The 10 Childhood Milestones Every Parent Should Photograph

There’s a moment that happens to almost every parent I’ve ever met.

It arrives on an ordinary Tuesday — while you’re watching your child do something completely unremarkable, tying a shoe or eating cereal or laughing at something across the room. For just a second, you see them clearly. Not the way you see them every day, which is too close and too constant to really notice anything. You see them the way a stranger might.

And what you feel in that second is something close to panic.

They’re already different. When did that happen?

That feeling is a signal. Most parents don’t know quite what to do with it.

I’ve spent more than forty years photographing children’s portraits across Eden Prairie, Edina, Minnetonka, and the Twin Cities. What I know — what I’ve watched play out in family after family — is that the parents who acted on that feeling have something to hold. The ones who waited have only the feeling itself.

Here are the ten milestones I’d never let pass. Not because they’re obligations. Because each one holds a version of your child that will not come back.

The First Year

The first year contains more transformation than any other twelve months of a human life.

A child at six weeks looks nothing like that same child at four months. Nothing like them at nine months. Nothing like the child who turns one. Each of those faces is its own separate, unrepeatable thing. You are living through a series of different children, one dissolving into the next so gradually you can’t feel it happening until it already has.

If I had to choose one window within the first year, I’d choose six to nine months — after the newborn fragility has softened, before mobility has made stillness impossible, when a child’s personality is beginning to show in their face. That window produces portraits families keep for fifty years.

Age Three

Three is the age most parents underphotograph. Because three is hard.

Three-year-olds are opinionated, unpredictable, and constitutionally opposed to being told what to do. I’ve worked with thousands of them. But here’s what forty years has taught me: there is something alive at three that doesn’t exist at two and won’t exist at four. A particular combination of wildness and emerging selfhood. A child fully present in their body, not yet managing how they appear to anyone.

That quality evaporates. I have watched it happen. The children who had it at three are measured and self-conscious at five.

Don’t skip three because it’s hard. Call me, and I’ll handle the hard part.

The Last Summer Before School

The summer before kindergarten is a threshold most parents feel before they can name it.

Something is about to change that can’t be changed back. The child who has existed in the unhurried years of early childhood — whose time has been entirely yours — is about to be handed to the world. A parent in Chanhassen once described it to me this way: “I felt like I was about to share him with everyone, and I hadn’t kept enough of him for myself yet.”

That’s exactly what it is. A portrait made in that last summer holds something no later image can replicate.

Age Eight or Nine

This one surprises people. Eight and nine don’t feel like milestone ages. They should.

Eight and nine are the years when childhood is most fully itself — old enough to have real interests and a distinct personality, young enough that none of the self-consciousness of adolescence has arrived. A child this age is more genuinely themselves in front of a camera than they will be again until well into adulthood.

I’ve written about this when discussing the age you most regret not photographing your kids. The short version: parents of teenagers consistently tell me the portraits from eight and nine are the ones they reach for first when they want to show someone who their child really is.

The Double Digits

Ten feels like a birthday that deserves more than a cake.

A child who has reached double digits knows something has shifted — they feel the significance even if they can’t say it. A portrait at ten catches a child standing at a threshold: no longer entirely who they were, not yet the person they’re becoming. A year later that tension has resolved itself and is gone.

The Year Before Middle School

Eleven and twelve are among the most photographed ages and the least well-photographed.

Parents have plenty of images from these years. What they rarely have is a portrait that holds the child as they were before adolescence rearranged everything. The face at eleven — still a child’s face, barely — changes faster over the following three years than at almost any other period after infancy.

High School Senior Year

Senior portraits mark a genuine passage. The face in a senior portrait is the face of someone on the edge of their adult life, and families who have that portrait come back to it in ways they didn’t anticipate when they were scheduling it.

What’s less obvious: a senior session is one of the last easy opportunities to photograph siblings together before the family begins to scatter. If there are younger children in the house, add a sibling session the same day. Five years from now, when coordinating a session requires plane tickets, you’ll be grateful you thought of it.

Graduations — Both of Them

Eighth grade graduation is underrated as a portrait moment. It’s the end of a chapter that doesn’t get formally marked in most families.

College graduation is the formal entry into adulthood. I’ve photographed college graduates whose baby portraits I made twenty-two years earlier. Those two images together — the beginning and the near-beginning of a life — are something families hold differently than almost anything else they own.

When a Sibling Arrives

A new sibling reshapes each existing child in ways that are immediately visible if you’re paying attention.

A portrait made in the first year of a new baby captures the specific newness of this configuration — the older child still figuring out their role, the relationship between siblings at its very beginning. A year later that newness has settled into itself. The portrait you could have made is no longer possible.

Any Year That Felt Hard

Some years are hard. An illness. A loss. A year when a child struggled with something real and came through it changed but still themselves.

These years deserve portraits too — not to document the difficulty, but because the child who survived it is someone worth holding. The milestones worth photographing aren’t only the officially designated ones. Sometimes the most important portrait is the one that simply says: we were here, and we were okay.

The Mistake Most Parents Don’t See Coming

Here’s what I’ve watched happen across forty years, in family after family, and it still troubles me.

It isn’t that parents don’t love their children or don’t value these moments. The love is never the problem. The problem is a set of quiet, easy-to-miss mistakes — decisions that seem harmless in the moment but gradually hollow out a family’s visual history until the gaps are too wide to fill.

The wrong storage format. The assumption that more photos means better photos. The milestone that felt fine to postpone because there was always next year. None of these feel like mistakes when you make them. Together, they add up to something irreplaceable being gone.

I put together a free guide on exactly this — “7 Mistakes That Quietly Destroy Your Family History” — because I’ve watched too many families discover these mistakes after the window has already closed. It’s the guide I wish every parent had before they needed it.

Related Reading

• How Often Should You Take Children’s Portraits?
• The Age You Most Regret Not Photographing Your Kids
• Capturing Sibling Bonds: A Guide to Sibling Portrait Sessions

The session itself is the easy part. The hard part is deciding it’s time. If you’re reading this, you’ve probably already decided. You can reach me at (952) 400-1020. I’m in Eden Prairie and I’ve been doing this since 1983.