Babies Don't Have to Crawl Before They Can Walk: Challenging the Taken-for-Granted About Childhood

By Daniel Bigler :: Friday July 17, 2009

I’ve always loved this rather esoteric fact: babies don’t have to crawl before they can walk.

Those of us in the West have always tended to have a very linear, defined view of child development – we’ve pretty much just assumed, based on what the books tell us, that crawling is a crucial step in development that precedes walking. When we really examine infant development across cultures, though, we find this isn’t the case. The Scientific American revisits this myth:

According to anthropologist David Tracer of the University of Colorado at Boulder, babies of the Au hunter-gatherers of Pa pua New Guinea do not go through a crawling stage. Instead their parents and other caregivers carry them until they can walk. Yet Au children do not appear to suffer any ill effects from skipping this phase. In a presentation given to the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in Chicago this past April, Tracer argued that, in fact, not crawling may be entirely normal and possibly even adaptive.

For children in many parts of the world, it’s healthier for them to be carried. Bangladeshi children who crawl have a greater exposure to ground pathogens and thus are more likely to get sick; so, their mothers carry them. Likewise, many African tribes swaddle or carry their children on their back, to prevent them from roaming the more dangerous ground terrain.

From different contexts emerge different practices. Human beings, in case you hadn’t noticed, are incredibly adaptive.

I get the sense, though, that most Westerners would still believe there’s something just ever so slightly antiquated or barbaric about this keep-the-baby-off-the-ground practice. Safety is a swell concern; but can’t those African villages just implement more environmental regulations to police those unsafe dirt floors? Children’s mobility is at stake! They won’t grow up to like traveling! They’ll be picked on by the kids who reach the ground first!

It’s jarring to see children deprived of what we largely consider a right of mobility… surely, as everything we know about child development tells us, this mustn’t be right.

There’s another factor that researchers have noted about the indigenous cultures that practice this – unrelated to a culture’s environmental adaptability, in fact. They’re finding these poor, mobility-deprived babies often hold a far greater degree of what researchers label “child-embeddedness” within their community. These children matter more, and are much more of a natural part of life for those around them. While Westerners might value a child’s independence – to the grand extent that we positively cherish a child’s first steps, and soon shuttle them off to child care so they can “learn things” and be individuals and socialize with others their age – mothers from these indigenous cultures might instead choose to keep their children close to them, keeping them more integral and interdependent to their own lives and work.

In short: every social group is led by a different worldview concerning children, and this system of beliefs and values changes how we interact with children.

In the West, it’s our past and our ideas of the future that guide the present. Our everyday efforts and practices in how we interact with children are particularly led by decades-upon-decades’ worth of “the research,” and by what “good science” tells us. Our histories have instilled in us deeply-held doctrines of what a child’s life and growth should look like, and similarly, our worldviews lead us to be deeply concerned about the future, about how our children will manage and navigate this unseen world. We’ve gotten raising kids down to a science: a science we call the field of “Child Development,” which every new parent must worship at the altars of upon delivery of their first child, paying homage for nine months beforehand to the prophets Spock, Montessori, Vygotsky… We’ve come up with firmly routed practices and conceptual frameworks that will, we think, get our kids safely into tomorrow – provided of course that we don’t veer from the path and mess them up too badly along the way.

We’ve gotten pretty good at this “child development” thing too; so good, in fact, that we’ve created an alternate, co-existing – yet ultimately artificial – “culture of childhood,” one situated external of our regular culture and lives for our children to exist in. We’ve segregated children into separate spaces apart from our own, different experiences than ours, and we’ve done it in the name of what is most “developmentally appropriate.” We do it, we rationalize, to help them develop as individuals and learn how to become a part of society.

Both our worldview and our scientific history clearly deeply impact and feed our practice, to a profound degree. We know more about children than ever, certainly, and we work harder than ever to engineer the “right” experiences for them to develop “properly.” But I do wonder if our knowledge and beliefs can also petrify us – if they can cripple our ability to change, to consider new ideas, to learn new ways of being and form new practices.

Babies don’t need to crawl before they can walk, after all.

There are other ways – many other ways – of existing with children, and I’m increasingly skeptical that any one of them is “the right” way.

Marilyn Fleer, who has conducted research on Australian indigenous family and education practices, suggests we should call into question our narratives of education and ultimately child development – not simply taking for granted our educational discourses and the theoretical frameworks upon which they are based. She suggests taking a post-Vygotskian, post-child centered lens at our children’s places in the world, orienting and defining our “best” practices not by the theory that has come before, accepted blindly, but by our individual, living communities. We should have an eye toward our own social histories, carefully examining how they’ve helped established the practices and institutions we have in place today – analyzing what we have inherited.

“For the structure of human exchanges, there are precise foundations to be discovered in the institutions we establish between ourselves and others;
institutions which implicate us in one another’s activity in such a way that, what we have done together in the past, commits us to going on in a certain way in the future. … The members of an institution need not necessarily have been its originators; they may be second, third, fourth, etc. generation members having ‘inherited’ the institutions from their forebears. And this is an important point, for although there may be an intentional structure to institutional activities, practitioners of institutional forms need have no awareness at all of the reasons for its structure – for them, it is just ‘the-way-things-are-done’. The reasons for the institution having one form rather than another are buried in its history.” – John Shotter

We need to be in a constant state of reconsideration of this history, analyzing how it fits with the communities before us, and considering the possibilities that different pasts might once have born. We need to leave nothing taken-for-granted.

Consider the act of learning, if you will:

“For many of us, the concept of learning immediately conjures up images of classrooms, training sessions, teachers, textbooks, homework, and exercises. Yet in our experience, learning is an integral part of our everyday lives. It is part of our participation in our communities…” – Etienne Wenger

Why do we have schools? Is it because they are the places children learn?

For many cultures, including the ones named earlier, children learn by being in and among their societies. They learn by being “embedded” among adults. They learn by observing those around them. Our practices of schools and teaching, clearly, would be superficial in these contexts.

We have these things because we value them, or because our pasts tell us they are necessary, or perhaps just because they’ve become traditions… but they are not the only right way of raising kids.

I am not suggesting we should necessarily change a thing about how we raise our kids. But I am suggesting, as Fleer writes, that we need to apply meaning to the things in our lives through “a dynamic process of living in the world” – not simply accepting inherited meaning from the past. We need to be much more reflexive about our practices and our concepts of childhood, considering whether what we hold from the past really fits with our communities today.

We can’t take anything for granted… Especially not the fact that babies don’t have to crawl before they can walk.

Tagged under: anthropology, child development, sociology of children :: #