You have to crawl before you can walk.
Except that you don't. Some babies roll, some scoot on their bottoms, some never develop a nice, clean, cross-pattern crawl (or "creep" to use the technical term), and most of them still learn to walk. Do they suffer later in life for the lack of crawling? Officially, doctors no longer think so, and have removed crawling from the list of important childhood milestones. Based on my own observations over a long life, and on much reading on the subject, I think they're wrong. It is no less than hubris to decide that a normal part of human development is not important, and most systems we used to think vestigial—tonsils, for example—turn out to have a distinct purpose and function. We can live without tonsils; many do, and for some their presence does more harm than good, but that doesn't mean we should excise them from healthy children, as was common half a century or so ago. The burden of proof for crawling's importance should be on those who insist it isn't, not the other way around, and "we see no evidence that crawling matters" isn't good enough for me, especially since there are plenty of therapists who disagree.
But I'm no doctor, and I'm not going to take on the American Academy of Pediatrics here, not now. What I view as blatantly irresponsible, both on the part of doctors and on that of writers like Nicholas Day, whose article deriding the importance of crawling hit our local paper recently, is the reason and the timing behind this change.
Since the implementation of the Back-to-Sleep campaign, in which parents are intensely pressured not to let their children sleep on their stomachs for fear they might die of SIDS, the age at which babies are meeting the customary developmental milestones has increased, and more and more children are skipping the crawling stage. It's not that doctors don't notice: as one said, after the mother fearfully confessed that her child had always slept on his tummy, "I knew that. Look at his head shape! Look at how advanced he is! This is no back-sleeping baby." But few dare not to push Back-to-Sleep.
Nor am I recommending tummy-sleeping here. If I did, I'd hear immediately from my brother in the insurance business. It's a personal, parental decision, best reached by careful research and deliberate decision, although I have known of babies who have made the decision themselves, by flatly refusing to sleep in any position other than prone. Parents are only human.
Besides, I no longer think Back-to-Sleep is the chief culprit here, except insofar as it makes parents afraid to put their babies on their stomachs at any time. This is not the first time doctors have insisted that there is a right way for babies to sleep: When my eldest brother and I were born, it was important for us to be on our backs "so the baby won't smother." By the time my next two siblings came around, tummy-sleeping was pushed, "so the baby won't spit up and choke." None of us had any trouble learning to crawl.
Here's what I think the critical difference is: although there were a few baby-entertainment devices back then—I had a bouncy seat and my brother an early Johnny-Jump-Up—we didn't spend a lot of time in them. A baby on his tummy learning to crawl is a baby learning to entertain himself, and a self-entertaining baby is critical to a parent's sanity. It takes a lot of work to learn to propel oneself forward to a toy one has accidentally pushed out of reach, but babies are hard workers when motivated. Today, the goal seems to be to sell more baby equipment to make the job easier by keeping both the kid and the toys corralled, so they don't have to work (i.e. become frustrated and cry) to reach them. That's easier for the parents, too, but in the same pernicious way that plunking children down in front of the television for entertainment also makes a parent's life easier—in the moment.
I won't even get into the amount of time children these days spend strapped into car seats, where they can barely move. And we used to think the Native American habit of confining their babies to cradle boards was cruel. Car seats, entertainment devices, strollers—sometimes all three wrapped into one so the baby doesn't even get freedom of motion in transfer—the proliferation of these is keeping our babies off the floor, and not crawling.
Bottom line: American babies are not meeting the traditional developmental milestones because of lack of opportunity. So what do we do about it? We change the milestones.
New York State students are failing the math Regents exam? We make the questions easier.
SAT scores have fallen? We "re-center" them, to reflect the lowered average.
Florida schools can't meet the new standards? We lower the standards.
High school students can't handle your tests? Give them easy extra-credit work to pull up their grades.
America's children can't seem to leave the nest and support themselves, even after college? Force their parents to pay for grad school, and to keep them on their own insurance policies until they're 26.
From birth through extended adolescence, we keep lowering the bar for our children. Some day they may forgive us, but I wouldn't blame them if they don't. It is good to recognize that "normal" is a range, and relax about minor variations in timetable and achievement. It is appalling, however, to respond to a general decline by redefining normal as average, and lowering the bar. Again.
Our children deserve a better future than we are preparing them for.
I don't have time to research it, but I wonder if crawling and any link to obesity. It seems to me a baby who crawls and is active early has a better start and is more likely to be active when older than a baby who mostly sits. It seems, but we have Jonathan as a counter example, and all the older kids I see stuck in strollers still love to run around when they are finally out.
Another point is that if we look to other cultures, we have to realize that the babies that aren't on the floor are being carried and getting lots of physical, mental, and social stimulation that way. Looking to Europe in the last few centuries seems like silly thing to do (as the article does). Bloodletting was common up until relatively recently and the human race survived, but it doesn't mean bloodletting is a smart practice!
But as with all the parenting advice, what I don't like are the absolutes "your baby must crawl or else you'll reuin him for life" or "there is absolutely no benefit in crawling." What have we turned childrearing into that we need an rulebook full of absolutes to feel secure about what we are doing? It's a crazy world out there.
I agree about the absolutes. Part of the problem stems from a healthy desire to analyze any system and figure out what works and what doesn't, and from the noble desire of parents to do the best for their children. Less healthy and less noble contributors are the fear of ambiguity and the hope that if we obey "the rules" exactly and faithfully, everything will turn out well, or if something does go wrong, at least it's not our fault. (Eating is another area in which this has gotten out of hand.) And then there's the "cult of the expert," which in other manifestations results in people who are afraid to sing, to play sports, and to cook because they can't possibly be as good as the professionals who have dedicated their lives to the activity.
I find the thing that helps most is perspective and a little knowledge of history, especially when it comes to childrearing, education, and eating. The experts have changed their minds so many times that I no longer have any faith at all that they have finally "gotten it right."
Within two minutes of writing the above comment, I came upon—in a completely different context— this quote from G.K. Chesterton: Once men sang together round a table in chorus; now one man sings alone, for the absurd reason that he can sing better. If scientific civilization goes on ... only one man will laugh, because he can laugh better than the rest.
