Of all the contraptions that are built to “aid child development”, the Baby walker has to be our most disliked.
Just as we’ve talked about previously, if your baby cannot walk unaided, she isn’t ready to walk yet! And the same is true for sitting up or anything else… If she needs help to do it, she hasn’t developed the functions yet and isn’t ready to do it.
Unfortunately, walkers do nothing to help or get them ready for the process.
Going through the stages of development such as creeping on her tummy and crawling are what will prepare your child for walking.
What happens over the weeks and months is that she will continue to use that same leg, which is going to build the hip and pelvic muscles up on that one side. It doesn’t take a trained expert to see that an imbalance from left to right can and will lead to a compromised posture and problems later in life.
By the time she gets to sixty and is in need of a hip or knee replacement, friends, family and doctors will say, “Well it’s inevitable, isn’t it? What can you expect at your age?”
If the functions are built properly from the start, you can expect to live a pain-free, active life… for the whole of your life. And so can your children!
So if you have your child in a baby walker, let’s get her out and on the floor crawling… Where she’s designed to be!
If, on the other hand, it’s too late and the walker has already been and gone, don’t fret! You can’t turn back the clock and you were simply doing what you thought was best. The thing to do now is to ensure that your child gets lots of unrestricted, free play.
Play that requires them to run, hop, skip, jump, crawl, roll, tumble and all other fun things that they are designed to do.
We’ll be talking more about unrestricted play in a later post, so watch out for that and check back tomorrow for our post on shoes!
Until then…
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