Objective: To assist families to understand early child development of infants, toddlers, and preschoolers

• There is great variability in how young children with visual impairment grow and develop; even those with the same eye condition differ in the age they acquire developmental skills.
• All children develop at their own pace, and we do not know what makes the difference. It is important to provide as many opportunities to learn as possible. Start from birth. Take nothing for granted; describe, explain, encourage; imagine everything from the child’s point of view.
• The lack of access to all the visual information that allows “normally sighted’’ peers to learn through observation and imitation prevents children with visual impairment from easily acquiring most skills because they have no models. Many skills must be deliberately taught.
• Children without disabilities generally acquire developmental skills in the same sequence: Sitting before crawling, before walking, before running. There is some evidence that young children with visual impairment do not follow the same sequence. The use of the hands and verbal facility may occur unexpectedly early.
• Better vision does not mean better performance or typical developmental growth.
• Disabilities in addition to blindness seem to have a greater impact on child development than does blindness itself.
• Most formal developmental assessments include a large proportion of skills that require vision. Young children with visual impairments may appear more at risk than they truly are, because the tests have to follow specific administration and scoring procedures that place these children at a disadvantage.
• Some children with visual impairment develop at the same rate as children without visual impairment, but those born preterm seem to take longer to “catch up.” Children without visual impairment usually catch up within a year after preterm birth; but children with visual impairment may take as long as three years.