Your 30-Month-Old: When Help Is No Longer Welcome

Dressing alone puts several skills together at once: sequencing the garments, orienting each one, and managing fasteners with fingers that are not quite ready for them. The insistence on doing it unaided is the useful part, since practice is the only route through. Building in extra time works better than taking over.

Retelling a known story in order is a real leap on from the fragments of a year ago. It means holding a sequence in memory and producing it in the same shape, which is the structure later needed for explaining, planning and describing. Corrections are worth resisting, because a retelling with some wrong details is still doing the work.

Setting a game up before playing it is planning that runs ahead of action. Deciding who is who and what the sofa stands for, then holding everyone to it, is shared imagination that needs language to negotiate, which is partly why the setup is sometimes abandoned before the game starts. Numerals belong to the same widening literacy, since a number on a door is a symbol standing for a quantity, and that is a large idea to meet for the first time.

Thirty months is a CDC checklist age, and it is the one where a number finally appears. These are things most children, meaning 75% or more, can do by now.

• Social: plays next to other children and sometimes with them, shows you what they can do by saying look at me, follows simple routines when told
• Communication: says about 50 words; says two or more words together with one action word, like doggie run; names things in a book when you point and ask; uses words like I, me or we
• Thinking: uses things to pretend, such as feeding a block to a doll; solves simple problems like standing on a stool to reach; follows two-step instructions; knows at least one colour
• Movement: uses hands to twist things like doorknobs or lids, takes some clothes off by themselves, jumps off the ground with both feet, turns book pages one at a time

Says about 50 words is a thirty-month milestone, not a two-year one. If you have read that a two-year-old should have fifty words and worried about it, this is the list that figure belongs to, and it sits six months further on than where it is usually quoted.

The other quiet jump is two-step instructions. At eighteen months the milestone was one step with no gesture; here it is two steps held in mind at once, like put the toy down and close the door. That is a working-memory change rather than a language one, even though it shows up in how a child follows what you say.

Worth raising at the thirty-month visit: very few words, no two-word phrases with an action word, no pretend play, not following a two-step instruction, or speech that is hard for people outside the family to understand.

That last one becomes a clearer measure at three years, where the milestone is talking well enough for others to understand most of the time. Losing words or skills remains the item worth a call rather than a wait.