Six stages, like the pencil marks on a doorframe. Each will get its own page: what’s typical, what varies enormously, and what’s worth reassessing in six months — always with the sources in plain sight.
stages are maps, not territories — every child travels them their own way, and so does yours
The stages are the maps of the long processes —puberty, identity, autonomy, money, digital life, the sleep that shifts—: what grows slowly, without a fixed date. The day-to-day events —the day something happens— live in Situations.
Each cell takes you to the library already filtered by that age. The full stage guides — written with cited evidence from serious institutions and put through editorial review — arrive with launch and in the weeks that follow.
If the stages are the pencil marks on the doorframe, the processes are what grows between one mark and the next: slow, without a fixed date, different in every home. Each stage guide will open them with cited sources; here, the map in miniature. Events with a name of their own —a situation or an activity— are linked once they exist.
The attachment that sets and the language that begins long before the first word. And sleep —the household's first great process, the one that varies most from baby to baby and the one least worth comparing.
Language that explodes and play, which is how they think. Autonomy starts to show —dressing, eating alone— and the first questions about the body arrive: the floor of sex education, made of short, honest answers.
Friendships and their geometry start to matter. Domestic autonomy takes its first steps with a safety net: the first pot and the first bus ride alone. And digital literacy begins: the first screens of their own, the first rules.
Early puberty and its conversations —including a first period, better talked through before it arrives, not after. Real autonomy: the first key and staying home alone. And the digital leap: the first phone, best with a written pact.
Identity becomes the day's work: who am I, which group, which cause. Sleep shifts —the teenage chronotype pushes the night forward, and it isn't laziness. And the first romantic ties, with sex education now an open conversation rather than a single talk.
The autonomy of leaving: less permission, more judgement of their own, solo trips that keep getting longer. Money gets real —earning it, managing it, making small mistakes. And vocation shows up: not «what will you be», but what moves you.
The traits serious research describes for the stage — cited and linked, never hearsay.
The most important section: the huge ranges of normal, to defuse comparison and panic.
Activities from the library for today, and the questions worth asking yourself again six months from now.
