Hi,
My daughter is 6 months old and has been on a crawling track (for sleep) and an inclined crawling track (during waking hours) since birth. She crawled the day we brought her home from the hospital and continued to do so up until about 5 weeks old. She then stopped crawling due to lack of opportunity. I could give you a list of excuses as to what was happening in my family at the time, but the bottom line is that she was not given enough opportunity to move. She has no problem being on her belly -- she'll stay on her belly throughout the day. Getting her to "move" on her belly is another story. We've used an inclined track (at varying degrees), flat track, toys, and putting hands behind her feet to get her to move. It all helps somewhat. In the past several weeks, we have focused on patterning her using the homolateral method outlined in Glenn Doman's "What To Do About Your Brain Injured Child" book and as further explained by an organization called Brain Highways in Encinitas, California.
http://www.brainhighways.com/ The patterning along with increased focus on getting her to move is working. This morning she crawled on her belly approximately 25 feet with some assistance (i.e. some of the time I put my hands behind her feet and other times I tempted her with moving toys/books along the way).
My 3 year old son who also slept on a crawling track and spent significant time on an inclined crawling track (waking) during his first 7 months of life (but ultimately did not crawl/creep enough) is currently enrolled in Brain Highways and is crawling on his belly for 30 minutes per day. He is also doing homolateral patterning on his belly and back daily. He also has a vestibular and sensory integration program. The impact on his motor (speech, fine motor skills, large motor skills) and sensory skills (comprehension, visual focus, eye tracking/convergence) is amazing. By the way, my primary goal for enrolling him was to increase his speech output and I did not expect the other benefits.
For those who say that crawling or creeping is not significant/important, I respectfully and completely disagree. Crawling on the belly and creeping on all fours is absolutely critical to integrating the primitive reflexes of the lower parts of the brain. The lower parts of the brain (i.e. pons and midbrain) are organized in the first year of life through crawling on the belly and creeping on all fours. If the brain is not organized through these activities, some of the behavioral symptoms include anxiety, fight or flight, freeze, dislike of reading or math, spacial disorganization, any oral habit like over or under eating, chewing on nails, smoking, addictions, too passive, too aggressive, exaggerating, inability to "let it go," helplessness, thoughts of suicide and more. Although these symptoms may not manifest in early childhood, many ultimately manifest after the age of seven and especially during the teenage years when the increase in hormones overwhelm the brain's compensating functions. So, you may have a baby who did not creep or crawl and be thrilled that he/she can read and do math early on and then are surprised when the child starts to struggle as a seven year old or teenager. Such struggles may be mostly in school, social or home. It is never too later to go back and work on your primitive reflexes.... I myself am working crawling and patterning to integrate mine.
If you want to research this very important topic further, I encourage you to look at the Brain Highways website. Also, as someone else noted, the How To Make Your Child Physically Superb book by Glenn Doman is very helpful as is the "How Smart Is Your Baby" book. I know that parents on this forum care sincerely about their children, however, I also believe there is tremendous misinformation out there that downplays the importance of creeping and crawling.
Here are some excerpted quotes from the Brain Highways website which illustrate the importance of this topic:
There is a direct relationship between movement and learning. We now know that there is a pathway from the cerebellum (known for its role in posture, coordination, balance and movement) to parts of the brain involved in memory, attention, and spatial perception (Strick, 1995).
Sensory integration focuses primarily on the remediation of brainstem functions as a way to improve functional skills (Ayres, 1972).
The child is born with tissues of biological intelligence and the brain structure, but these only become useful when the child moves and explores the environment, manipulates objects, observes and describes what is seen, and makes use of the information in her world. Such actions are the foundations and building blocks for learning. This relationship between movement and learning continues throughout life (Capon, 1993).
The nervous system learns by doing (Gilfoyle, Grady & Moore, 1972).
Each developmental stage assimilates part of the previous one; full function depends on the functional level of the stage below. A child’s learning and behavior may be affected when natural development stages are “missed.” (Sasse, 1980).
Proper neural pathways are laid when children acquire sensory motor skills through play and specific movements (Miller and Melamed, 1989).
Movement and physical activity help to integrate both brain hemispheres. If hemispheric specialization has not occurred by age seven, a child will have learning difficulties and not perform to their full potential (Taylor, 1997).
Children who do not crawl adequately are more likely to be hyperactive and suffer learning disabilities since they may not have mastered eye-hand controller binocularity (Walsh, 1980).
Vestibular input is necessary for static and dynamic balance development, eye-movement control, and motor planning.
Children with poor vestibular processing are delayed in gross motor patterns that require coordination of both sides of the body and may have difficulty with eye-hand coordination and fine motor skills (Pyfer, 1981).
The sensory input from the eyes, ears, muscles, and joints must be matched to the vestibular input before such information can be processed efficiently (Pyfer, J. & Johnson, R., 1981).
The term sensory defensiveness describes a disorganized response to sensory input due to an imbalance between inhibition and excitation within the central nervous system. Children who are sensory defensive are characterized as hyperactive, hyperverbal, distractable, and disorganized (Knickerbocker, 1980).
Retention of primitive reflexes can affect gross motor skills, fine motor skills, sensory perception, and cognition (Goddard, 1996).
Sincerely,
Marie.
Show Posts
