Should Your Baby Crawl?

“Should my baby crawl? Yes or no?” That’s probably one of the most frequently asked infant related questions. It’s also one that triggers a heated argument every time it is asked.

So, let’s try to find the real answer.

I'd like to start off by using the following parallel to describe a basic crawling principle:

A Crawling Comparison

Let’s say you’re a gardener and decide to grow tomatoes from pips rather than starting off from a few small plants.

You carefully prepare the beds and plant 20 seeds. You do everything perfectly right. Now, in all probability, things will go as planned and you will eventually have only about 12 small tomato plants… the remaining 8 pips never grow.

At this point you can stop and think you were successful.

But, if you do nothing else and let things take its natural course you may eventually only have about 2 plants with a few small tomatoes. 10 Plants will typically die of neglect, fungus infections, etc.

In sum, you will never have a 100% success rate growing tomatoes from pips.

Very much the same principle applies to successfully raising your baby.

Many people, and even medical personnel, only see the short term effect of crawling. And that’s what they base their answer on.

Unfortunately I must admit they are 100% right if they say that babies do not HAVE to crawl – that is if we’re only talking about getting them mobile. In that respect they are right.

BUT we are not looking at and talking about the whole picture

There is another part that we are ignoring.

With this type of answer we are effectively only looking at the 12 young plants you got from the seeds. But the idea was never to only grow plants. The ultimate goal is to grow tomatoes!

In the same way, the goal with your child is have him fully developed and optimally using all his skills and talents… not just having him mobile.

The real test comes in many, many months later when the plants must start bearing tomatoes. This is the time when people fail to connect the inability of your baby to crawl with the learning problems he often experiences at school. They fail to see the connection between the 12 young plants and only the 2 plants bearing tomatoes.

These people look at the 12 plants and say they were successful. I disagree. I reason that you were only successful with the 2 plants bearing tomatoes.

From experience I know that there is a very high probability that babies who never crawled to experience certain learning problems once they start with formal school activities. They are almost like the 10 plants that never bear fruit.

The most frequent learning problems these kids experience are:

• Having difficulty distinguishing the letters p, b, d when reading, or even f and t. So, in stead of reading ‘pot’, they may be reading ‘dot’… meaning that many sentence rarely make sense. They simply find it difficult to understand what they’re read.

• Reading numbers like 41 and then involuntarily writing 14 or any other numerical reversals. Doing mathematical is really is big problem for many of these kids.

In normal language we talk about “reversals” and the effect thereof is most prominent in reading and mathematics. These are the "skills" crawling is brilliant at teaching.

In fact, some child development experts go even further by stating that a child’s vision and speech skills are partly determined by the amount of time he spends crawling as a baby.

But, without going into too much detail it simply comes down to baby crawling naturally stimulating and encouraging the brain to integrate the left and right side of the body and to correctly process the "input signals" – and provide the right answers.

Of course we must also appreciate that some kids never crawl and have no such associated learning problems at school. These kids are typically like the 2 plants bearing tomatoes.

What happens here is that these kids did other activities to stimulate and encourage development of the very same skills.

One of the ways is to use the right educational (or often also called “learning”) toys and games.

There are many more other activities and games stimulating the same development. But unless parents specifically aim to stimulate and encourage development of these “missing” skills, it will most likely not happen.

One of the standard things I do professionally is ask parents to fill in a questionnaire before I test children for learning and development problems. The questionnaire is to get comprehensive background information about every kid I see, regardless of his or her age at the time.

One of the questions in the questionnaire is whether the baby reached all the milestones and at what age, regardless of how old the kid is when s/he comes to me for therapy.

My goal with these questions is to find out whether they mastered all the milestones – yes or no? And when did they do so?

I know from the responses that there are an overwhelmingly high percentage of kids who never crawled that have these specific learning problems at school.

In our school system these problems are usually only spotted between 5 and 8 years old when kids go to school and these skills are actually tested.

That’s why it is often difficult for parents and pediatricians to relate these learning difficulties to the inability to crawl that happened almost 8 years ago!

I believe the only reason I see these difficulties is because I specifically ask and look for them!

My suggestion is thus to still encourage baby crawling... just to be sure.

But how do you encourage this skill?

Fortunately there are a number of really great ways to do it, without anyone else knowing what you are doing. They may be thinking you are playing.

One of my suggestions would be to take a medium size blanket, lay it flat on the ground and lay your baby on his tummy on the blanket. Now, start dragging your child around by dragging the blanket.

Most kids love this activity. After a while you can opt for a towel to ensure your baby gets his hands and arms clear to help steer himself. That is the “trigger” for learning the crawling skill.

Another option I like is to use a biggish skateboard and place the baby on his tummy on the skateboard. Initially I will push him around on the board. But he will be quick to use his arms to move himself around. And that’s all you really want to achieve.

Summary

Bottom line is this… prevention is better than cure. So, let’s do what we can to ensure our baby fully develops all skills and talents… even if that means encouraging baby crawling.

baby crawl