The Play Space
Crawling.
If you want to help your baby discover their ability to crawl, I recommend focusing on creating a varied environment for your baby to explore. By creating a varied environment, you are creating opportunities for your baby to create and experience new solutions, movements, interactions with their environment.
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In order to create an environment that encourages crawling on hands and knees, consider obstacles with height for your baby to crawl over.
Your leg, a pillow, or a couch cushion are great options. By bringing your baby’s gaze and attention up from the floor, they will want to push up through their hands, and eventually up onto hands and knees.
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Just as you’ve been doing with pre-crawling skills, think about creating distance between your baby and their toys. And, distance between you and your baby. This will give them an opportunity to problem solve how to mobilize and get to what they want.
Longer crawling distances allow for your baby to practice their reciprocal and symmetrical hands and knees crawling pattern.
If toys are close by, your baby will only need to crawl one or two cycles before transitioning back into sitting. Babies sometimes have asymmetrical crawling patterns when they are first figuring out how to crawl. These longer distances give them the opportunity to work the kinks out.
Consider removing visual barriers that give the perception of limited area to explore, like overhead play gyms, small play mats or blankets, and small play pens or pack ‘n’ plays.
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Whenever possible, let your baby practice crawling activities with their knees and toes exposed on a non-slip surface. Traction is your baby’s friend when it comes to getting up onto hands and knees. My favorite place to practice quadruped is on a yoga mat.
A blanket on a hardwood floor is not going to cut it. Try to avoid footy pajamas, socks, loose baggy clothing like dresses, and movement restricting clothes like jeans.
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Have you ever noticed that when your baby is playing on the floor, and all their toys are out at once, they seem to move from one to the next – without engaging for very long?
Bring out one toy at a time for your baby to play with. There's nothing wrong with having more than one toy out at a time. But, if you decide to try this, notice any changes in your baby’s play behavior that might occur.
Are they spending more time engaging with the toy? How do they respond when you swap the toy for a different toy? Are they more willing to try to crawl to the toy?
Babies that are learning to crawl will usually go for the toy that is easiest to get. So, if their toys are scattered all around them, within reach, there is no reason for them to try to move to get to their toy. But, if the only toy they see is outside their reach, there are less distractions, and they are more likely to make attempts to move to get it.
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Crawling helps babies develop their near and far vision, calculate distances, and make sense of their surroundings. At first, babies may prefer to go “through” things rather than “around.”
With practice, they learn how to negotiate a more efficient path to their destination. This is a vital skill for self-preservation, navigation, and problem solving.
Crawling also encourages babies to learn how to make calculated risks, explore their boundaries and potential, experience failure and learn how to overcome it. They begin making some of their first decisions about where to go, when to go, and how to do it.
So once your baby is able to crawl on a level surface, create an environment that provides opportunities for your baby to explore – so that all of these skills can develop.
Think about crawling through tunnels or under chairs, on a variety of surfaces (soft or firm), up and down inclines, and on uneven surfaces.
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A carpeted set of stairs is a great place for an “Expert Crawler” to play with direct supervision and guarding for safety.
If you don’t have stairs at home, its okay! You can also try a small step stool that is about 6” tall.