A mother in one of our parent sessions described doing everything a WhatsApp group had told her to do. Flashcards. Naming objects all day. Insisting on eye contact before handing anything over. Four months. Nothing. She had concluded her son was more severe than the other children.
He was not. The advice was aimed at a child who was already attending to people. Her son was not there yet. Everything she was doing required a skill that had to be built first — so none of it could land, and the only thing it reliably produced was conflict at the table.
Developmental age, not birthday age
Every child is working at a level, and that level is usually not their age in years. Pitch above it and the child cannot engage, so they resist, and the adults read resistance as behaviour. Pitch at it, and the same child is suddenly capable — the thing you were told was impossible happens in a fortnight.
This is why “he just doesn’t want to” is so often wrong. Wanting to was never the obstacle.
Working in sequence
Development runs in an order. A child who is not yet noticing that other people are interesting cannot be taught to take turns in conversation — not because turn-taking is too advanced as an idea, but because every step in between is missing. Skip steps and you get effort without movement.
So the first job is to work out, honestly, where your child is now. The second is to pick strategies for that point, not for where you wish they were, and not for where the child in the WhatsApp group was. The third is to move when they move — because the strategy that was right in March is holding them back by September.
That last part is where most home programmes quietly stall. Nobody revisits the level.
Why your neighbour’s advice did not work
It may have been excellent advice. For their child, at their child’s stage. Shared across a WhatsApp group it loses the only thing that made it work, which is who it was for.
That is also why we teach parents rather than hand out a sheet. You are the person with your child in the hours we are not there. If you understand why a strategy is the right one now and what it will look like when it is time to move on, you can adapt it on a bad Tuesday. A sheet cannot.
In Delhi: our Janakpuri West team runs parent sessions alongside the child’s programme. Book an appointment