Dr. Lawrence Gray of the University of Chicago is among a growing group of doctors and scientists in the field of infant mental health. They are looking for early signs in babies of autism ADHD and other mental problems that traditionally our medical profession has thought doesn’t show up until closer to age three.

Dr. Gray says that “we used to say ‘nature versus nurture’, but now people really think it’s ‘nature through nurture’.”

These doctors have identified certain behaviors that healthy infants exhibit as early as days after their birth. If a child doesn’t exhibit these behaviors it could be a very good indicator that he is at risk for developmental delays.

Guess what the big sign is??? Lack of eye contact! This is enlightening, given what Kelly’s blogged about recently in the correlation between lack of eye contact and the importance of monitoring the changes in eye contact as a sign of healing.

The authors of a CDC-funded Interdisciplinary Report on developmental disabilities say that warning signs in infants include:

• Failure to focus on sights and sounds by 2 months
• Failure to initiate joyful behavior with parents by 4 months
• Failure to exchange smiles and sounds with parents by 8 to 9 months
• Failure to take parent’s hand to find a toy and point to objects by 12 to 16 months

For those of us adopting children after these ages, the risk of developmental delay has to be tempered with what the child hasn’t been exposed to, plus the effect of trauma our youngsters may have suffered.

Critics of these researchers say that more children will be needlessly diagnosed and labeled when in fact they have normal variations of age-appropriate behaviors.

But the researchers say this is not the point (and it isn’t). They cite brain plasticity and the mounting evidence that the earlier a child receives intensive intervention for delays the more meaningful progress can be made.

Sitting here looking at LuLu, who had 18 months of early childhood deprivation and is the poster child for “combo platter”, I realize that if someone had been able to identify and intervene the second we walked off the plane from China, more healing, more improvements could have taken place. Her brain had more plasticity at age 2 than it does now at age 10. While there is still hope and she’s still improving, the message comes through loud and clear: The earlier the better!!!

Here’s the article in its entirety.