Ask around and you would probably find a majority with the notion that early walking is something positively extraordinary in toddlers. But most people don’t realise the loss of developmental progress associated with it.
A study supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation concluded that children take the first steps unaided at an average age of twelve months, and that children who started walking early turned out to be neither more intelligent nor more well-coordinated than their peers.
Precisely my point. But here I’m taking it a little further by saying that walking early might not be a good thing, especially if it causes the child to skip the crawling phase.
Our older son, Joel who began tottering at about at ten months, did just that.
He crawled for about 2 weeks between eight to nine months and then abandoned it altogether when he transited to cruising and walking right after. Even his crawl wasn’t in the regular posture because he always had a foot planted on the ground.
Glenn Doman, a prominent childhood educator, claimed that crawling develops convergence of vision, and children who didn’t do enough of it would be prone to reading and writing difficulties later in life. Various researches also indicated a close association between trunk muscles and balance and mobility performance.
The issue caught our attention when Joel began to exhibit signs of restlessness and displayed a tendency towards floppiness – especially when he was made to sit cross-legged on the floor like most school children. Joel slouched more deeply than his peers and it gave his back a rather worrying arch. He also had difficulty keeping his balance and the effort tired him easily.
Joel’s attention improved tremendously when his teacher sat him in a chair and rested his feet firmly on the ground. Supposedly Joel sat through the lesson without fidgeting. Reasons: (1) the chair’s backrest supported his midriff, and (2) he tended to slouch or ‘squirm’ less because the lower half of his body was supported by his legs being pressed firmly to the floor.
Later we found that it all had something to do with his trunk muscles which he had failed to develop adequately during the crawling phase. Without adequate trunk muscle and such ergonomic supports, it was easy for him to succumb to his own bodyweight like a ragdoll.
It all made perfect sense because our younger son, Amos, diagnosed with Down Syndrome and low muscle tone (hypotonia), has problems balancing and is only starting to walk after almost three years.
And so we had Joel doing his trunk exercises; sit-ups, wheelbarrel-walks, and worked in the fun when we got the boys to hound each other round our flat in a crawling position. We’ve been doing them for almost a year and Joel is now able to sit upright at his desk and chair for a good full hour doing writing or clay-play.
Maintaining a good upright posture requires solid trunk muscles. It aids digestion and puts significantly less strain on the the spine because the muscles are doing most of the work they were designed to do in the first place.
So don’t pop the champagne when your child abandons crawling and starts tottering to you at nine months. Be glad and be amused, but don’t forget to go back to her and make her work a little more on her arms and knees. It would help aplenty with the arm-leg coordination too.