The term cerebral palsy refers not to a specific disease entity, but rather to a group of conditions with variable severity that has certain developmental features in common. The formal definition, delineated by an international panel in the mid­2000s, is as follows: “Cerebral palsy describes a group of permanent disorders of the development of movement and posture, causing activity limitation, that are attributed to non­progressive disturbances that occurred in the developing fetal or infant brain. The motor disorders of cerebral palsy are often accompanied by disturbances of sensation, perception, cognition, communication and behaviour, by epilepsy and by secondary musculoskeletal problems”. The nuances of this definition are parsed in more detail