Crawling—A Milestone Worth Meeting

Like most of what we see in creation, human development is a beautiful, intelligent, complex, and synergistic system where everything has a purpose and everything supports the unfolding of the next part of the process. It seems very likely that we can trust in the rightness of healthy human development, and that the innate process of crawling exists for important reasons. While human beings can survive and function without crawling, most parents and experts understand that crawling is an essential part of human development.

Crawling is immensely important for optimal physical, sensory, emotional, and cognitive development. Infants are meant to engage in both belly crawling and hands-and-knees-crawling. Smooth, coordinated crawling builds muscle tone and coordination. It supports the development of the vestibular and proprioceptive senses, and is vital for binocular vision and balanced hearing. Crawling provides sensory stimulation, matures the brain, and enhances cognitive functioning via growth and myelination of neural networks (see research summaries and therapist opinions below). When children have skipped crawling—or if they exhibited abnormal locomotion in infancy—then it will likely be very helpful for them to crawl to overcome some of the gaps in their development. However, in order for a child to crawl properly and easily, there has to be a good neuro-sensory-motor foundation in place.

One of the easiest and most developmentally appropriate ways to build this foundation is through innate rhythmic movements and primitive reflex integration. The Brain and Sensory Foundations program gives parents simple and adaptable movements that support core strength, coordination, and the ability to be in prone; all of which are necessary for crawling. Learn more at https://moveplaythrive.com

By integrating primitive reflexes and providing the foundation for crawling, we can help children who exhibit:

• Motor delays
• Poor spatial awareness
• Vestibular underdevelopment/poor balance
• Lack of coordination
• Low muscle tone
• Poor posture
• Gait irregularities
• Restricted, effortful movement due to a lack of flexibility in the legs
• Ocular-motor issues
• Dyslexia
• ADHD
• Learning deficits
• Slow mental processing due to poor myelination
• Speech delays

See the full list of conditions that may benefit: https://moveplaythrive.com/conditions

There are many research studies that support the benefits of crawling:

• Cazorla-González et al. (2022) did follow up measurements at age 7 of children who crawled before walking and those who did not crawl before walking. The children who crawled before walking had lower fat mass and higher levels of muscle mass than non-crawlers. The children who crawled in infancy also had lower systolic blood pressure than those who skipped crawling. The researchers concluded that crawling before walking may positively impact future overall health (Cazorla-González et al., 2022).
• Researchers studying 9-month-old infants showed that those who crawled had better cognitive abilities, such as more flexible memory retrieval skills (Herbert et al., 2007) and mental rotation ability (Schwarzer et al., 2013).
• This research showed that infants with greater experience in crawling did better than novice crawlers in a spatial memory task: “…we know that crawling experience serves as a mediator of cognitive skills and that both the onset of crawling and crawling experience affect spatial memory” (Clearfield, 2004, p. 219).
• When studying motor skills in preschoolers, McEwan et al. (1991) found that the influence of crawling in infancy was shown to be beneficial to motor skill development. The preschoolers who were noncrawlers in infancy scored significantly lower in motor skills tests than those children who had crawled (McEwan et al., 1991).
• Hernández-Martínez et al. (2023) found that 5-year-old children who had achieved crawling in infancy showed significantly better motor competence than those who had not crawled in infancy.
• The experiences concurrent with crawling “provide a foundation for visual-spatial perception [and]… The process of crawling provides a state of eye-hand coordination, vestibular processing, improvement of balance and equilibrium, spatial awareness, tactile input, kinesthetic awareness, and social maturation” (McKewan et al., 1991, p. 75).
• On tests of visual perception in a group of children between the ages of 5 and 6, those who had crawled in infancy performed significantly better than those children who did not crawl in infancy; the crawling children also showed a more efficient ability to grasp a pencil (Visser & Franzsen, 2010).
• Crawling appears to be associated with building emotional discrimination skills; for example, infants who had more experience crawling appeared to be more sensitive to detecting emotion in facial expressions than the same-aged noncrawling children (Gehb et al., 2022).
• Crawling intervention helped children with ASD (ages 7-19) to improve fine-motor skills (Stewart, 2014).

Some argue that the research on crawling is not definitive. That may be partly true because it is hard to separate the benefits of crawling from the benefits of achieving independent mobility. And most of us have come across individuals who never crawled, but who appear to be functioning quite well despite the lack of crawling. However, in a recent survey the vast majority of pediatric physical therapists said they believed that crawling was important (92%) and linked to positive developmental outcomes (71%-99%). One therapist in the survey explained, “I have noticed a trend that my children that skipped crawling tend to have a weaker core, weaker upper extremities, sometimes weaker [lower extremities], decreased bilateral coordination and frequently may have asymmetrical or atypical gross motor skills” (Kretch et al., 2024, p. 11). Another therapist wrote: “The school age students that I work with who skipped crawling typically struggle...with coordination, speech, and academics, especially reading” (Kretch et al., 2024, p. 11).

In the same survey, 79% of pediatric physical therapists disagreed with the removal of crawling from the CDC developmental checklists (Kretch et al., 2024).

References

Clearfield, M. W. (2004). The role of crawling and walking experience in infant spatial memory. Journal of experimental child psychology, 89(3), 214-241.

Gehb, G., Vesker, M., Jovanovic, B., Bahn, D., Kauschke, C., & Schwarzer, G. (2022). The relationship between crawling and emotion discrimination in 9-to 10-Month-Old infants. Brain Sciences, 12(4), 479.

Herbert, J., Gross, J., Hayne, H. (2007). Crawling is associated with more flexible memory retrieval by 9-month-old infants. Developmental Science, 10(2), 183-189.

Hernández-Martínez, A., Sánchez-Matas, Y., Gutiérrez, D., & Exposito, L. (2023). Relationships among integration of Primitive reflexes, Motor competence and Crawling in children. Authorea Preprints.

Kretch, K. S., Dusing, S. C., Harbourne, R. T., Hsu, L. Y., Sargent, B. A., & Willett, S. L. (2024). Early mobility and crawling: beliefs and practices of pediatric physical therapists in the United States. Pediatric Physical Therapy, 36(1), 9-17.

McEwan, M. H., Dihoff, R. E., & Brosvic, G. M. (1991). Early infant crawling experience is reflected in later motor skill development. Perceptual and motor skills, 72(1), 75-79.

Stewart K. L. (2014). Crawling pattern movement effects on fine motor skills among children with autism spectrum disorder. [Published master’s thesis, Missouri State University].

Visser, M. M., & Franzsen, D. (2010). The association of an omitted crawling milestone with pencil grasp and control in five-and six-year-old children. South African Journal of Occupational Therapy, 40(2), 19-23.