As parents, we all look for and take joy in our child's important "firsts" - first word, first time rolling over, first time sitting up unattended, first steps . . . But although these noted benchmarks are significant and memorable, there are lots of other small developmental milestones that may be even more important indicators of whether our baby is on track towards success. The key is knowing what these are and how we can help our children attain and surpass these milestones. On this week's show, I talk about raising a smarter and healthier child with positive parenting expert and speech-language pathologist Katherine Gruhn (http://www.mybabycompass.com/meet-kathy/). After working for years with parents, school personnel, and other medical team members, Katherine realized that there was no resource that provided an easy check-list of milestones by age that parents and others could use to assess child development. So she created My Baby Compass (http://www.mybabycompass.com/), a comprehensive program that offers those checklists as well as age appropriate activities that parents can do with their children to help them reach these critical milestones. On this week's show, you'll learn: why the 0 - 7 age range is the most critical time for impacting your child's development the key developmental milestones parents should be looking for by age what Katherine means by the "30 million word gap" and why that is so important for you as a parent to understand how parents can determine when intervention is warranted the problem with programs like Baby Einstein and academic pre-schools; and why language development is so crucial and what parents can do to promote that development