There are researchers who claim that our view regarding the development desired for babies is too western and modern. They cite examples from small hunter-gatherer tribes, where babies go straight from being carried on their parents' backs to standing and walking on two legs. Was crawling invented together with the development of floors in houses?
By: Kate Wong
Babies need to crawl before they learn to walk, parents and pediatricians agree. Crawling is also considered a prerequisite for normal progress in other aspects of neural and neuromuscular development, such as hand-eye coordination and social maturation. But here is a study that may knock the ground out from under the feet of this popular opinion.
According to anthropologist David Tracer of the University of Colorado at Boulder, babies of hunter-gatherers from the Ao tribe in Papua New Guinea do not go through the crawling stage at all. Their parents and other caregivers carry them until they learn to walk. And here, it doesn't seem like the Hao children are adversely affected by skipping this stage. In his talk before the American Society for Physiological Anthropology in Chicago in April 2009, Tracer even argued that skipping the crawl may be completely natural and perhaps even adaptive.
Tracer observed 113 pairs of mothers and their children and found that babies up to the age of one were carried in a vertical carrier for 86% of the time. On the few occasions that the mothers placed their babies on the ground, they held them in a sitting position, and did not place them on their stomachs.
Because au babies spend most of their time upright they do not learn to crawl. They do, however, go through a gliding phase, where they sit upright and propel themselves by gliding on the rump. Tracer says that the Haos believe that scooting, and not crawling, is the preliminary step to walking in all humans.
Not only the Hao people prevent their children from crawling. Tracer mentions that while traditional societies, in Paraguay, Mali, Indonesia and other places, children are raised this way. What's more, he says, even our closest carnivores, the chimpanzee and the gorilla, don't often put their paws on the ground. Therefore, it is quite possible that our hominid ancestors also carried their babies from place to place and did not let them crawl.
Tracer cites a study done among children in Bangladesh. The study showed that crawling significantly increases the chance of contracting diarrhea. He hypothesizes that carrying the babies reduces their exposure to pathogens in the soil and also protects them from lunatics. Therefore, Tracer claims that the crawling stage is a late invention, a practice that began a hundred or two hundred years ago, when people began to live in paved houses, which are raised from the ground, and their floors are much cleaner than dirt.
Wanda Trevathen, an anthropologist from the University of New Mexico, also believes that in the past it was rare to place babies on the ground, and adds the whispering embers to the list of possible hazards. Tracer's work "highlights how narrow our view of baby development is", she comments, "undermining the tendency to judge all babies in the world according to the babies of the Western world".
The article was published in the October issue of the magazine "Scientific American - Israel" published by Ort
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In my opinion, the development of babies depends on him crawling.
He learns faster to pull himself up with his hands so he can pull himself up with objects and stand up and start walking.
I don't know how it is in hunting tribes, but it seems to me that if you carry the children all the time, the walking starts at a later age.
Advantages of babies crawling around the house:
1) They clean the floor.
2) The babies find lost items under the sofa or the closet and return the lost item to its owner (or swallow the items).
3) What am I his servant, that he will carry himself, the parasite!
The writer is a father of two.
Michael:
Unfortunately I don't have the sources. This is information in the newspaper from the mouth of the same developmental diagnostician. According to my understanding, she meant that crawling develops the shoulder girdle, which is important for various skills later in life. Also, apparently the theory is that dealing with the difficulties of crawling leads to improved cognitive abilities, but that is my interpretation.
Audi:
The question is, of course, what is the reason why they did not crawl.
If they did not crawl as a result of not being able to crawl, then it is likely that the defect that deprived them of this ability will deprive them of other abilities. If the reason is different, the conclusion may be different.
Can you point us to the studies you mention?
I read this article when it was originally published. I asked a friend who works at the Child Development Institute (or something similar) in her opinion. She says that studies have shown that children (Western, of course) who did not crawl, showed various learning and writing problems in later stages. It follows that crawling may not be essential for the development of healthy children fit for life Physiologically, but probably contributes to their fitness in modern life in aspects that were not so essential in the past.
Oof, now this makes the well-known sentence awkward, from now on you have to say "You must learn to crawl (or slide on your ass) before you learn to walk"