Tips for Determining Your Preemie's Adjusted Age

When a baby has been born before 37 weeks of age, he or she is considered to be pre-mature. A pre-mature baby has the same growth and development as a baby the same age still in utero. While wanting to start counting down to your child's first birthday, there are a few things you'll have to keep in mind.

Comparing your baby to another baby the same age might not add up due to the other baby being full term. Comparing 2 babies at 3 months of age, one being born at 40 weeks gestational age, and the other being born at 34 weeks gestational age, there is actually a month and a half difference of growth between the two children. You might be thinking that because your baby was born pre-maturely, he or she will always be behind, and this isn't the case. Doctors say that by the time the child is 2 years old, they will have caught up to other kids their age, development and growth wise. However, if the child was severely pre-mature, being before 30 weeks, they might always be a little behind other children the same age.

If you are comparing your child to another, you would want to compare to a child of the same gestational age. While a child who was born at 40 weeks, would technically be a month younger than your child who may have been born at 36 weeks, they are actually the same adjusted age. They should be hitting milestones more or less along the same timeline.

An adjusted age is the reference to your child's age as if they were born at 40 weeks. Therefore, even if your child was born at 34 weeks, and they are currently 4 months old, their adjusted age would be 2.5 months old.

To figure out what milestones and growth developments you should be focusing on for your child in the first 2 years of his or her life, you should be following the milestones for the child's adjusted age. This unfortunately requires more patience and more waiting for exciting milestones to hit, but the child will definitely catch up with time. This doesn't mean that you shouldn't encourage milestones for his or her age according to when he or she was born, but having expectations wouldn't be fair to your child or yourself.

The one exception to the rule is for those who weren't 100% sure of when they conceived their child, however deemed by your OB when you were pregnant, they came up with the most logical date as to when you conceived, and therefore determining a due date. With the chance that your child may have just been on the smaller side, this could throw those assumptions of gestational age off and therefore giving you the thought that your child would be born later then he or she should have been. Therefore, in the rare chance that your child was conceived a few weeks before you or your OB thought, your child would actually be up to par with milestones and growth with other children their age. However, figuring if the small chance of being wrong about your conceiving date, it's best to assume that your child might be behind and more on the lines of his or her adjusted age.

The best thing to keep in mind is that in 2 years, the worrying about your child hitting milestones on the expected timetable versus hitting them their adjusted age timeline, will just be a distance memory and will not affect you or your child in the long run.