Is it normal to skip crawling

Then, one day, with his legs bent out in front of him like a little yogi, he scooted his bum forward. He did it again and again, moving in a straight line, with a little bounce as he picked up speed. Then it just became normal. He would scoot to greet someone at the door, and bounce in his lotus pose across grass or pavement to get a ball or pat a dog.

He skipped it altogether. Those methods commonly include creeping or sliding on the tummy, and bottom shuffling—using the legs, and sometimes arms, to propel themselves in a seated position.

The commando crawl arms only is another popular move. Some babies will even roll from one end of a room to another. Nathalie Toriel, a mom in Toronto, says her son Milo, now almost three, had his own unique way of moving: the bear walk. The function of learning to crawl is for babies to explore their surroundings. When sitting up, a baby looks around and becomes interested in reaching distant objects and people. His or her world becomes larger in scope and moving from one place to another becomes important.

Some babies use a previously learned skill such as rolling to move from place to place. Any way that works for them to explore and satisfy their curiosity, they will do! Just days after birth, babies can push their legs and arms against a surface and move forward. They can also be put into water and their arms and legs move reciprocally, alternating as with crawling.

A lot of growth and change takes place over the next six to ten months. Skills such as rolling over, lifting the head and chest when on the tummy, and grabbing both feet while on the back, all happen during this time. All these movements strengthen muscles on both sides of the body, which enables a baby to develop the skill of sitting and reaching for a toy without losing their balance.

Vision is also developing from near sight to being able to see objects and people at a distance. If all these skills build on previous skills, does crawling also build skills that benefit the baby later? Occupational therapists and physical therapists have long studied and observed the many benefits of crawling. They work with hundreds of babies and young children and take a thorough developmental history to learn whether each child craw led and at what age. Several important skills have been discovered that seem to have a direct link to crawling.

For the body : Joint stability and postural control appear to develop as a result of crawling on all fours. Basically, babies gain more variety in moving which helps them play and move in way s that contribute to smooth and controlled transitional movements past the crawling stage. But new research may knock the legs out from under this conventional wisdom.

Instead their parents and other caregivers carry them until they can walk. Yet Au children do not appear to suffer any ill effects from skipping this phase. In a presentation given to the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in Chicago this past April, Tracer argued that, in fact, not crawling may be entirely normal and possibly even adaptive.

In his observations of Au mother-child pairs, Tracer found that babies up to 12 months old were carried upright in a sling 86 percent of the time. On the rare occasions when the mothers put their infants on the ground, they propped them up in a sitting position, rather than placing them down on their stomachs.

As a result of spending all of that time upright, Au kids never learn to crawl. They do, however, go through a scoot phase in which they sit upright and propel themselves along on their bottoms. Tracer says the Au believe that this scooting, rather than crawling, is the universal human prewalking phase. The Au are not alone in discouraging their children from crawling. Tracer notes that babies in a number of other traditional societies—including ones in Paraguay, Mali and Indonesia—are raised this way.