Ways to Play

Pre-crawling skills.

Expected Age Range: 7-9 months, or so.

These activities are designed to help your baby learn to army crawl, and then transition up onto their hands and knees in preparation for crawling.

Provide Push Off With Your Hands at Their Feet

Your baby’s ability to be mobile on their tummy requires the ability to push through their toes and feet into the floor. 

In order to help your baby discover how to use their feet, you really only need to help them push off with their big toe. Take your thumb and push it against your baby’s big toe to provide them with a chance to push off from your thumb and move their body. Alternate left and right sides. 

You can also guide your baby’s foot down to the floor and help their big toe make direct contact with the floor to practice pushing off from the floor. 

Bicycle Legs in Tummy Time For Weight Shifting 

Mobility on tummy also requires the ability to weight shift in a side to side manner. You can help your baby become comfortable with this weight shift by bending one leg, and straightening the other. 

When one leg bends, your baby’s weight will shift to the opposite side, and they may turn their head toward the side of the bent knee. Slowly switch between sides, allowing your baby to adjust to each weight shift. 

Army Crawling Over Obstacles

Army crawling allows your baby to discover forward mobility, but the next step is crawling on hands and knees. By practicing to army crawl over an obstacle, your baby will develop the strength to push their body up into the quadruped position that is needed for crawling on hands and knees. 

Try encouraging your baby to crawl over your outstretched leg while playing on the floor. 

This creates an obstacle with some height for your baby to navigate over. It will encourage your baby to push up onto their hands and knees, and figure out how to move forward over your leg. Experiment with gently rocking your leg from side to side to help your baby move over your leg. 

Supported Rocking in Quadruped

When your baby begins pushing up onto their hands and knees, lightly place your hand under their tummy. Gently rock your baby forward and backward as they are weight bearing on their hands and knees. 

Babies naturally do this rocking forward and backward in quadruped because it helps them create the momentum that they need to unweight a hand or knee to move forward. 

By helping them rock with gentle support, they become more comfortable with accepting this weight shift.

Looking Up in Quadruped

When your baby is on their hands and knees, attempt to draw their gaze upward and to the sides by elevating a toy of interest. 

At first, this will cause your baby to collapse onto their tummy reflexively. But with practice, they will be able to maintain quadruped while looking around their environment. This is a skill that will be helpful once they begin crawling around their environment. 

Transition From Sitting to Quadruped with Support

Sit your baby next to your outstretched leg on the floor. Place one of their favorite toys on the other side of your leg. Shake the toy to encourage your baby to transition out of sitting and over your leg. 

Transition From Sitting to Quadruped

Once your baby learns to maintain quadruped on their own, they will also begin to transition into the position from sitting. This can be encouraged simply by toy placement in sitting. Place a toy in front of your baby, and to their side, outside their reach. Your baby will make attempts to transition out of sitting, over their leg, into quadruped. 

Quadruped While Unweighting One Hand

In order for your baby to be able to crawl forward, they need to be able to unweight one hand at a time in quadruped. 

And in order to do that, they need to be able to weight shift side to side. Help your baby weight shift side to side on hands and knees by placing your hand under their tummy and gently shifting their weight from side to side. 

Once they are tolerating this movement with support, you can increase the difficulty. Give them a gentle push at the side of their hip to shift their weight onto the opposite side. Do this back and forth with a predictable cadence. 

After some practice, you may notice that your baby feels comfortable enough to unweight one hand at a time.