I was the youngest kid and, besides what I’ve read in books, I have absolutely no experience with watching a child develop. So, naturally, I have a question (well, actually, a million of them).
My 5 1/2 month old is doing a (weird?) thing. He started pushing up a little bit when he was about 3 months old. He got pretty good at it…while he never pushed up so that his arms were fully extended, he could get his chest off the floor. When he was 4 1/2 months old he started rolling over (from his back to his stomach). Now when he’s on his stomach, though, he extends his arms backwards (like he’s flying). He can still lift his chest off the floor when he does this (and his legs, too…he balances on his stomach). If I move his arms up for him to support himself, he moves them right back again.
Is this something babies normally do? Is he ever going to learn to crawl this way? He does sometimes scrunch his knees up like he’s trying to scoot forward, but he’s going to get some serious rug burn on his chin if he actually gets some motion going.
Children don’t usually move from rolling over directly to crawling. They usually sit up before they crawl (sometines they skip crawling altogether). I wouldn’t worry about it - he’ll probably sit up in the next couple of months.
My daughter was rolling over a 2 months. Gave us a very hard time with the whole “back to sleep” thing.
But our little one never did learn to crawl. She would get up on hands and knees and then reach out with her hands for what she wanted and then pumped her knees, sliding her nose along the floor, not even able to see where she was going, until she touched what she wanted. But then she started walking at 8 months, and running at about 9, and NOTHING was ever out of her reach again.
She also did the lay on the stomach and arch the back thing sometimes. Mostly she just wanted to be upright. We would give her to people used to babies to hold and she would just wail. We had to tell them to hold her upright instead of the standard cradled in the arms hold. As soon as she was sitting up on their lap or peeking over their sholder she would be happy as a clam again. You want to talk about challenges in getting a little one to sleep? Lets talk about one that hates lying down.
Sounds like he’s doing Pilates. Seriously, as stated, all kids develop different things at different rates. Some do stuff that other kids don’t. Just enjoy the cute aspects and watch out that what they’re doing doesn’t endanger them. And sitting up does (almost?) always come before standing. They need the strength to in their abdominals and neck muscles to hold themselves erect first.
My son is like this! He likes to stand in our laps or sit so that he can see around the room and he has very little patience with being cradled. He can stand while holding onto our hands, now, and I think it’s because he’s always preferred to be upright on his legs, so he’s had a lot of strengthening. He also doesn’t like to be confined in any way…he hated the swaddle when he was a newborn.
And just to clarify to everyone…I’m not worried about him, just curious as to whether this is something some babies do in order to strengthen their…something? He’s trucking along developmentally (I personally think he’s a genius ).
Our Berber carpet is going to be a little rough on the face, though, if he uses the locomotion technique favored by Degrance’s youngest.
Actually, the motion you’re describing is a great ab-building excercise and will also help him develop a fabulous sense of balance, both of which are essential for crawling.
Mine is 6 1/2 months now and is finally starting to crawl, but his first attempts involved propping up his arms and then raising his butt way way up and locking his knees. Then he’d pull up his arms and kind of throw himself forward. I think the constant thumps to his chin are part of what helped him learn to bend his legs, so maybe your Berber will come in handier than you think!
One son did what we called the “commando crawl” for months before ever getting a true crawl going (he kept his stomach on the ground and would elbow and knee his way around the floor).
Another kid managed to crawl backwards for months before he ever figured out forwards.
They’re all different. Thrashing about, holding limbs off the floor, etc. is all part of the process.
I never learned to crawl at all - the carpet in my parents’ house was pretty nasty (they’d just moved in) and my mom would put me down on a sheet, so if there was a toy on the other end of the sheet I’d just haul the sheet on over until I could reach it. My mother was scared to death because I was her first (and only) child and she’d read so much in the parenting magazines about correlations between crawling and reading. Trust me, she needn’t have worried.
It kinda looks like skydiving right? Arms and legs flung stiffly backwards, head thrusting fowards? Looks like it would just kill your chest if you tried doing it on the floor alongside him?
My kid did this, and we thought it was the funniest thing. It was before crawiling, but after she had learned to sit up I believe. It is probably about as normal as anything else a healthy baby does - some babies will do it, some won’t and the vast majority turn out just fine.
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