On the comments for “Jean Talks!” post from several days ago, Jessica has asked an important question-- which I would answer right there if I could, but some glitch in this site seems to prevent me from doing that recently. (Help, blogspotters!). In brief, Jess is thinking about crawling because her baby is at about the age when it happens, and she wants to know what the story is, about advice that tells you you have to make your baby crawl-- even that you should move the furniture farther apart if a baby who hasn’t crawled yet wants to “cruise”.
As it happens, I was just looking up some material about this today. The first point I want to make about this is that nowadays most of the people who give this advice are chiropractors. See, for instance, http://unitedfamilychiropractic.com/pediatric-chiropractic/chiropractic-and-the-importance-of-crawling/. This chiropractor warns you that if your baby doesn’t crawl, he or she may not learn to read either.
This is pretty scary, but fortunately not true. If you doubt that, ask yourself if you’ve ever met a person with severe cerebral palsy who couldn’t have crawled, but who reads very well. Q.E.D.
The idea of the essential role of crawling in development seems to have been initiated by one Glenn Doman (not Dorman as the unitedfamily site says), a physical therapist who got his degree in 1940 and who in 1955 started the Institute for the Achievement of Human Potential, which still exists in the Philadelphia area. Doman opined, and he convinced many parents and teachers, that failure to crawl was problematic, and that many developmental disorders, from cerebral palsy to autism and severe brain injury, could be cured by a treatment he called “psychomotor patterning”. Patterning was a procedure in which five adults grasped a child’s head and limbs and moved them repeatedly in a pattern that imitated a reflexive movement of early infancy. (This procedure has twice been rejected as useless in position statements of the American Academy of Pediatrics.)
Why did Doman and his present-day chiropractic followers think this would work? As a first reason, they cite neuroplasticity-- the fact that the nervous system can continue to grow and develop long past infancy. Such a characteristic of the brain certainly exists, but it does not mean that any and all damage can be overcome, nor, certainly, does it mean that crawling movements would cause such recovery.
As a second reason, Doman and the gang repeated the mantra of the late 19th century, “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”, or, the development of the individual repeats the development of the species. To a certain extent, this is true-- but it’s also irrelevant. What they really are saying is that they think ontogeny can recapitulate ontogeny, that a person whose development was interrupted or damaged can be made to go through the same developmental stages a second time and emerge healthy. That’s a lot different from anything about species development, and once again, what does it have to do with crawling?
The “cross-crawl” is an especially silly idea, because what true crawl would not be a cross-crawl, with right arm and left leg moving together and so on? It’s true that some animals “pace” by moving the two legs on the right together, and the two on the left together (I think tigers do this, and horses can be trained to do it). But imagine an infant doing a pace-crawl without falling over. As for some poorly-defined need to use the two sides of the body in “cross” fashion, we do this when we’re walking! One leg bears the weight while the other moves forward, and simultaneously older children and adults counter-rotate their shoulders to keep their balance, causing the left arm to swing forward with the right leg and so on.
There are a number of other issues about motor development, in addition to the Doman/chiropractor stuff. One is what Jessica said: babies will crawl or do whatever when they and the circumstances are ready for the action. If you have a very slippery floor, or a rough splintery one, they may skip the crawling part. In any case, they may only crawl briefly, then get themselves up (maybe because your furniture is a good size and shape to pull on), or for whatever reason they may figure crawling gets them where they want to go and stick with it for months.
However, if a baby gets to be 18 months old and shows no sign of standing, or if he or she crawls asymmetrically, using one leg much more than the other , or if only one hand is ever used in crawling or in reaching, those are all possible signs of developmental problems and should be carefully checked out (and in my opinion, not by a chiropractor).
Jessica also queried advice to put the baby on its stomach on a hard surface when he or she is awake. This is an interesting issue. If you are putting your baby to sleep on its back (and I’m afraid there is no really good reason to do that, no matter what you’re told-- but save that for another time), the order of motor development in the first months will be different than what it would be if the baby slept and spent most of its time on the tummy. Pushing up when in the prone position exercises neck and arm muscles and takes strong muscles to do well. If a baby doesn’t push up well because it hasn’t worked at doing it, getting up on all fours is not going to work too well either, and without all fours, crawling doesn’t happen. All those things will happen eventually, but unless the baby gets lots of tummy time, they won’t happen as early as they did before “Back to Sleep” came along. But… by age two years, no one will be able to tell the difference, so unless you’re worried when the baby doesn’t meet the milestones that are based on babies 20 years ago, there’s no real problem here.
Showing posts with label crawling. Show all posts
Showing posts with label crawling. Show all posts
Monday, June 20, 2011
Friday, May 20, 2011
Myths and Misunderstandings, Ages and Stages, and "Parenting Within Reason"
A month or so ago I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Colin Thornton of Parenting Within Reason. He was interested in issues discussed in my book Child Development: Myths & Misunderstandings (Sage, 2009), and we got into some points from the book, some other points that have come up on this blog, and some brand-new things as well. You can hear the podcast at http://foundationbeyondbelief.org/fbbpodcast. (I warn you though-- it’s a whole hour long.)
Colin asked some excellent questions and made me glad I’ve spent a long time thinking about this stuff. Even so, there were some where I was tempted just to say “hommina hommina hommina.”
One question was an important one that I confess I would never have thought to talk about. Colin asked me about stages of development-- were there really stages, and is it essential to go through all of them? This is one of those questions where a simple Yes or No is not much help, so I tried to touch on a lot of issues (probably many more than Colin had in mind when he asked).
To begin with, “stage” is a metaphor. The use of metaphors for description in psychology is very common, because many of the events we need to talk about are not easy to observe directly. They may be mental events like attitudes, which we can only infer. Or they may be events that take a long time to unfold, as is usually the case in child development. “Stage” is a metaphor because it compares events in a child’s life to passages over spatial distance rather than focusing on them as changes over time. A stage is literally “a place to stand”, but that implies the possibility of standing in other places at other times. A stage coach was a vehicle that covered a set amount of distance and either dropped off passengers to catch another coach, or changed tired horses for fresh ones. Each stage or distance covered was thus not only farther away from the original one, but in other ways different from the ones before it.
Similarly, the metaphorical stages of development also have each their specific distance (time) from the starting point, and they have both quantitative and qualitative differences from the previous stages. “Quantitative” differences are obvious enough-- at later stages, many things (like walking or talking) may be done faster or more often than at earlier stages. “Qualitative” differences are not just more or less, but new and different ways of doing things. A baby who crawls moves in a different way than a toddler who walks, and the toddler’s stiff-legged, wide-based walk is in turn a different kind of movement than the 8-year-old’s free rope-jumping, dancing, or hopscotch-playing. Each stage of development is not only more advanced toward maturity than the stages before it, but is qualitatively different both from the previous and the succeeding stages.
So, Colin Thornton asked me, do people have to go through all the stages? What if a baby doesn’t show much evidence of a particular stage, but instead goes right on to the next one? Is that child going to miss something developmentally? How about crawling, particularly-- a stage that many parents have worried about over the years? No, the fact is that if a child has not developed to the point where the actions of the “next” stage are possible, he or she can’t do those things. Whatever the child does, that by definition shows his or her level of development. And children don’t all spend the same amount of time on each stage. It’s as if some have very fresh horses to pull their stage coach through one part of development, and tired ones for another stage. Some crawl for months and months before standing to walk holding on, others crawl for a day or two, and still others just sit around until they’re ready to stand, or scoot on their bottoms to get where they want to go. In the long run, it makes little or no difference to the child’s general development. (And there’s certainly no reason to try to insist that a child crawl; like trying to teach a pig to sing, it doesn’t work, and it annoys the pupil.)
There are a couple of other points I’d like to make with respect to stages of development, and these are things that Colin and I never got to. One is that although there’s no reason to be concerned about a “skipped” stage, there may be reason for concern if a child has been able to do some movement or task consistently and then “drops back" to an earlier stage. An example would be a child who has been walking holding on and now goes back to crawling exclusively (not just for convenience). It’s important to find out whether there’s a physical problem causing this apparent regression.
Second, one factor in whether a child seems to move beyond a particular stage has to do with what the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky many years ago called the Zone of Proximal Development. This term describes a phenomenon common throughout development: a child can perform an act when a parent or familiar caregiver is watching from nearby, but not when alone. The social and emotional support of a smiling, encouraging adult seems to help the child (or even a teenager) organize a new and difficult behavior which may not be possible when alone. We don’t “teach” a child to walk, but our encouragement may actually make it possible for actions to be accomplished at the beginning of a new stage. (Look away, or go and answer the phone, and the baby gets disorganized and falls down.)
There’s more about development on the podcast, and I promise you that although I sometimes thought “hommina” I never actually said it. I’m embarrassed to urge you to buy the book, but if you’re interested in what I say on this blog you might like it (see Amazon for a sample).
Colin asked some excellent questions and made me glad I’ve spent a long time thinking about this stuff. Even so, there were some where I was tempted just to say “hommina hommina hommina.”
One question was an important one that I confess I would never have thought to talk about. Colin asked me about stages of development-- were there really stages, and is it essential to go through all of them? This is one of those questions where a simple Yes or No is not much help, so I tried to touch on a lot of issues (probably many more than Colin had in mind when he asked).
To begin with, “stage” is a metaphor. The use of metaphors for description in psychology is very common, because many of the events we need to talk about are not easy to observe directly. They may be mental events like attitudes, which we can only infer. Or they may be events that take a long time to unfold, as is usually the case in child development. “Stage” is a metaphor because it compares events in a child’s life to passages over spatial distance rather than focusing on them as changes over time. A stage is literally “a place to stand”, but that implies the possibility of standing in other places at other times. A stage coach was a vehicle that covered a set amount of distance and either dropped off passengers to catch another coach, or changed tired horses for fresh ones. Each stage or distance covered was thus not only farther away from the original one, but in other ways different from the ones before it.
Similarly, the metaphorical stages of development also have each their specific distance (time) from the starting point, and they have both quantitative and qualitative differences from the previous stages. “Quantitative” differences are obvious enough-- at later stages, many things (like walking or talking) may be done faster or more often than at earlier stages. “Qualitative” differences are not just more or less, but new and different ways of doing things. A baby who crawls moves in a different way than a toddler who walks, and the toddler’s stiff-legged, wide-based walk is in turn a different kind of movement than the 8-year-old’s free rope-jumping, dancing, or hopscotch-playing. Each stage of development is not only more advanced toward maturity than the stages before it, but is qualitatively different both from the previous and the succeeding stages.
So, Colin Thornton asked me, do people have to go through all the stages? What if a baby doesn’t show much evidence of a particular stage, but instead goes right on to the next one? Is that child going to miss something developmentally? How about crawling, particularly-- a stage that many parents have worried about over the years? No, the fact is that if a child has not developed to the point where the actions of the “next” stage are possible, he or she can’t do those things. Whatever the child does, that by definition shows his or her level of development. And children don’t all spend the same amount of time on each stage. It’s as if some have very fresh horses to pull their stage coach through one part of development, and tired ones for another stage. Some crawl for months and months before standing to walk holding on, others crawl for a day or two, and still others just sit around until they’re ready to stand, or scoot on their bottoms to get where they want to go. In the long run, it makes little or no difference to the child’s general development. (And there’s certainly no reason to try to insist that a child crawl; like trying to teach a pig to sing, it doesn’t work, and it annoys the pupil.)
There are a couple of other points I’d like to make with respect to stages of development, and these are things that Colin and I never got to. One is that although there’s no reason to be concerned about a “skipped” stage, there may be reason for concern if a child has been able to do some movement or task consistently and then “drops back" to an earlier stage. An example would be a child who has been walking holding on and now goes back to crawling exclusively (not just for convenience). It’s important to find out whether there’s a physical problem causing this apparent regression.
Second, one factor in whether a child seems to move beyond a particular stage has to do with what the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky many years ago called the Zone of Proximal Development. This term describes a phenomenon common throughout development: a child can perform an act when a parent or familiar caregiver is watching from nearby, but not when alone. The social and emotional support of a smiling, encouraging adult seems to help the child (or even a teenager) organize a new and difficult behavior which may not be possible when alone. We don’t “teach” a child to walk, but our encouragement may actually make it possible for actions to be accomplished at the beginning of a new stage. (Look away, or go and answer the phone, and the baby gets disorganized and falls down.)
There’s more about development on the podcast, and I promise you that although I sometimes thought “hommina” I never actually said it. I’m embarrassed to urge you to buy the book, but if you’re interested in what I say on this blog you might like it (see Amazon for a sample).
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