Talking About Child Development Posted on March 19, 2007 Learning to talk to parents and policymakers about normative development is an valuable skill, reports Mary Ann McCabe (bio).

Training in child development, adolescent development, young adult development, informs clinical work just as much as the empirical research does. That you need to be able to fall back regularly about what somebody's dealing with developmentally; they're a moving target. And usually their families do not understand that.

So oftentimes you know, it's very easy for us to target something for intervention in a way that views it as a problem rather than understands it as a developmental trajectory. And some of the best service we can give to parents, and sometimes even to kids and adolescents themselves, is to teach them about what they're going through. To teach them about development.

And actually I think that that's one of the best ways, at least for me, to come by skills in dissemination more broadly, that you learn to talk about child development and you learn to talk about the research to a nonscientific audience about themselves or their kids. And help to put something into context that is you know, a behavior that's normative, problematic, but normative is different than a behavior that's just a problem.

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