The aim of this descriptive, longitudinal study is to contribute to an understanding of parents’ influences on vital developmental processes in congenitally blind children. Without visual impressions verbal communication can have an important compensatory function, giving the child access to the external world and to social information that can not be obtained by other means. The language used by parents to young blind children could be expected to be descriptive, informative and elaborated. Instead a number of studies report that parents’ language may be impoverished, usually highly directive, with a lot of questions testing the child’s knowledge. The parent-child interaction in the case of 7 congenitally blind children have been followed in-depth by means of regularly home-based video-recordings from 18 months to 6 years of age. Individual communicative patterns in parents’ way of using verbal language to the child during the same period have been identified and are related to the child’s overall development at 6 years of age. A methodological study concerning the way of categorizing the parents’ verbal utterances has been conducted separately with the aim of estimating to what extent the video-recorded material can be minimized in the data-analysis. The result indicates the possibility of a substantial reduction without loss in representativity. The research findings indicate a high prevalence of weaknesses in developmental processes, particularly in communication/language, social behaviour and mental representations. Two of the 7 children showed no developmental problems at 6 years of age. Their parents kept close contact, mirrored and appraised the child and provided a continuous narrative on what was going on in the nearby environment. Varied emotional/intentional remarks were common. Three of the 7 children developed fairly well but showed remaining problems concerning communicative pragmatics and mental representations. Their parents had either a very directive style with many questions concerning the object world, or in contrast a highly dialogue-oriented style. Some vagueness concerning reality adaptation and interpersonal rules were found in this group and few varied emotional/intentional remarks were made. Two of the 7 children showed more significant developmental delays concerning communication, language and mental representation. Their parents had either a highly directive or dialogueoriented style. Few emotional remarks were made. Since the developmental problems to a higher or lower extent are found in the population of sighted children with autistic spectrum disorders, the results are discussed in relation to constitutional as well as environmental factors.