How can I help my baby crawling

Learning to crawl is a key milestone in your baby's life.

Your baby will have already learnt to sit without support and roll; crawling is the next step. If you look at most formal developmental milestone and learning scales, you may find that crawling is left off of them. This is due to the wide range of times and methods babies may use to learn to crawl.

At about six to eight months most babies will learn to balance on their hands and knees. Babies work out how to move forwards and backwards from this position by pushing off with the knees. However some children never crawl because they get comfortable with some other method of locomotion. Instead they bottom shuffle, slither on their tummies or go straight to walking. It does not matter how your baby gets around, it is getting mobile that is important.

Crawling is your baby's first way of getting around by himself, it strengthens the muscles in preparation for walking, ensuring arm, leg, and back muscles are strong enough to keep him from falling on the floor.

However if you notice that your baby is not crawling, you really don’t need to worry about it so much, because remember every child is different, some of them will crawl before the 9th month, some after, some will skip that step and will start walking, however when that happens at some point they will crawl.

There’s nothing you can really do to make your baby crawl, but there’re some exercises you can do encourage and help the baby to crawl.

Putting your baby on the floor, face down, once the baby is able to keep his head up or sit, is an exercise you can do, also you can put yourself in front of the baby with some toys that he or she likes and encourage the baby to move forward.

It’s only a matter of time and patience, but is not the big deal, since learning to crawl or problems with crawling is not listed on the doctor’s chart as a problem in the development.