Baby Milestones by Age: An Australian Checklist (0–24 Months)

It usually starts with a small moment — your baby rolls over at daycare pickup, or a friend's five-month-old is already sitting while yours is still working on it. Suddenly you're awake at 11pm searching for baby milestones by age, trying to work out whether everything is on track.

Here's the reassuring part up front: milestones are age ranges, not deadlines. Australian guidance from the Raising Children Network(mở trong cửa sổ mới) and Pregnancy, Birth and Baby(mở trong cửa sổ mới) is consistent on this — healthy babies reach the same skills in different orders and at different speeds, and a baby who walks "late" is almost always just a baby who walks late.

This checklist covers birth to 24 months across three areas — motor, social and language — with the red flags that genuinely warrant a chat with your GP or child health nurse.

How to use this checklist

Treat each age band as a window, not a test. Premature babies are usually tracked at their corrected age — counted from their due date rather than their birth date — and a baby pouring energy into one skill (say, crawling) often pauses on another (say, babbling) for a few weeks.

healthdirect · Developmental milestones

Some children may walk or talk earlier or later than others — that's normal.

What matters more than any single date is the overall pattern: is your baby steadily gaining new skills over time? That's the question your child health nurse asks at every scheduled check — and it's much easier to answer when you've noted things down as they happened, rather than reconstructing months from memory in the waiting room.

A milestone is a guide, not a deadline — babies get there in their own order, at their own pace.

Milestones in the first year

Two notes on this stage. Around the middle of it, most babies also show the readiness signs for starting solids around six months — good head control and genuine interest in your food. And the 7–12 month window is where variation is widest: some babies crawl at seven months, some skip crawling entirely and go straight to cruising. Both are normal.

Milestones from 12 to 24 months

The Raising Children Network's toddler trackers(mở trong cửa sổ mới) break this stage into finer bands if you want more detail — language in particular can look wildly different between two perfectly healthy toddlers at 18 months.

What "developmental milestones" actually covers

Developmental milestones are the skills most children pick up in a rough order, grouped into a few broad areas — and the ages attached to them are averages with wide normal ranges, not deadlines. healthdirect(mở trong cửa sổ mới) groups them like this:

• Motor — rolling, sitting, crawling and walking, plus the fine-motor half: reaching, the pincer grip, scribbling.
• Language and communication — babbling, first words, following a simple instruction.
• Social and emotional — smiling back, wariness of strangers, playing alongside other children.
• Cognitive — object permanence, cause and effect, simple problem solving.

The areas develop at their own pace and often take turns: a baby pouring everything into crawling can look like they've paused on babbling for a few weeks. That's why the tables above are read across the whole row rather than cell by cell.

Red flags: when to see your GP

Variation is normal; a persistent absence of skills is what health professionals want to hear about. Based on healthdirect's guidance(mở trong cửa sổ mới), talk to your GP or child health nurse if your baby:

• By 6 months — isn't making babbling sounds, doesn't reach for toys, has poor head control, or doesn't smile at people
• By 9 months — can't pass a toy from one hand to the other, or doesn't respond to familiar words or their name
• By 12 months — can't sit unsupported, doesn't copy sounds or gestures, or won't bear weight on their legs
• By 18 months — isn't walking independently, has no simple words, or doesn't follow simple instructions

Also see your GP at any age if your baby loses a skill they previously had — that always warrants a review.

Keeping track without the paperwork

The hard part of milestone tracking isn't knowing the list — it's remembering, three months later, exactly when the first roll or first word actually happened. Nobody sits down at the end of a newborn day to write developmental diary entries.

That's the gap BabyLog's milestone tracking is built for: when you notice something new, you tap once to record the observation — no typing a note one-handed while holding a wriggling baby. The moment is stamped with the date and your baby's exact age, and it sits alongside your growth measurements and daily logs. Because the record is shared with every caregiver, the milestone your partner or grandma spots on their day doesn't get lost — everyone sees the same timeline.

Then, when the child health nurse asks "and when did she start sitting on her own?", you can look back and answer in seconds — and spot the patterns across months that no single busy day reveals.

Watch the milestones arrive in their own time — and track your baby's development with BabyLog.