Clinicians and practitioners-in-training can often lose sight of the normal developmental landscape that underlies behavior, especially in the field of cognitive development. It exists in an insular bubble within the broader field of psychology, and within each sub-domain there is a wide continuum between the anchors of atypical and optimal development. Clinicians need to learn, and to be reminded of, the unique peculiarities of developing cognitive skills in order to appreciate normal developmental phenomena.

In A Clinician's Guide to Normal Cognitive Development in Childhood,...