Children are one of life’s great treasures, but they are also one of life’s greatest mysteries as well. When you have a child, you are literally shaping (from the ground up) an entire human being. While you will not ultimately decide where they go or what they do with that life, you are going to lay a very powerful piece of the ground work for the life that they are ultimately going to lead. So when it comes to understanding how your children (and really, all children) develop, there really is no such thing as having too much knowledge. So be sure to do a lot of studying.
Just make sure that you keep up with where your children are, and keep a little bit ahead so that you can expect where they are likely to get to in the next few months. While every child is going to have their own developmental speed, and get to a certain level at a certain time, there are definitely a large number of different milestones that you would hope they are going to reach as quickly as they can. Especially when it comes to things such as potty training, faster is definitely more pleasant, at least for you.
Of course, when your children develop, it can be wrong to expect too much of them too quickly. If you expect your one year old to be able to read and write, you are going to end up disappointing yourself, and you may even set up an abusive level of standards for your child to follow. While doing things to get your children to seem to develop at an earlier age might seem impressive to some people, it is really just cruelty, so you should never do things of that nature. When you allow your children to develop at the pace their nature intends, you let them be themselves.