Up and Running

Today

My nephew has been excitedly recording his 5-month-old daughters progress. One moment she's learnt to roll over; the next she's grasped the concept of walking, although she can't quite do this unaided yet.

Another cousin commented that her child, who is 2 months older, is still puzzling over the rolling over business, never mind crawling or walking! "Lazy" she called him, but what does seem clear is that we are all very different in the way in which we reach these stages without it really mattering in terms of our overall development.

In My Day

Lizzie was late in learning to walk. As a baby she didn't brace her legs against my lap when I was playing with her but preferred to sit down again as soon as possible! She got the idea of crawling pretty early and soon became super-fast and efficient in this skill. So, really, what was the point of walking when you could already get about so fast?

So, although she was chattering using an ever-growing vocabulary from just over a year, her world view was still from floor level.

When she was about 16 months or so, I was browsing a catalogue of hand-made wooden toys. These understated unpainted plywood toys looked interesting and my eye was caught by a push-along trolley. This object was really a deep box on casters with a handle for pushing. The was a sturdy lid so a child could sit on it. To round it all off it had a 2-dimensional horse's head with string mane attached to the front and a string tail at the back. Perfect! I ordered it and in due course we presented it to Liz.

She loved it and grabbed hold of the handle to push it. Unfortunately, it hadn't been designed to be pushed by someone crawling on the floor and it overbalanced, giving her a bit of a clonk. Lizzie examined this desirable object. There was clearly only one thing for it: she'd have to get up and walk. Which she did, without hesitation and as though she'd been walking for months.

Clearly she'd been hiding this skill from us until it became more beneficial to use it! I expect quite a number of children do this and a variation in motivating factors may explain a fair bit of the variation we see.

I don't know what explanation we can give to my finest achievement. My baby book proudly announces that I first sat up unaided in the big pram in March 1949 - when I was 15 months old......