Recently, I have seen an uptick in the comments that crawling is not an important developmental stage for babies, and can just be skipped with no ill effects.  This idea is usually based on two arguments:

  • Kids long ago didn’t crawl, and kids in some remote tribes still don’t.
  • My pediatrician said crawling isn’t important.

I am fascinated and stunned by these two relatively weak arguments. While it may be true that babies in other societies didn’t crawl, that doesn’t mean that modern babies don’t need to crawl.  Long ago, it was just too dangerous to allow babies to remain on the ground for any period of time. There were hazards ranging from open fires to snakes down there, and babies are curious and defenseless.  Some of these same hazards still exist in remote areas where babies are not permitted to crawl. But, all of these babies would have crawled, and would have benefitted from crawling, if it wasn’t so perilous.

The pediatrician argument can be dispatched pretty easily, too.  Pediatricians, while highly trained, don’t know everything. It is perfectly fine to question something your pediatrician says if it doesn’t seem right for your child.  In fact, you should! Often pediatricians think of crawling as an intermediate skill that leads to walking, not an important milestone on its own. With this perspective, if a child walks on time, crawling isn’t really important.  But, crawling is much more than a step toward walking. Instead, crawling builds key skills and strengths that are essential for children’s success in school and in play. Mother Nature intended children to crawl, giving babies this developmentally appropriate mode of locomotion.

So, what is so great about crawling?  I would argue, and occupational therapists agree (here, here, here, here as a small sampling), that everything is great about crawling.  It is the best way for children to develop numerous crucial skills and strengths.  At Pop, Hop & Rock™, I have developed a Key Skills and Strengths system for evaluating the developmental heft of activities,  As you can see, crawling checks almost every box. Each of these skills is important to young children as they learn to explore and move through their world.  And, these skills are important for more academic pursuits down the road.

Let’s take a closer look at this long list of ways that crawling helps kids.

Perceptual Motor Skills

Perceptual motor skills allow a child to interact appropriately with the environment by combining the use of senses and motor skills.  Children develop these skills be using their visual, auditory and tactile senses in combination with their growing motor skills. In other words, they have to move in a way that stimulates the senses.  Crawling is a baby’s first chance to recognize that he takes up space in this world (body awareness) and develop an early internal sense of direction (directional awareness). He learns how to maneuver around through space (spatial awareness).  And, he executes a rhythmic pattern as he coordinates moving opposite hands and knees (temporal awareness). These rudimentary skills translate into the ability to understand space around other things besides his own body, while developing a sense of rhythm in movement.  If he has difficulty understanding space, writing becomes a particular challenge: how much space between letters or words, understanding running out of space at the edge of the paper, confusion with up, down and right side and left side as well as horizontal or vertical planes.  Equally, language, both spoken and written as well as math, require an understanding of patterning, sequence and rhythm, all built from crawling.

Sensory Skills

Typically, we think of our bodies as having five senses: seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling.  In reality, we have eight senses – those five plus the vestibular system, proprioception and introception. Introception deals with understanding the body’s signals for hunger, thirst, toileting, etc., and is not part of the Pop, Hop & Rock™ Key Skills and Strengths.  But, the vestibular and proprioceptive systems are critically important, and both are developed with crawling. The vestibular sense is housed in the inner ear, helping to orient us in space so we know whether we are right side up or upside down. It stabilizes our eyes so when our bodies are moving, our eyes continue to see a stable and fixed point.  When a baby is crawling, her head is moving, giving the vestibular system a chance to practice holding the gaze steady. A poorly developed vestibular system leaves you feeling unsteady and can make focusing on visual information challenging. You can see how those deficits would interfere in the learning process in a school setting.

The proprioceptive system is deep in the joints, and it regulates how parts of our bodies feel when they interact with outside stimuli.  It allows us to understand how hard to push or pull, how tightly to hold on, or how softly to touch. With every movement, a crawling baby is putting pressure on his hands and knees stimulating the proprioceptive sense.  Without a strong proprioceptive sense it is hard to judge how hard to push a pencil against paper or how hard to touch a friend in a game of tag.

One of the more traditional senses is also stimulated by crawling – the visual system.  When babies crawl, they are typically looking forward at an object as they move either toward it or away from it. They are strengthening their eye teaming, when eyes are working together to focus on something.  Sometimes the eyes are converging on an object as they draw closer, and sometimes the eyes are diverging on an object as they move away.  Strong visual processing is fundamental to a wide array of school activities, including being able to copy from the board or being able to look at a teacher and then look down to write notes.

Strength

Clearly, crawling develops strength throughout the body, including core, grip, upper body, and lower body muscles.

Crawling develops core muscles when the child is working against gravity to keep the body up off the floor and moving.  A well developed core supports all of our gross motor actions, giving us good posture control and fluidity in our movements.  The core supports our appendages, allowing children to hold a pencil and write, hold a book to read, build a block tower, run, climb, jump and play.  A strong core also allows children to sit comfortably in a chair in elementary school, making it easier for them to listen, focus and attend to tasks.

By putting pressure on the hands, crawling develops grip strength.  As the child moves across the floor, she begins the process of cupping, forming that little indent in the palm of the hand  Those muscles are key for holding a spoon as a toddler and a pencil as a kindergartener. Crawling also puts pressure on her arms, building strength and mobility in the shoulder girdle.  Shoulders support arms and hands which a child needs for holding a book and moving a pencil across the page.  And, when a child is crawling she is building mobility and strength in the hip muscles and the lumbar spine which will help her successfully walk – the milestone that pediatricians are looking for.

Other Skills

The final category contains important skills that don’t fit neatly in the other three categories.  Crawling builds all of these skills which are essential for school success.

Crawling assists in establishing eye-hand coordination by allowing babies to move to an object they want to manipulate.  Once they arrive at their goal, they can reach for and grasp the object, moving it with their hands.  Additionally, crawling requires the child to choose a safe place to put the hand on the floor, and he uses his eyes to help him make the choice.  This process exercises and develops the coordination of the eyes and hands, which is essential for writing in school, as well as participating in games and sports.

The complex movement of opposite hand and leg required by crawling develops bilateral movement, midline crossing, motor planning, and balance.  When a baby crawls, his right arm and left leg move forward together while the left arm and right leg wait their turn. Coordinating the two sides of the body to accomplish a task builds bilateral movement.  In using the opposite sides of the body concurrently, the brain has a conversation across the two hemispheres, strengthening the wiring that runs between them known as the corpus callosum. This conversation, known as crossing the midline, helps build a brain that is capable of complex, creative, and critical thinking.

Motor planning allows our bodies and brains to figure out the best way to accomplish a physical task.  Crawling requires minute and strategic decisions on where and how to put a knee or hand, developing this skill.  Later, motor planning will be essential for building, maneuvering through the classroom, and writing. Crawling has the added bonus of reinforcing pattern and rhythm of movement, and both of which are key to reading and math.

So, now you can see that crawling is critical to the foundational developmental building blocks that help children succeed in the classroom and beyond.  If we were keeping score, the 16 checked boxes on the Key Skills and Strengths chart far exceeds the two weak arguments against the importance of crawling.  Crawling is a clear developmental win for children.

So, what to do if your child gets up and walks without crawling first? Or, maybe you have a baby who is reluctant to crawl.  Here are some easy ways to encourage babies to crawl:

  1. Place a toy just out of reach.  When he gets to the toy, move it a little farther away or find another new toy to place just a little out of reach.  Then stretch out the distance a little making him go a little further each time.
  2. Face him and crawl backwards, talking to him the whole time and encouraging him to follow you.
  3. Roll a ball away from him and show him how you crawl to go get it.
  4. Once children are walking, crawling doesn’t have to be thrown out!  Children can crawl-race to dinner or crawl like “puppies” to the bath or they can crawl backwards adding a bigger challenge. At school, fueled by fun and creative adventure stories, children can hands and knees crawl, bear crawl or crab walk during transitions.

Make these activities interactive games, playing along with lots of giggles.  You’ll be able to sustain the play longer for even more skill development and strengthen a happy love of movement!

Photo by Sandra Seitamaa on Unsplash