Remember To Have Fun!

Nine (Baby) Steps On How To Give Your Child The Absolute Best Start In Life - Baby Step #9

So here we are on the last of our “Nine (Baby) Steps On How To Give Your Child The Absolute Best Start In Life”.

If after reading the previous posts you are somewhat concerned because you used a walker or a playpen or any of the other things we’ve talked about… Don’t be!

You can only work with the information you have at the time and you were undoubtedly doing the best you could with the tools you had. Life is constantly changing and with it, our knowledge of what’s best and what’s not.

If your kids are still young enough, get them out playing as much as you can and make the play as unrestricted as possible… Jumping over and crawling under objects, twisting and turning, jumping up and bending down, hopping, skipping, jumping…

You get the general idea!

Football and other sports are certainly great, though they don’t offer completely unrestricted motion that takes their bodies through a full range. The more unrestricted and free play it is, the better.

And make sure you get out there and join in too! You don’t need us to tell you about the joys of having kids… So relive a little of your youth and get down on the floor or the lawn or anywhere else and join in!

Kids are fun and so is rediscovering your inner child!

The most important aspect in all of this is that you have fun with your little people.

If you would like to get a deeper understanding of the points covered in this series of posts, we can’t recommend enough the reading of Pete Egoscue’s fourth book, Pain Free For Women.

The title can easily give the impression that it’s for women only… Don’t be fooled! It’s a great book that everyone should read.

Chapter 5 is the most pertinent to the points that we’ve been covering in this series of posts.

Talk to you soon!

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Confinement Is Detrimental To Good Health

Nine (Baby) Steps On How To Give Your Child The Absolute Best Start In Life - Baby Step #7

So we’ve had a look at Baby Walkers and why they’re not so good for the development of your child… And we’ve had a look at hard soles shoes and how they play their part in sabotaging strong, functional muscles.

Today we’re going to look at a device that is great for keeping the little ones safe while Mum and Dad tend to other matters, but aren’t so good for their healthy development…

Today, it’s the playpen! (And unrestricted motion in general).

You’ve probably seen a wee child in a playpen that is screaming at the top of her lungs. Is she throwing a tantrum? Is she being a little brat? Or is she saying, “Hey, get me out of this prison! Don’t you know I’m designed to move and to get out and explore this new world?!”

Now, we realise that life moves at a hundred miles an hour nowadays. Mums go out to work and there are numerous other things that need to be done all the time.

In addition to all of that, when you’ve got a little person to look after, you want to make sure she’s safe while you turn your back to drain the spuds and turn the oven down to gas mark 3…

It’s tough to balance everything.

And we also know that your little person is the most important thing in the world for you. You’ll do whatever it takes to protect her and to ensure that she is fit, strong and healthy.

Which is why she needs to be out of the playpen and given free range to explore wherever she wants as much as is humanly possible.

Crawling and exploring builds strong and healthy muscles… And more than that, "the baby's movement is strength­ening not only musculoskeletal system functions but brain functions as well."

That’s quite a realisation for many folks and it’s worth repeating…

"The baby's movement is strength­ening not only musculoskeletal system functions but brain functions as well!" *

So keeping your child out of the playpen, out of hard soled shoes and out of baby walkers is not only working towards building strong and healthy muscles (which lead to great posture later), it’s also working to develop brain function too.

Remember, we humans are designed to run, hop, skip, jump… To roll, tumble, reach, bounce and pounce. We are designed to move.

Movement is not only necessary for building strong functions from birth, it is necessary throughout our lives as we continue to repair and regenerate worn parts.

We’ll talk to you again tomorrow when we’ll be looking at the joys of entering their world, as opposed to bringing them into ours!

Talk to you then.

* Reference: Pain Free for Women – Pete Egoscue



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Walk On… Bye

Nine (Baby) Steps On How To Give Your Child The Absolute Best Start In Life – Baby Step #5

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.

Many well-meaning parents put their little ones in walkers to ‘help them along’ or to ‘get them ready for walking’.

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.

If you’ve ever seen a child in a baby walker, you may have noticed that quite often, their feet don’t quite reach the floor to begin with… So, frustrated at not being able to move, she will reach down with one leg to enable her to ‘push off’.

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…