Your baby’s first steps

Crawl, seal or crawl?

A child cannot crawl immediately. It first practices rocking and rocking on all fours. In the prone position, it pulls the legs under the body and moves back and forth. At some point it will be time. Your child is moving. In the beginning it will still be difficult for your child to keep their balance, as they first have to learn to shift their weight onto their hands and knees. Don’t be surprised if it falls over more often. It also gets up again. Babies tend to fall in a way that doesn’t bruise them.

If crawling doesn’t work right away, your baby won’t get tired of trying again and again. Your baby was born with ambition. If she doesn’t try crawling again right away, she will try the new mode of locomotion again at a later date. Find out in our further article how you can help your baby learn to crawl .

However, it can also be the case that a child skips crawling completely and initially only moves by crawling or rolling and suddenly dares to take the first running steps. It does this by crawling on its stomach, moving its arms and legs back and forth, or rolling from side to side on its stomach and back again.

No matter how it moves, it sees things that it finds interesting and wants to investigate. Therefore, for the child, locomotion, by whatever method, is in the foreground. Being on the move independently also promotes a sense of direction. So don’t stop your child and let them do as much as possible, even if their pants are worn through and their hands are dirty.

Tip: As soon as your child has found a suitable method of locomotion, it will love to crawl up and down stairs. To avoid accidents, you should practice the right technique with your child at an early stage. Encourage it to climb stairs, of course only if you are there. This is a good workout for the muscles, endurance and coordination of hands and feet. However, always pay attention to the necessary security. Our checklist for a child-safe home makes it easy to see what to look out for.

With hands and fingers – fine motor skills

Your child will become more and more skilled with their hands and fingers. It is able to put small things through an opening, purposefully let go of things, and pick up tiny objects with its thumb and forefinger. Sometimes kids that age even try to stack blocks and shapes on top of each other.

Tip: Offer your child toys that can be opened and closed or manipulated in other ways. Your child will surely find these toys exciting and they help him to further develop his motor skills.

sitting and standing

Your child now prefers to sit on their heels. With the help of different leg positions, your child will become more and more secure in their posture. Kneeling upright is becoming just as popular. Through this movement, it can achieve many things. Kneeling is a transition to standing, as from this position he will soon attempt to push himself up using his little arms. Due to the increased effort, this exercise strengthens the trunk muscles and the ankles.

Tip: Don’t help your child by pulling them into the standing position. This could result in permanent postural damage. The best thing is to let it try out how it can move and give it a lot of freedom. You can find more information about this developmental step in our article “When babies learn to sit” .

The first steps

However, it will be quite a while before it can actually run. Nevertheless, sooner or later the time will come when crawling or sealing is no longer enough. It wants to move the way you do it: on two legs. You’ll see it trying harder to pull itself up everywhere. This will work relatively quickly, but the difficult part is sitting down again. Help your child with this, for example by gently pressing the back of the knees. When your child has mastered this, it slowly begins to take its first steps along the wall or the edge of the table. This is called “walking the railing”. Then it’s up to you. And at some point he has enough self-confidence and tries it on his own. Of course, it will fall and stumble in the beginning. But don’t worry, your child will learn it. When, however, differs from child to child. Here, too, children develop individually.

Tip: Don’t put your child under pressure. It knows best when it is time to take the first independent steps. If you notice that your child is beginning to sit up and move about, you should not hold their hands and influence them to take the first steps. This prevents your child from working out its own movement sequences. If you speed up the process or help it, it may skip important steps in movement development. This will become noticeable in the further course of development. Your child wants to sit up on its own and learn to walk for the first time.