How to Assess Your Child’s Development with Language & Literacy Milestones

There are years that ask questions and years that answer.

Zora Neale Hurston

To best usher your child towards literacy from birth onwards, it’s helpful to know what they can and should understand and do at different stages.

Let’s start by setting realistic expectations. Your baby cannot read. It’s not even something you should aspire to, let alone try to teach, despite the bogus claims of some products and the wishful thinking of the parents who buy them. The path to reading unfolds over the course of years, not months, and trying to shortcut the process can misdirect you from providing the critical early support and guidance that’s shown to predict later reading achievement and school success.

Reading is making sense of print at a glance. More specifically, learning to read is learning to recognize in writing words, ideas, and concepts that we already understand in spoken language. So there are two hurdles standing between babies and reading comprehension—sufficient oral language experience and knowledge of the alphabetic code. 

Children must have enough back-and-forth conversation with parents, caregivers, and others to build the vocabulary, verbal reasoning, and knowledge of the world they need to make sense of words and sentences. Plus, they need direct explicit instruction in how written language works. That is, how letters and combinations of letters represent speech sounds in print. And both facets of reading—oral language and written language—take time to develop.

The parents’ job in the beginning is not to teach reading but to nurture its long-term development through active attention, book sharing, and caring conversation. Think of these as your own ABCs. Do them thoughtfully and consistently from the start, and you’ll create a rich early-language environment in which your child’s reading can bloom. No flash cards, computer screens, or baby “curriculum” required.

How to Use Language Milestones & Literacy Targets 

Below, you’ll find a chronology of milestones and targets to help you anticipate the language experience, alphabetic knowledge, print awareness, and speech-sound insight that your child should accumulate as they grow into reading. By the end of this quick tour, you’ll better understand how your child grows from cooer and babbler to full-fledged reader and communicator.

Many linguists believe that modern human speech abilities, including vowel and consonant sound production, may have emerged roughly 200,000 or more years ago with the development of the larynx (aka voice box). That span has given our brains ample time to evolve the wiring that enables even very young children to produce and understand speech in their native language with ease. 

Today, children’s oral language development is thought to proceed along a straightforward and predictable path with observable milestones (e.g., first coos, babbles, and spoken words). I will list some language developmental markers that align with norms published by organizations including the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the Centers for Disease Control. The time frames I list correspond roughly to when most monolingual children have reached the milestones, according to analysis of parent surveys, clinical and observational data, intervention and longitudinal studies, and other research.

I’ll also list select targets related to written language skills. Reading, in contrast to oral language, doesn’t develop effortlessly. Rather, it’s a complex learned ability that emerged much more recently in human evolution. Reading requires the “recycling” of brain networks that originally evolved for other purposes (auditory, visual, semantic processing, and executive function). There’s incredible variation in how long it takes people to develop the oral language foundation and absorb the written language instruction they need to learn to read well—and far too many never get there. 

For this reason, I use the word target to describe the print-focused skills. These written-language achievements and book behaviors represent the age when kids “should” have the skills or knowledge in order to meet grade-level expectations down the road—not when most kids actually do achieve these skills. In fact, most kids aren’t currently meeting the targets, because there’s such poor communication and infrastructure linking early care to elementary school and beyond. As a society, we’ve raised the bar for kindergarten readiness without properly supporting families and early caregivers in preparing kids to clear it.

Keep in mind that your family’s mileage along the road to reading will vary. The chronology that follows isn’t a standardized, validated screening tool nor a curriculum guide. It merely overviews what kids need to know and do over time where language and literacy are concerned. It’s not meant to trigger a guilt trip about what you did or didn’t know or do at any given point in time. 

If your child is older, scan the list to reflect on all that they’ve learned or where they might need support. Then read ahead to see what’s still coming. Get on board with doing what you can now to move forward from where your child is, and to help them learn and accomplish what they need next for school and life.

You can also visit readingforourlives.com/milestones for more in-depth information on the language and literacy signposts described, the research underpinning them, and ideas on what to do if you are concerned about your child’s development.

Language Milestones & Literacy Targets By Age

May the following lists remind you of the range of skills and experiences kids need—and give you the patience and perspective to be a loving guide.

• Language Milestones & Literacy Targets for Babies
• Language Milestones & Literacy Targets for Toddlers & Preschoolers
• Language Milestones & Literacy Targets for Kindergarten & Early Elementary Students

Keep in mind, the ultimate level of reading we’re aiming for is a moving target. The sophistication your child will need to thrive will depend on the individual goals they pursue in higher education, the demands of the workplaces they enter, and the invention of new technologies and media that we can’t even imagine today.

The term literacy itself changes over time. From the dawn of tablets (stone, that is) millennia ago to the global proliferation of the electronic variety today, social and technological change has altered the very definition of the word. As parents, we need to be aware of literacy’s dynamism as modes of communication change. 

I think of how my daughter’s second-grade year was dramatically altered by quarantine and an influx of digital technology. A kid who’d had limited screen time suddenly spent hours online daily and became adept at classroom tech, videoconferencing, and ebook procurement—because she had to. The terms of engagement with her school, teacher, and classmates had transformed in an instant. A pandemic raised educational stakes by activating new approaches to technology, communication, and learning.

The need to leverage skilled reading to meet contemporary needs endures. And the best readers, whether 8 or 80, will be defined by their ability to identify the vast majority of words in any text they encounter and construct meaning from them, individually and collectively.

As each age and stage illustrates, this level of comprehension is built on the foundation of a stimulated brain, a robust vocabulary, wide-ranging exposure to writing, and explicit instruction in the alphabetic code. To read well may take a lifetime, but it all starts from day one with the language- and literacy-building experiences parents create.

Edited and reprinted with permission from Reading for Our Lives by Maya Payne Smart, published by AVERY, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.

Copyright © 2022 by Maya Payne Smart.