and stacking, then simple pretend with real objects.
   • Show one new play idea, then sit back and let your child try it their own way — even when it looks wrong.
   • Use ordinary things — cups, boxes, spoons, a dupatta — to explore in, out, on, under and “what happens if…”.
   • Watch for the first pretend act: feeding a doll, holding a block to the ear like a phone. It often appears around the time language starts to move, so it is worth telling your therapist about.

   Try this: Repeat the same simple play many times before you add anything new — mastery first, variety later.

   Mark week done

5. Stage 5 — Everyday self-help

   Turn daily routines into learning, because they come round ten times a day without you having to plan them.
   • Break eating, dressing and washing into small steps, and hand your child the step they can very nearly manage already.
   • Keep the same order and the same few words every time — the repetition is doing the teaching, not the explaining.
   • Offer two real choices inside the routine so your child practises deciding and then telling you.
   • Expect self-help to be where families — and schools — notice the first honest change.

   Try this: Hand over the last step of a routine first — pulling the sock up the final inch, pressing the last popper. Finishing it gives a real “I did it”, and therapists use this backwards order on purpose. A picture sequence helps the order stick — our free printable daily routine chart is made for exactly this.

   Mark week done

6. Stage 6 — Repeat, embed and generalise

   Help new skills stick, and spread out of the one place they were learned.
   • Practise the same skill in different rooms, with different people and different objects.
   • Keep sessions short, frequent and playful rather than long and effortful — five minutes, five times a day.
   • Expect a new skill to appear, vanish for a while, then come back stronger. That wobble is ordinary learning, not a relapse.
   • Once a step is solid in more than one place, nudge the bar up to the next small step in that area.

   Try this: You know a skill is truly learned when your child uses it somewhere new without your help — that is your green light to move on. It is the same test we use in the clinic, and it is worth knowing how progress is measured in therapy so you can judge it the same way we do.

   Mark week done

7. Stage 7 — Work with your team

   Join home support up with assessment, therapy and school so everyone is pulling the same way.
   • Keep one running note of new skills, worries and questions, and take it to every appointment.
   • Ask your therapist which one or two goals are worth working on at home right now — not five.
   • Weave any exercises you are given into everyday play and routines rather than running them as drills at a table.
   • Ask for findings in writing and share a copy with your child’s school. A school adjusts far more readily for a difficulty it has seen described.

   Try this: Take a short phone video of whatever worries you. Children rarely perform on cue in a clinic room, and thirty seconds of real footage often tells us more than an hour of description.

   Mark week done

Little tricks that make it work

• Follow your child’s developmental level, not their age — it keeps every task within reach.
• One small step at a time, repeated often, beats trying to fix everything at once.
• Short and frequent wins: five minutes, five times a day, beats one long weekend session.
• Keep routines predictable — the same words in the same order help learning stick.
• Say the praise out loud, for the effort as much as the result. Slow progress is still progress.
• If you have not had a developmental assessment yet, push for one — it can uncover a cause, and support, you did not know was there.