Welcome to Developmental Pediatrics
The Department of Pediatrics Section of Developmental Pediatrics provides clinical services in
the Developmental Pediatrics Clinic at
Children's Hospital Colorado, located in Aurora.
Developmental Pediatrics is merged with JFK Partners. The Mission of JFK Partners is to promote the independence, inclusion, contribution, health, and well-being of people with developmental disabilities and special health care needs and their families through consumer, community, and university partnerships.
The Section of Developmental Pediatrics is comprised of faculty from the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Colorado and staff at Children's Hospital Colorado. Our clinical services occur in the Developmental Pediatrics Clinic at Children's Hospital Colorado.
Our clinicians evaluate and manage children with a variety of developmental and neurobehavioral differences. We provide single-specialty evaluations as well as interdisciplinary team evaluations for children with developmental and behavioral concerns from birth through adolescence. Ongoing follow-up is also provided for our patients, as needed.
The Developmental Pediatrics Clinic has eight developmental and behavioral pediatricians, and sixteen licensed clinical psychologists, a social worker, and five registered nurses involved in patient care. Other interdisciplinary team members include speech-language pathologists, occupational therapists, physical therapists, and a nutritionist.
We specialize in developmental disorders such as:
- intellectual disabilities
- developmental delays
- autism spectrum disorder
- learning disorders
- attention deficit hyperactivity disorder
- feeding disorders
- fragile X syndrome
- XY chromosome disorders
In addition to our single discipline assessment model, our interdisciplinary teams include:
- Infant-Toddler Clinic
- Birth to Three Clinic
- Early Preschool
- Early School Age Clinic
- Preschool Clinic
- School-Ages Clinic
- Adolescent/Preteen Clinic
- Nutrition Clinic
- Transition Clinic
- One Day Clinic- for families who live far away in order to finish assessment and parent feedbacks on the same day
- Developmental Pediatric Speech-Language and Occupational Therapy Evaluations
- Therapy evaluations for children up to 7 years old (chronological or mental age)
We also have a Sleep Clinic and Toileting Clinic and we provide psychopharmacologic management for children with developmental disabilities and associated behavioral issues. We have established new clinics in the past two years which serve unique needs in our community.
We have established collaborations with genetics, neurology, gastroenterology, and sleep medicine in order to provide more integrated care for children with ASD.
The eXtraordinarY Kids Clinic addresses the medical, endocrine, developmental, and psychological needs of children and adolescents with X and Y chromosome variations. We are a member of the National Fragile X Foundation’s Fragile X Clinical and Research Consortium. The Fragile X Clinic specializes in treating individuals with Fragile X syndrome.
We have an ABC Behavioral Management parent education program, to educate parents on the basic principles of behavior management. This also is a four seminar series focused on behavioral strategies that may be used for children with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
We have psychologists who provide treatment using the Early Start Denver Model, which is an evidence-based therapy for young children with autism spectrum disorders.
- The University of Colorado School of Medicine Department of Pediatrics and Children's Hospital Colorado now offer a three-year ACGME-accredited Fellowship in Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics. Please visit our fellowship page for further information.
- We offer a new psychology post-doctoral training program in developmental disabilities through Children’s Colorado. This is a one-year training program in which the trainee learns assessment skills of children and youth with a range of developmental disorders, participates in didactic sessions, and has research opportunities.
- We provide training for residents in developmental and behavioral pediatrics which involves clinical training in all aspects of developmental and behavioral pediatrics. Our faculty provides lectures in developmental and behavioral pediatrics and observations of programs and home visits with families who have children with special health care needs as part of the experience.
- An elective in Child Development and Behavior is available for fourth-year medical students who have successfully completed a pediatric clerkship.
- Developmental and behavioral pediatrics is an integral component of the pediatric clerkship curriculum for third-year medical students at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.
We participate in studies through the Autism Intervention Research – Physical Health Network (AIR-P), which is funded by HRSA via the Combating Autism Act Initiative (CAAI). We are collaborating with other ATN sites on studies that involve nutrition, sleep, iron metabolism, and creatine deficiency, to name a few. We also participate in a multisite, case-cohort study of the etiology of autism, which is funded by the CDC.
The eXtraordinarY Kids Clinic has a grant to evaluate genotype-phenotype correlations in individuals with sex chromosome aneuploidy and will establish a repository of DNA for future genetic studies. We will also study the behavioral and motor effects of testosterone replacement therapy in adolescent males with XXY and XXYY syndromes.
We are a member of the National Fragile X Foundation’s Fragile X Clinical and Research Consortium, which was recently funded by the CDC to develop a registry of subjects with Fragile X for the purpose of tracking medical and behavioral features and to facilitate future clinical trials.
We also have funding through the Colorado Clinical Translational Science Institute, funded by NIH, to evaluate barriers social-emotional screening in a Latino population.
Drs. Friedman, Reynolds, and Tartaglia are also members of the Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center (IDDRC) faculty.