What Is Global Development Delay ?

Babies are usually born programmed to learn important skills such as speaking, socialising or walking in predictable sequences of stages, with the help of encouragement, teaching and support as they grow up. These skills usually develop in predictable sequences and at predictable times. There are well-established average ages for when these stages of skill development occur, although they are all affected by familial factors (children in some families talk later than in others, walk later, or become dry at night later), racial factors (Black children by and large sit up, crawl and walk earlier than White children do) and social factors (children in homes with lots of books and opportunities to read and where reading is a valued and a frequent pastime will read earlier and better than others). All the above stages of skill development are known as developmental milestones and there are a number of these within recognised areas of development (developmental domains). A child with Developmental Delay has delayed achievement of one or more developmental milestones in one or more developmental domains. A child with Global Developmental Delay (GDD) is one who is delayed in achieving milestones within most, if not all, of these development domains. The prevalence of GDD is estimated to be 5-10 percent of the childhood population, and most children with GDD have impairment of all domains.

These domains of development can be summarized as follows:

• Motor skills (milestones in this domain include, gross motor skills such as sitting up or rolling over and fine motor skills such as picking up small objects)
• Speech and language (which also includes babbling, imitating speech, identifying sounds, communicating using non-verbal means such as gesture, facial expression, eye contact and posture, and understanding what others are trying to communicate to you – comprehension or “receptive language”)
• Cognitive skills (the ability to learn new things, filter and process information, remember and recall, and to reason)
• Social and emotional skills (interacting with others and development of personal traits and feelings)

Parents will often be the first to worry that their child has delays in one or more developmental domains. However children develop at notoriously different rates and the age at which a particular child reaches a specific developmental milestone can vary substantially. In fact, some children who do not reach developmental milestones on time may catch up later, sometimes with and sometimes without extra support, have no permanent problems and go on to develop normally.

Paediatricians screen routinely for delays and if they suspect GDD they may ask questions regarding the child’s progress and evaluate the child with a number of tests, both developmental (checking out what exactly a child is able to do) and medical (usually to try to find a cause for the developmental difficulties