I was in the park enjoying the day as were a bunch of kids.
I saw two little guys and they were learning to walk. They’d get up, take two or three steps and fall down. Then they’d pick themselves up and try again and fall on their little bottoms.
I had to admire their tenacity as I was there for a half an hour and when I left they were still trying. I mean they could’ve given up and crawled, but they were both determined to walk. No worries as they were on grass and their bums were well padded with diapers.
I got to thinking how long does it take before the baby is able to steady him/herself and start walking. I realize it’s different for each baby.
I was thinking of it like when I learned to ride my bike. I kept falling and I was unsteady then all of a sudden I got the hang and BOOM I was flying down the street on the bike.
I don’t know- I’m 42 and still trying to get the hang of it!
But seriously, I think it only took a couple of weeks for most of my 3 to catch on. It’s easier for them, I think, when they can take a couple of months to cruise around holding on to furniture before they start actually walking.
Love watchin’ a little one doing the hold onto the furniture thing. Especially when he/she takes his/her hand off and does that stand there and teeter/totter thing for a few seconds before putting hands back on the furniture. Cracks me up!
My daughter’s been stuck in this phase for a good month to six weeks. She’s just now getting the courage to do some real walking. She just walked about 12 feet a few minutes ago. Yay her!
Mine spent a month or so “cruising” - walking while holding onto something (couch, coffee table). Once they could take three steps independently, it was days before they were toddling with quite a bit of skill.
This is relevant to my interests! My guy is cruising and furniture-surfing like crazy and has been for a couple weeks. I’m trying to encourage him to walk, and wondering when we might see his first steps. He has a habit of falling on his toys and hurting his bum, so I have to run interference in case there are any pointy toys on the ground.
Whereas mine started crawling at 8 months and pulled herself up onto her feet the same day, then spent four full months cruising the furniture and crawling the gaps before she just got the hang of it and very quickly just walked everywhere. I know she took her first independent steps two days before her first birthday and during the party caused havoc by being able to get places we didn’t expect. I don’t remember her crawling at all from then, not even when it would have been easier.
That’s great - you should do this. A fine game for proto-walkers involves holding an adult fingers in each hand and walking with help (adult walks behind, bent forward somewhat awkwardly). Babies typically enjoy this well past the point where every adult in the room has had enough.
But I expect he’d learn to walk without any encouragement at all. It’s about as natural as sticking food in your mouth.
If your kid us anything like mine was she might be walking full time by tomorrow. Mine didn’t have the courage to walk without help for almost three months then one day she found the courage to walk ten feet across a room. She was walking exclusively by the next night. Learned to run not long after.
Mine didn’t even bother to crawl, she did this shuffling on the bottom thing over to the furniture then pulled herself launched herself off. I bought her a little pair of ankle boots when she was *nine months old * and she promptly walked off across the shop! It looked pretty odd - people would scream “that baby shouldn’t be walking” - she was normal size for her age, so pretty small.
It was pretty funny, I was meeting my friends at the park and she’d gone from holding onto things to legging it across the park in the space of a morning.
Well that’s what made these two guys so cute. They kept on falling but they were not going to give up. If it had been me I’d have just quit and crawled or scooted along, but those babies were determined to pick themselves up and walk across that grass, like their lives depended on it.
Step, step, fall. Get up… Step, step, step, fall. Get up and try again. As I said, I was there a half hour and they were still trying when I left.
Of course when you got as much padding as these wee little shavers had, maybe it was fun for 'em
My mom tells me I did this for months (I think I started standing when I was 9 or 10 months old). She almost never saw me fall down, because I refused to walk unsupported until I was perfectly steady and confident on my feet.
I think it depends on the baby! Also on what you define as ‘actually walking’. My middle sister used to fall down constantly (often flat on her face, busting things open) for a long time after she first started to learn to walk. We have lots of pictures of her as a toddler with goose eggs, swollen lips, black eyes, etc. Using something for support was an alien concept to her (as was breaking her fall with her hands apparently). She certainly was capable of taking multiple steps and getting a pretty good pace going, but she wasn’t skilled at walking by any means!
Come to think of it, our very different strategies for walking have carried over into our adult lives generally…
Both my kids went from trying to walking in a few days, maybe a week tops. One started a little before his first birthday, the other a little after. They cruised for those few days in between trying and walking. Both of them got the experience of hanging on to Tia, a big old Collie-Shepherd mix. She would amble away with them hanging on trying to keep their footing.
My first took less than a month between cruising and walking independently. #2 took almost a year (they did all their other milestones at about the same time as each other). It worried me at the time but I think now that his balance must’ve been a bit ‘off’ due to multiple ear infections and he wanted to give himself that extra confidence.
It takes most babies about 1,000 hours of practice from the time they pull themselves upright to the time they can walk alone. [I don’t know where they got this fact. And it seems a bit of a long time, really.]
The single most important requirement for walking: strong back muscles.
So, if you’ve got a baby with a strong back, it seems that walking will come a bit easier.
ETA: It is surprisingly hard to find good cites about learning to walk on Google. I’m not sure why.
Agreed. And the actual time seems to vary greatly, as the tales in this thread suggest.
Some babies are serious about crawling, get quite good at it, and don’t make their first attempts at standing and walking until they have developed some decent strength and coordination. Others seem to have only minor interest in quadrupedal locomotion, and start trying for bipedalism much sooner.
I remember that we did a lot of “walking while holding on to our fingers” with her. It seems like it happened in a flash. I remember her first steps very well, because I was going out of town the next day. We were at my parents’ house, and as we were leaving I just decided to see if she’d walk to me, so I backed up a few steps, did the “come to daddy!” thing, and she let go and took a series of wobbly steps to me. Been a Daddy’s Girl ever since. It was just a bit after her first birthday.
When you are dropping your kid off at the dorms for her first year of college, everything that happened before seems to have happened in the blink of an eye.
