Q&A: crawling and sleep

Let me answer these two softballs while I work on longer responses to tougher questions:

Tertia asks:

Hello, asshole.

Should I be worried that Kate is no where near to crawling at 10,5 months?  Well, actually, its too late, because I am a little worried. Do these developmental milestones really matter?  She seems absolutely fine with every thing else and has consistently been hitting her milestones a little later than the norm up until now.  Are some kids just a little slower than others and does this have any correlation to future aptitude in school / life etc?

Yours in assholiness

T, I think that if your wee little asshole-in-training is fine with everything else--responsive to you, babbling, all the other stuff--then she's just a slow crawler. As long as she gets plenty of tummy time and isn't stuck in a walker or jumper or saucer all day, she's fine. (For anyone panicking right now because your baby hates tummy time, go to SparkPlugDance.org and check out the article on how to make tummy time fun for your kid.)

FWIW, my husband didn't walk until he was 22 month. Yes, that's almost 2 years old. But now he walks fine. Sometimes he even runs! (He's actually pretty graceful and athletic.) He was very verbal early and read before he was 4. So I think he was just doing other things cognitively when other kids were working on the walking stuff, and then caught up later.

And now for Softball #2. Ally writes:

Dear Moxie,
My son is 13.5 months old, and I really thought by now he'd be sleeping through the night. This is less of a question and more of a plea for encouragement. He wakes mainly when he's teething, which, since he's working and working and working on his 1 year molars, is 4-5 nights a week. I keep vacillating between a roll-with-the-punches, it'll-be-ok attitude and OMG I'M NEVER SLEEPING AGAIN.

But I will, right? Sleep again?

Yes. Yes, you will. Maybe not tonight, and maybe not next week. But soon, and until you have another child.

Seriously, though, have you tried the Humphrey's #3 teething pills? If those don't do anything, then maybe send him to Grandma's for the weekend.

Honestly, if we can put a man on the moon, why can we not come up with something that makes the teething pain go away completely? Tylenol and Motrin just don't cut it. And you have to watch them suffer, and you have to suffer yourself. It's amazing any of us make it through the first two years.

Hang in there, Ally. And it's way easier the second time, because you lose that "what am I doing wrong?!" feeling with the second one and just get pissed off at the human body and its developmental trajectory instead.

Comments

[mamamarta]

i could be wrong about this, but it's my understanding that crawling is not actually a developmental milestone. i.e. it's not something that we expect to see all kids do, period, much less by such-and-such a time. i know several kids who never crawled and who walked just fine, often on the early side.

fwiw,

marta

[Heather]

yep, i agree with mamamarta. i was told by a child-development specialist that the real milestone is working to get towards things that are out of reach. so, any movement such as leaning over and reaching while sitting up, rolling, scooting, pulling, etc.

[Moxie]

What I was told by a developmental movement specialist (and it says on SparkPlugDance.org) is that some kids don't crawl, and that's fine, as long as they're given the opportunity by getting enough tummy time and unrestricted movement. Crawling helps organize the brain (which is why some of the new therapies for ADD/ADHD and dyslexia involve crawling). If it's part of a kid's natural development not to crawl, s/he's probably gone through the same organization in a different way (by scooting backwards, etc.) But if a kid is in saucers or restricted in other ways, s/he may go straight to walking but will have missed that step, and may have problems later on (with reading or other processing).

So the important thing is not when or whether the kid crawls, but whether the kid gets the opportunity to be down on the floor, unrestricted. Which perfectly correlates with what mamamarta and Heather said earlier.

I wonder how much more we'll know about this in 20 years.