The Wonder Weeks 4+

I have found this app to be so helpful. In the early days - when I had no idea what I was doing - it was really reassuring to see that my bubs was being fussy because of a leap and they were bang on timing wise. I would wonder why he was being so different and check the app which would show us sitting right under a storm cloud.
I also really liked seeing what the current or next stages in development were. At first it helped us see what we could do to help his development and as he’s grown, we’ve found we are doing a lot of the things instinctively so it’s just reassuring. Anyway, I really liked having this app and would recommend it.

Personally I didn’t find that my baby’s development followed the leaps described in the app. It’s interesting to tick off the milestones such as when your baby makes consonant sounds etc but there is no scientific basis for the claims that all babies go through these leaps at the same time.

Extract from a 2018 guardian article by Oliver Burkeman:

The Wonder Weeks, a popular book by the Dutch husband-and-wife child development experts Frans Plooij and Hetty van de Rijt, insists upon the existence of 10 predictable “magic leaps forward” in your baby’s neurological development, heralded in each case by bouts of fussiness, raising the prospect that you might be able to tick them off like milestones in a home-renovation project. For example: at 46 weeks old, the authors declare, you can expect your baby to start to understand sequences, such as the steps involved in fitting one object into another. (Typically for the genre, The Wonder Weeks tries to reassure readers these stages will unfold naturally, while strongly hinting there are specific things parents must do to make them go well.) But it’s not wholly astonishing to learn, from Dutch press reports, that when one of Plooij’s PhD students sought experimental evidence for these leaps, she found none, and Plooij tried to block the publication of her results, triggering a controversy that saw him dismissed from his university post.

So I’m a psychotherapist so I do have some knowledge of child development and at the very least how to accurately research information, the wonder weeks is absolute pseudo science based on theories which have been disproven.
I can’t believe the amount of people that fall for it when we absolutely know that you can’t accurately predict these things because children are individuals.
It’s also kind of scary that Dr Franz X Pooj theories have been challenged and disproven, and do not hold up to real studies about early child development, and yet is still unethically plugging this information everywhere and making money from it…
Baby development occurs on a continuum rather than a fixed schedule. Moreover, every child is different. Babies will develop their abilities at their own natural pace and rhythm based on myriad factors including their genetics, their diet, their environment, and the adults who interact with them. So, the milestone of rolling over might occur at 5 months, but that’s an average. It could also happen at 4 months, or 6 months. To suggest that babies will experience a mental leap that profoundly changes the perception of their world at distinct and precise intervals isn’t supported by the bulk of research into infant development.