Development, How do we know if we are doing it right?

A beautiful baby comes into this world and a part of a loving family.  They have all ten fingers and ten toes.  What more could new parents ask for?  Instruction booklet!  Before the baby we worry about what our plans are for the weekend or even that evening, who we can call to go with us and how early we will get back.  After the baby opens up a whole new world of worries.  Forget weekend plans unless they are made well in advance and sleep what is that?  What most of us parents want to know is am I doing this right?  We want to know that our child(ren) are developing normally and can keep up with peers their own age.  I think almost everyone has heard of Freud and Erikson even if they do not have children or have had a psychology class.  We know their names because of what they have helped us to understand about development and comparison of ourselves to the "norm".  We most commonly measure infants development by milestones.  When did they first smile, laugh, roll over, sit up, crawl, walk, etc.  When you look at the stages laid out by Freud (Psychosexual Stages) and Erikson (Psychosocial Stages) you have to take into account the cultural influences and societal norms for each group.  Where Freud concentrated on the more physical attributes of development (Oral, Anal, Phallic) Erikson concentrated more on the psychological attributes of development (how we come to think and feel emotionally about ourselves and our surroundings).  We have to remind ourselves that our children are developing through the stages and that this is part of life.  We have all drove our parents bonkers at one point or another.  What seems so simple to us is a development for our children.  Their reasoning and thought processes have to be trained.  We did not wake up one day and decide to not touch the fire because it is hot.  We either were told or, what many of us did, we touched it and discovered it was hot.  I believe that there are some experiences that our children have to learn for themselves.  When an infant is trying to grasp a toy we often let them struggle with it for a while.  That is how they train themselves to reach out and grasp it.  (I know that it is not that simple but just trying to make a point).  Our physical bodies have to be trained as well.  We walk but first we learn to manipulate our bodies by rolling over.  Many of us learn to either roll from our front to our back or back to front.  Once we have that down we then discover that if we push ourselves again that we can roll back to our starting position. 

I remember when my daughter was an infant and we were in her room.  I was rocking her and the thought struck me that I was responsible for this little girl.  I began wondering if I would be able to do this (parent) without screwing it up.  I believe that development is a continuous process.  Sure there are stages that you go through but you are constantly developing and growing.  We learn from our mistakes and the mistakes of others in our past.  My parents were young and raised both my sister and I the best that they knew how.  I think more than anything we look at not so much just the stages but the ultimate battle between nature and nurture.  As I said my parents raised my sister and I pretty much the same.  However we are completely different people.  I am not sure that I am ready to jump on the nature band wagon just yet though.  I think it boils down to choices that we have made have lead us to different places.  My sister was more a risk taker and I am not.  She was the one normally in trouble and I was afraid of my parents.  If we are who we are because of the choices that we make then that would mean that we would have to develop the cognitive ability to decipher between what our choices are.  We would have to work through Erikson's stages to develop cognitively and hopefully our parents would support us in that endeavor.