Developmental Leaps: What’s Real, What’s an App, and What to Do With a Kid Who Fell Apart This Week

All four of my kids had developmental leaps you could set a clock by, and I’d still tell you to be careful with the word.

I knew what I was looking for, which is most of why I saw them. A kid who’d been sleeping would stop. A kid who’d been easy would be glued to my leg and crying over the wrong cup. It would last a week or two, and then on the other side there’d be something new: a word, a skill, a way of thinking that wasn’t there before. Four times through, the pattern was clear enough that I’d recognize the start of one and brace. So the leaps are real, in my house. What isn’t real, or isn’t what it sounds like, is a lot of what you’ll find when you search the term, and the most-searched phrase that brings people to this page is “limbic leap,” so that comes first.

What is the limbic leap?

It’s a phrase one person made up. Allana Robinson, a Canadian parenting coach, coined “the Limbic Leap” to describe the stretch, around age four, when a child who had been reasonably settled becomes suddenly, bafflingly emotional: tearful over nothing, unable to do things she could do last month, incapable of explaining what’s wrong. Robinson says so herself, on the page where she introduces it: it isn’t an official term, and you won’t find it in the research. She built the name around real neuroscience, there is a period of rapid growth in the amygdala around that age, and she trademarked the phrase.

When you search a term and find it everywhere, you assume it’s a thing pediatricians know about, and this one isn’t. That doesn’t make the four-year-old’s hard stretch any less real; it is extremely real, and if you’re in it, I’m sorry, it’s a long one. It just means the label is a brand, not a diagnosis, and you can describe your kid’s year without it.

Are the Wonder Weeks real?

Same question, bigger business. The Wonder Weeks is a Dutch book (first published in 1992, in English since 2003) and now an app, built on the claim that babies go through ten predictable mental leaps in their first twenty months, at specific weeks, each preceded by a fussy, clingy period. Millions of parents have the app. It tells you a stormy week is coming before it comes.

The original work by Hetty van de Rijt and Frans Plooij was based on a small number of babies. In 1998 a doctoral student at the University of Groningen, Carolina de Weerth, working under Paul van Geert, tried to replicate it and found no evidence of the predicted fussiness or stress-hormone spikes at the predicted weeks. The dispute that followed was bitter; de Weerth said she was pressured not to publish, Plooij said her study wasn’t a real replication, and the university didn’t renew his contract. Nearly thirty years later no one has independently confirmed the week-by-week schedule.

Babies and toddlers absolutely go through periods of disruption followed by new skills; every parent of more than one child has watched it, and I watched it four times. What hasn’t been shown is that those periods arrive on a schedule you can put in an app. The app is selling you the schedule, and the schedule is the part that isn’t supported.

So what is a developmental leap, really?

Children’s development isn’t a smooth ramp. It goes in fits: plateaus, then a reorganization, then a new level. During the reorganization a child is, in a real sense, running on a brain that’s rebuilding part of itself, and the signs are the ones every parent recognizes: sleep falls apart, appetite changes, she wants to be held, she loses skills she had (the potty-trained kid who isn’t, the independent player who can’t be alone), she melts down over tiny things, and then, on the other side, she can do something new. Language jumps, motor skills jump, or the way she understands other people jumps.

That is what I watched in my four, and it’s what the research on development broadly supports: periods of rapid change exist, they’re uncomfortable, and they precede gains. What the research doesn’t give you is a calendar, and what it certainly doesn’t give you is a reason to buy anything.

Why the names sell

A parent in a hard week wants two things, and the names deliver both: she wants to know it’s normal, and she wants to know when it will end. “Leap 7” and “the limbic leap” promise both in two words. I understand the appeal completely, and I’d never shame anyone for downloading the app at 3am.

But the names also do something quieter. They turn your kid’s week into a product category, with a brand, a timeline and an upsell, and they train you to look at the chart instead of at your child. A parent reading her baby learns things no app knows: this one gets clingy before a motor leap, that one stops eating before a language jump. The chart replaces that reading with someone else’s average, and the averages, as it turns out, aren’t even confirmed. This is a small version of a large pattern: an industry that profits from your not trusting what you can see.

What to do in a leap

Lower the bar. For a week or two, the goal is not progress; the goal is getting everyone to the other side with the relationship intact. Expect less, hold more, say less.

Protect sleep however you can, because the disruption runs on tiredness and so does your patience. Feed the clinginess rather than fighting it; a kid who’s asking to be held is doing the one thing that regulates a rebuilding brain, and she’ll stop asking when the rebuild is done. Keep the routine’s shape even when the content falls apart, because the shape is the thing she can still predict when nothing else makes sense.

Don’t add anything. No new skill drills, no new rules, no new tool to “help with the leap.” She has enough going on. And don’t tell her she’s okay when she clearly isn’t; ask her what’s wrong and let her not know. (I’ve written about why the “you’re okay” reflex is a mistake here.)

Then watch for the other side, because it’s the best part. Somewhere in the second or third week, she’ll do something she couldn’t do before, and if you’ve been watching her instead of the chart, you’ll see it.

One thing

The next time your kid falls apart for no reason you can find, write down the date and what it looked like. Two weeks later, write down what’s new. After two or three of those, you’ll have a better chart than any app, and it’ll be about your kid.

I write every week about what childhood is for and how to protect it from the things built to fill it. You can find me on Instagram or join the list.

Sources

• The Wonder Weeks: van de Rijt H, Plooij FX, Oei, ik groei! (1992; English 2003); ten leaps in the first 20 months. 1998 Groningen replication (de Weerth, under van Geert) found no evidence for the predicted fussiness or cortisol pattern; subsequent dispute. Link
• Robinson A, “The Limbic Leap,” Uncommon Sense Parenting. Author’s own statement that the term is hers and not official; cites amygdala growth around age four. Link