Babies (2020) s01e03 Episode Script
Crawling
What's that? That's a dog.
Yeah.
That's a dog.
Can you come to the dog? Look, it's a doggy.
It's nice.
Nice dog.
For the first several months of life, infants are slaves to gravity.
They're just stuck in whatever place somebody put them in.
And then this remarkable transformation happens when babies learn to crawl.
Wee! Now they can move their own body from one place to another, and now the whole wider world is opened up to them.
Hey, bubba.
Hi! Hey! Hey! But how is it that babies learn to crawl, and what do they learn when they're crawling around in the world? You can do it.
In the first year of life, babies are growing faster than they ever will.
Come on, you can do it! The baby can wake up in a different body than they went to sleep in.
It's longer.
The arms are longer, the legs are longer, and as they begin to move, they cannot do exactly what they could do yesterday with the same precision.
You can! Call him here! What does this mean for a baby who's learning to crawl? For decades, we really believed that crawling was just a stage toward walking, but could crawling be more than a stage? Could crawling be fundamental to the way we all move? Ready? Who is that? Take a video for Mum.
Now that Amelia's back at work, I kick into my primary carer role in earnest.
Look, who is that? Who's that? Is that Pascoe? There's Dad, there's Pascoe.
Which I'm really excited about, just because it's great time I get to spend with Pascoe.
And we're gonna get back to practicing some tummy time, see how he's doing with crawling.
Ready? Who's this here? When Rich starts telling me, "Oh, we did this today," and, "Oh, Pascoe started crawling today," or "He did this move" Get your arms going.
That's it.
That's it.
Who's there? And I'm sort of sat at work, just at my laptop Good boy.
You know, I feel like I'm missing out on quite a bit.
Good! Oh.
Hey! I think also as a first-time mum you're quite keen to sort of tick off all the milestones, and you sort of read the books that say, "At this stage your baby will be doing this," and you're like, "My baby's not doing that," or "My baby did that two months ago.
Is he too early?" Good, he's got it! First past the post.
Oh, and you even pressed stop on the video.
Good boy.
You know how it works.
You know how it works.
You know how it works.
My career is not a straightforward, I would say, uh, trail.
Not at all.
I started to be a nuclear physicist.
I was studying the movement of electrons and atoms.
And then, as a biologist, I switched to be more interested with the movement of the body.
All of the steps gave me an open mind to different ideas that you can have about movement.
Many people thought for a long time that crawling emerged only around eight, ten months, and is a transitory step toward walking.
However, it is maybe more mysterious.
I think for me the question was, "Could crawling be more than a stage? Could crawling be crucial to the way all humans move around?" What can I get for you? I'll have a coffee.
- That's alright.
- Thank you.
In the womb, fetuses are able to move from one place to another place if they want, and you have to imagine a newborn as an astronaut coming back from the moon, where it was able to do a lot of movements freely and now is stuck with the gravity.
But there are specific times or occasions where you can see a newborn moving his body from one place to another.
Around one hour after birth, if the baby is skin to skin on the belly of the mother, you will see the newborn moving slowly to the breast of the mother.
And this is a fantastic behavior.
I love it, I saw it a lot.
Many, many times.
So another occasion is to put the newborn in the water.
The first time that I saw that, I was just, uh, shocked.
I said, "My God, these newborns are able to do a lot of things, and they are already able literally to crawl in the water.
" And so it is where I get very interested with this movement, and starting to ask, "Is this crawling that is already here really disappear to reemerge eight or ten months later for the baby to learn how to do that on land, or is there a link between these two behaviors, the newborn and the older baby?" People believe that newborn movements are only reflexes that will disappear very soon after birth.
And so they have nothing to do with a connection coming from the brain to control the movement.
But with that newborn, crawling was so beautiful, it's not really an automatic system.
It could not be.
This is why we thought of a very crazy experiment.
So the question we asked was relatively simple Was the crawling that we saw in the newborn already controlled with something in the brain? And one of the stimuluses of the brain, one of the most important systems that controls the crawling at seven, eight months, is the vision.
Hello, have you had a good journey? Yes, very good.
Look how he's grown! So knowing the importance of vision, we were wondering, and this was really our big question, what will happen to a newborn if we give them the illusion that they are moving around? Voilà .
Will they move? Will they not move? Let's not forget his little hat.
The hat of an astronaut.
Hop là .
There you go.
Ready to go to space.
Exactly.
We're going to send him into space.
What we have done is to imagine black dots that are moving on a pattern that is completely white.
So to get the impression of moving, you have to have all the dots moving, and in the same direction.
As soon as they see, they move their legs and their arms, and literally swimming.
Swimming in the air.
We were just shocked when we saw that.
We had this idea, but we were not completely sure that we will get this, you know, result.
We were very surprised.
Hello, little girl.
Hop là .
Hop là .
This, for us, was really something incredible because that means that they have this primitive link between the brain and the spine, and the vision, and the motoring activity to say, "Hello, I see something and I am moving according to what I see.
" And this was, for us, really the first evidence that this crawling pattern that you see at birth is coming from the brain.
What we have here is an extension of the leg at the same time as movement of the elbow and arm.
Now, having seen this baby just swimming literally in air with arms and legs, this definitely shows that this crawling pattern that a lot of people believe was just a reflex is not a reflex.
It's wonderful.
Let's take your hat off for a minute.
Voilà .
Look at Mom and Dad.
We started to think of how to study and analyze the same kind of movement if we put them on land.
We knew thatit's very difficult for babies to propel themselves, because the head is very heavy, it's one third of the weight of the body.
So they are not able to support that in the gravity.
Oh! - Can I come in? - Yes.
- Hello.
- Hello.
Ah! So, Hello little Helmi So now we start about thinking how to make the baby free to move around, and how to find a tool finally for them to be not crushed by the gravity and having their arms and legs free to move.
Would you like to participate in this experiment which will last around ten minutes and a little longer to get Helmi downstairs? Let's go.
So we were thinking a lot about how to construct such a tool.
We thought it will be easy to do it.
But not at all.
It took us, like, one or two years to build this kind of tool.
- Hello.
- Hello.
So we started to test our first baby on this mini skateboard in 2016, and, uh, we call the final version "the Crawlerskate.
" He's looking now.
They are comfortable, that sometimes triggers it.
They do whatever they want.
We explain what is the Crawlerskate, and all the time they are very interested because they think their newborn cannot at all crawl.
Hop, hop, hop! Ah.
Some babies are making a huge movement, even crossed the mattress once or two or three times.
It seemed really incredible.
Wow! Bravo! Bravo! Bravo, Helmi.
We were just shocked to see that these little two days newborn babies were able to do that on our Crawlerskate.
I find it emotional every time they move like that.
Huh? Too good.
It was really a very emotional moment, I can tell you.
Not only for us, but for the parents.
Hop là .
If we look at the results that we obtained with the Crawlerskate, what that suggests is that the nervous system that is important for the baby to move their arms and legs and crawl and to propel themselves is already in place.
- Thank you very much.
Goodbye.
- See you later.
Goodbye.
So what we have found is very new, and controversial.
Because for decades, people believed that we were born as bipeds.
That means that we are walking only with our two legs.
But what we have found is a completely different picture.
We believe now that we are born moving arms and legs as quadrupeds.
If you look at adult walking, it seems to be automatic to move our arms when we are walking.
But in fact we can do much more than that.
We are still quadrupeds inside us, in the nervous system.
So is crawling just a transitory stage? I think now, no.
Wake up now.
We need you today.
In fact, if you see the baby as a car, the engine is, like, sleeping and waiting for the bodywork to be ready, for the moment where the baby will be strong enough, with strong muscles, to take care of the weight and to be motivated to move it.
For that, the baby will have to grow.
And this is another story of how the baby grows up Hey! and changes the body with maturation and experience.
Mwah! Hey! What a yawn! Good boy.
All right, should we see if he can do the crawl? Come on.
Oh.
A bit of a A bit of a bump.
Oh, there's a push.
There's a push.
Use those legs.
Come on.
Good boy.
Good boy.
Oh, oh That's it.
You little champion! Push up.
Good boy.
Oh, hello.
Very good.
Good boy.
Lift yourself up.
Wahey! Look at that! Right, just getting a bit happier staying on his front.
There, you've got that the play with.
Pascoe does seem a little bit unsettled during the day.
Probably he's just going through a bit of a growth spurt, or a developmental spurt.
He seems to just be getting longer and longer, and stronger and stronger.
You can do it.
That's it.
He's got the legs going.
The legs are pumping.
He's getting bigger, that's for sure.
He's got some good power in his legs and I think he's starting to feel that in his feet.
Okay.
- Good work, buddy.
- See? I think we thought that he would be crawling by now, so You can start crawling if you'd like.
Would you like to start crawling? I started out in anthropology with an interest in the interaction that babies had with their families.
Every parent experiences how disruptive babies can be.
They're sleeping, and then there's no way they will go to sleep.
There are times when they're not very hungry, and times when they become very hungry.
Or out of nowhere they become kind of morphed, and parents will say, "Who's this monster who yesterday was such a good little girl?" It occurred to me that knowing something about growing would be informative here.
In 1979, my neighbor was about to have a baby, and I suggested to her at some point, would you mind if we measured your baby? She was very kind and she said, "Yes, of course.
" - Good morning.
- Good morning.
Okay, should be see how long you are? Measuring a baby's length is a two-person job.
Are you ready? Set? Measure! Whoopsie! You have somebody who can focus the attention of the infant correctly, and then you need somebody to actually stretch the baby out.
Good job.
Excellent, Aspen.
Thank you so much! Very good job! Yeah! I very clearly remember that I was a little concerned about doing it, but we did it.
And I wrote the measurement down, it was 62.
7 centimeters.
The next day I come back and we go through the process again, take the measurement.
It was very different.
Sixty-four point five.
I thought, that can't be, because yesterday it was 62.
7 centimeters, but today it's 64.
5 centimeters.
My first reaction was, "Well, I'm really terrible at this.
I mean, I'm terrible at this.
Because that's way too much.
" I came back several more times.
And each time we measured the baby, the length of the baby was 64.
5 centimeters.
Now I was actually quite unnerved, because there was no growth.
I've just taken five measurements, none of which are what you would expect to see.
One is too much, and then there's no growth at all, and that's not possible.
How much of my data reflect the fact that I don't know what I'm doing because I'm new, and I'm a novice? And how much of this might be um, a moment of "Who knew?" And that's where I began.
Hey, bubba.
Hey, Mateo.
Yeah, you're smiling now.
Your sleep has been more difficult lately, hasn't it? And Mama is very tired.
What else is going on with you? He's going through a growth spurt, and there have been moments where Mateo has just, like, randomly just burst out into hysterical crying, and there's been no particular reason for it.
Yeah, you're lucky you're so cute.
Yeah, you're lucky you're so cute and that I love you.
'Cause you've been a handful.
Yes, you have.
Yes, you have.
You've been more difficult with your naps.
Yes.
You don't want to sit down for too long.
Yeah, you want to pull yourself up.
Yes, you do.
Oh, don't get upset.
Don't get upset.
Yeah, I know you don't like to lay down.
Okay, it's okay.
He's definitely taking more attention now.
He wants more attention now.
Which is harder to get things done in the house.
Mateo.
We used to think that babies grew every day.
Little by little.
Slowly, very slowly.
That it was a kind of background noise of life.
There's a growth chart in every pediatrician's office, so every parent has seen their child's size plotted on a growth chart.
These particular charts show the size of 882 children that were measured at ages one week, two weeks, four weeks, six weeks, eight weeks, and then monthly thereafter until one year of age.
When we look at a growth chart, we see a curve.
But the curves are actually a result of a connect-the-dots process.
There were no measurements between these two specific time points.
But it creates the visual image of how growth occurs.
Very slowly and continuously through time.
Is it actually continuous, little by little, every day, as we all assume it is? I set out to measure 30 babies, because 30 babies would be a reasonable scientific size.
Also, when I started measuring babies, I asked parents to please keep a record of their baby's behavior on a day-to-day basis.
These notebooks are the original data.
This was a typical day in my life.
On the 23rd of August in 1981, I visited 12 children.
And for each of them, I measured at least their head and their length.
I met the first family at 7:20 in the morning, I remember that quite precisely.
And I saw the last person on this page Um, I left their house at 10 p.
m.
It looks simple, but that's what it took to do the measurements.
I noticed that babies who were measured once a week did grow in the course of a week.
This led me to wonder, did it really take a whole week for that growth to occur? I decided to measure them twice weekly, and I noticed that babies grew in half a week.
And I thought, does it really take them one half of a week to grow? And that moment is when I first started measuring babies daily.
Scientifically, it was a remarkable experience, because I did not know what we would find.
On the 19th of February in 1986 this child was 59.
8 centimeters.
Next day, the length measurement for this child was 59.
8 centimeters.
The following day, the child was 59.
8 centimeters.
Uh, and one day later, the child was 60.
8 centimeters.
So in this one day, the child was one centimeter longer.
Among the babies I measured every day, their growth varied between one half of a centimeter and 1.
65 centimeters in one 24-hour period.
In one day, they grew.
And these growth days were separated from one another in an individual by two to twenty-eight days of no growth.
And then these bursts, these spurts, occurred.
From these records I was also able to identify a clear link between the times during which they were having a growth spurt and dramatic changes in babies' behavior.
Changes in their sleeping behavior, tantrums, and times of insatiable hunger.
Wow.
I was thinking, this is a very big thing.
I was shocked.
I was awed.
I thought this was remarkable, and it was a moment of It was a moment of, I have no idea how this happens, but these are the data.
So what we used to think is that growth happened in a curve.
And what we now can see is that growth happens in jumps that separate times of no growth.
Two very distinctive phases.
And the reason that we can see this now is because of the increased frequency in the measurements themselves.
The day that the paper was published it was on the front page of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and it hit a number of media outlets.
There was a genuine interest.
This is remarkable.
Isn't it exciting that we now know this about children? What I did not expect was the reaction from the scientific community.
I was invited to a conference.
And I had a few very nice, very sensible questions.
And then a leading figure in the field stood up and started by mocking the data, that this can't be, we all know this can't be, because look at the growth curve.
That this wasn't credible, that it stretched their imagination, that babies could grow so much in one day, it simply wasn't possible.
I was not prepared for that level of rancor, at all.
Just not at all.
But I think it's an example of when one has a model in one's mind, a model of how things work.
This is classic in science, and somebody comes and says, "Well, wait a minute.
Let's consider this.
" The reaction to that is very frequently a kind of hostile disbelief.
But I think it's absolutely consistent with how science progresses.
Understanding that the baby is experiencing its own growth It's fun for me, too, you know.
Yes.
and that its body is changing, and it has to adjust to its own changing body, and where it is in space and what it can do, is a very different way of thinking about the influences on early development.
What does this mean for a baby who's learning to crawl? Ready? One, two, three.
And then they just stand up.
Yeah! Is that funny? Hello.
- Hello.
- Hi.
There's Pascoe! Hello, Paxie.
So we've been doing loads of tummy time.
- Has he? - But not showing much signs of wanting to crawl.
Wow.
Well, the toys he'll grab, - but he doesn't - Yeah.
He'll try and reach for things, but his feet don't move.
Yeah, he kind of happily goes on his tummy for a bit, but then he gets really annoyed.
It's really worth persisting with that, Mimi, though.
It's terribly important for them to crawl, and to use all those muscles, because that's really important for their future development, you know? - Get those legs going.
- Yeah.
It's just hard when he really hates tummy time, - and is really upset.
- Yeah.
It's hard to keep doing it.
- Do you think you want to crawl, mate? - Are you listening to that? Grandma says you have to.
Oh, he shook his head! - "No! No, I don't want to.
" - No? Cheeky boy.
I can definitely see where she's coming from with her concerns, but there's not much you can do with a baby.
You can try telling him so many times "You need to crawl before you walk," but if that's what he wants to do I haven't always been a scientist.
In college I actually studied fine art.
And on the first day of class, the professor handed me a plant.
And he said, "Draw this.
" Every day he would come with a different plant and he would tell me "You need to really look at it and understand how it grows.
" So now, all these years later, um, I feel like I'm essentially doing the same thing, only now I'm looking at babies, and I'm looking at their movements, so that I can understand how does behavior grow? In the real world, the ground is not perfectly flat and empty and uniform.
But for the last hundred years, and even going on now today, people study infant crawling by encouraging the babies to crawl in a straight line over uniform ground.
But that's not how real mobility works.
In the real world, as babies are crawling around, they actually have to make decisions, they have to use perception to guide their crawling movements.
So, you know, "Should I crawl over the edge of the bed or should I stop at the edge?" Um And so I wanted to find a way to test how do babies use perception to guide their crawling movements? If a baby really could perceive what they can do and what they cannot do, then they should be able to do it in a totally novel situation, something that they've never encountered before.
So I built an adjustable slope apparatus.
So, for this study, we want to see how babies, um, know what actions are possible and what actions are not.
- Mm-hmm.
- So we're going to ask him to crawl - over this walkway.
- Great.
It's gonna make a noise, Grant.
It can have really small slopes like this - Yep.
- or steeper ones like that.
Gotcha.
Good.
I love it.
All right, kiddo, let's go.
Grant is about ten months old, and he's been crawling for a little over a month.
Come get it! We've got it all down here! Come here! Grant, come get these.
Yeah.
Good job.
Aah! You got it! We increased the degree of slant six degrees at a time.
All right, Grant, are you ready? I've got it on the tower again.
- Come here.
- Go, go, go! Go, go, go! We're trying to figure out how precise are the babies' decisions about what they can and cannot do? - He couldn't get 'em - You've got all of 'em down there! Go! All right, working on that arm.
Here you go! Come get the blue one! On a successful trial, he crawls from top to bottom, belly off the floor, and nobody has to touch him.
Go, go, go! Go, go, go! On an unsuccessful trial, his arms give out or he stumbles or, you know, he's about to do a faceplant on the surface and the experimenter has to rescue him.
- Okay, we're waking 'em all up.
- Come here.
You want to put 'em down to sleep? Wanna put 'em to sleep? That's good.
Come put 'em down to sleep! Go to sleep.
All right.
- Good try.
- There you go! He's making judgments thatare completely off from what he really can do.
Then finally we present them with the largest slope, which is really a 90-degree drop-off.
Go, go, go! It's all the way down there, you gotta go get it.
- You coming? - He will.
You coming? All right! - Good try, man.
- You got 'em! Grant approached the 90-degree drop-off the same way as he was approaching the shallower slopes.
Come over to the edge, look and see what's at the bottom Oh, the pop-up pals! And then just crawl right over the edge.
All right! That's telling us that Grant is not yet able to distinguish what he can do and what he cannot do.
It's absolutely typical that babies, when they first begin crawling, when they first begin any new skill, they just are willing to try everything.
And it's actually a pretty good way for development to work.
If you don't try things, you're never gonna learn.
And so they just take the leap.
Go, go, go! - Go, go, go! - Yeah.
Marlow's interesting because she's quite a strong hands-and-knees crawler.
Down you come! Down you come! Down you come! Good crawling, Marlow.
In terms of having alternative ways of coping with a difficult motor problem, she was, like, right on the edge of understanding that, you know, there was other positions that are available to her to solve the problem.
Come here.
You can do it.
Babies show really different kinds of behaviors as they're approaching the brink of an impossibly steep slope.
Come on down.
I know, it's so funny.
Just come on down.
So I'm pretty sure you can figure it out.
The babies who make smart decisions, those are the same babies that will generate perceptual information by looking and by touching.
You see that? You coming? Marlow was quite good at perceiving what she could and could not do.
She knew if the steps were very steep that they were impossible.
Xylophone, and Yeah! Wee! Okay.
Good Good try, man.
All right.
- I'm gonna send this down to Justine.
- Can I have that? I'll hold it for you.
Dax would switch freely between crawling on hands and knees and crawling on hands and feet like a bear.
A little more challenging.
He actually can move faster when he's up on hands and feet, and so when he really wanted to get to something, he would just extend his legs and, you know, crawl down the pathway on hands and feet.
He's crawling.
What's that? He was just, you know, reconfiguring his body on the fly to kind of figure out how to solve that problem.
- Let's do it again.
- Perfect.
All right.
Are we coming down? Ready? We built this tall tower for you.
Dax really, really could perceive the limits of his own abilities.
Wow! You did it! So as the slope started to get too steep for him to crawl safely, that's when he was beginning to switch to find alternative strategies.
Ready? Come get some down here.
Yeah, they're all waiting for you.
Wow! Smart thinking.
You got it.
It takes about 20 weeks of crawling experience before a baby is showing adult-like accuracy when they're looking at an impossibly steep slope.
What is it that babies are learning over all those weeks of crawling? Definitely not in Manhattan.
Good job.
Good job.
They're learning how to figure out, in this moment right now, what is my body like? What is the environment like? And what can I do with this body in this environment? And those things will change from day to day, because they can wake up and find that they've grown another two centimeters.
Their mom could dress them in a different outfit that is functionally changing their body dimensions, or the way that they can move.
Go, go, go! Go, go! And it's good for your baby to crawl on grass or crawl on sand or crawl on whatever, because learning to crawl isn't learning some specific pattern of coordination between your arms and legs, it's learning to behave in a really flexible way so that the baby can get around in the world.
It's tummy time again? Huh? What do you do in tummy time? Is that a laugh or is that a cry? Mateo.
Is that a laugh or a cry? Where's Laura? Yeah, you don't like this position.
Are you going to crawl, Mateo? Think you can crawl? Come, come, come.
I see you, Mateo.
Come.
Come on.
Hey! Oh, detour.
A few weeks ago, he just started crawling, and then as soon as he started, he's just been going nonstop ever since.
So, yeah, he goes between rooms, he climbed up the stairs the other day, which I was shocked by.
Come, come, come.
And so I really have to watch him now.
Hey, come on.
Come on.
Hey, good boy.
Hey.
Good boy! Come.
Come here.
Come.
Yeah, now I really need to be careful with him, because Yeah, you're all over the place, bubs.
It's okay, come.
Come, come.
It's okay, come.
More recently he's getting more independent.
Just kind of going for it and feeling confident to just explore on his own.
Good boy! You're on the move, bub.
All right, let's go.
Want to have your milk? Want to go take a nap? Night-night, Papa.
Over the years, I've watched hundreds and hundreds of babies crawl.
One of the things that I found out, to my surprise and my frustration, was that a baby who could demonstrate that it could crawl on Monday would not be able to crawl on Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday, and then could crawl again on Friday, and then not Saturday, Sunday.
So this raised the question of whether there's a long period when a baby can't crawl, and then, like turning on a light switch, all of a sudden now this baby can crawl? Does it really work like that? Well, the only way to know would be to observe babies every single day and see whether you turned on the crawling switch.
This is my daughter, Lily, when she was a baby.
And she was in my diary study, and we tracked babies from when they were born until they were about 18, 20 months old.
We asked parents to track every little skill that babies might display on the way to being able to crawl.
This whole file is Lilly's data.
So, in March Lily took her first crawling steps.
So, on March 19th, she did a combat crawl, and then we never saw it again.
And on March 28th she did a belly crawl, and then not again until April 1st.
Now Lilly is doing a whole variety of little sort of crawling steps of different types of crawls.
Sometimes they go away, sometimes they stay for several days in a row.
We learned that crawling is incredibly variable and incredibly creative, and that every baby's trajectory looks different from the other babies.
The whole idea of motor milestones, where there's a kind of orderly progression "First, babies can roll and then they can sit up and then they can crawl and then they stand and then they cruise.
" You know, it's been in the literature for a century, in every pediatrician's office, in every parenting book or magazine.
It just really doesn't happen like that.
He's just done the same words you've made.
Or noise.
Oh.
Get your balance right.
That is brilliant.
Our findings show that there really is no sort of steady march from one stage to another.
Ah, success.
From whatever, lifting your head up, and then all the way to walking.
Good strong legs.
Instead, babies are acquiring their skills in different orders, and skills are sort of appearing and disappearing and reappearing, and then, bit by bit, babies gradually make their way toward walking.
He's on the move and there's no, sort of, turning back.
I don't think he's gonna crawl, I think he's completely missed that stage.
Seeing other babies crawling and getting places, there was a thought of, "It'd be nice if Pascoe could do that," but once we got the feeling that he wasn't gonna crawl, it was just, "All right, just let him stand up.
" - Watch your head.
- On the table.
Here.
Hey! Where is it? Where'd it go? He's just decided, "No, I like standing up and I like moving around this way, so I'm just gonna continue like this.
" No.
No.
- Yes.
- No.
It's just eagle eyes, watching him all the time.
That's funny.
Making sure that he's not grabbing something that he shouldn't grab.
Oi! It's really important for parents to know that crawling isn't mandatory.
It is not an obligatory stage that babies have to do before they begin walking.
And so, if your baby decides to crawl, great.
What's that? It's a footy.
And if your baby finds another solution for getting around, like bum-shuffling, great.
And if your baby decides to just wait and get up and walk, that's also great.
- That's it, that's it.
- Good cruise, good cruise.
Yes! Reach.
- Almost.
- Get closer.
Good boy.
Babies all develop in their own way.
One hand.
Hey! So just relax and enjoy and watch your baby's beautiful development.
Yeah.
That's a dog.
Can you come to the dog? Look, it's a doggy.
It's nice.
Nice dog.
For the first several months of life, infants are slaves to gravity.
They're just stuck in whatever place somebody put them in.
And then this remarkable transformation happens when babies learn to crawl.
Wee! Now they can move their own body from one place to another, and now the whole wider world is opened up to them.
Hey, bubba.
Hi! Hey! Hey! But how is it that babies learn to crawl, and what do they learn when they're crawling around in the world? You can do it.
In the first year of life, babies are growing faster than they ever will.
Come on, you can do it! The baby can wake up in a different body than they went to sleep in.
It's longer.
The arms are longer, the legs are longer, and as they begin to move, they cannot do exactly what they could do yesterday with the same precision.
You can! Call him here! What does this mean for a baby who's learning to crawl? For decades, we really believed that crawling was just a stage toward walking, but could crawling be more than a stage? Could crawling be fundamental to the way we all move? Ready? Who is that? Take a video for Mum.
Now that Amelia's back at work, I kick into my primary carer role in earnest.
Look, who is that? Who's that? Is that Pascoe? There's Dad, there's Pascoe.
Which I'm really excited about, just because it's great time I get to spend with Pascoe.
And we're gonna get back to practicing some tummy time, see how he's doing with crawling.
Ready? Who's this here? When Rich starts telling me, "Oh, we did this today," and, "Oh, Pascoe started crawling today," or "He did this move" Get your arms going.
That's it.
That's it.
Who's there? And I'm sort of sat at work, just at my laptop Good boy.
You know, I feel like I'm missing out on quite a bit.
Good! Oh.
Hey! I think also as a first-time mum you're quite keen to sort of tick off all the milestones, and you sort of read the books that say, "At this stage your baby will be doing this," and you're like, "My baby's not doing that," or "My baby did that two months ago.
Is he too early?" Good, he's got it! First past the post.
Oh, and you even pressed stop on the video.
Good boy.
You know how it works.
You know how it works.
You know how it works.
My career is not a straightforward, I would say, uh, trail.
Not at all.
I started to be a nuclear physicist.
I was studying the movement of electrons and atoms.
And then, as a biologist, I switched to be more interested with the movement of the body.
All of the steps gave me an open mind to different ideas that you can have about movement.
Many people thought for a long time that crawling emerged only around eight, ten months, and is a transitory step toward walking.
However, it is maybe more mysterious.
I think for me the question was, "Could crawling be more than a stage? Could crawling be crucial to the way all humans move around?" What can I get for you? I'll have a coffee.
- That's alright.
- Thank you.
In the womb, fetuses are able to move from one place to another place if they want, and you have to imagine a newborn as an astronaut coming back from the moon, where it was able to do a lot of movements freely and now is stuck with the gravity.
But there are specific times or occasions where you can see a newborn moving his body from one place to another.
Around one hour after birth, if the baby is skin to skin on the belly of the mother, you will see the newborn moving slowly to the breast of the mother.
And this is a fantastic behavior.
I love it, I saw it a lot.
Many, many times.
So another occasion is to put the newborn in the water.
The first time that I saw that, I was just, uh, shocked.
I said, "My God, these newborns are able to do a lot of things, and they are already able literally to crawl in the water.
" And so it is where I get very interested with this movement, and starting to ask, "Is this crawling that is already here really disappear to reemerge eight or ten months later for the baby to learn how to do that on land, or is there a link between these two behaviors, the newborn and the older baby?" People believe that newborn movements are only reflexes that will disappear very soon after birth.
And so they have nothing to do with a connection coming from the brain to control the movement.
But with that newborn, crawling was so beautiful, it's not really an automatic system.
It could not be.
This is why we thought of a very crazy experiment.
So the question we asked was relatively simple Was the crawling that we saw in the newborn already controlled with something in the brain? And one of the stimuluses of the brain, one of the most important systems that controls the crawling at seven, eight months, is the vision.
Hello, have you had a good journey? Yes, very good.
Look how he's grown! So knowing the importance of vision, we were wondering, and this was really our big question, what will happen to a newborn if we give them the illusion that they are moving around? Voilà .
Will they move? Will they not move? Let's not forget his little hat.
The hat of an astronaut.
Hop là .
There you go.
Ready to go to space.
Exactly.
We're going to send him into space.
What we have done is to imagine black dots that are moving on a pattern that is completely white.
So to get the impression of moving, you have to have all the dots moving, and in the same direction.
As soon as they see, they move their legs and their arms, and literally swimming.
Swimming in the air.
We were just shocked when we saw that.
We had this idea, but we were not completely sure that we will get this, you know, result.
We were very surprised.
Hello, little girl.
Hop là .
Hop là .
This, for us, was really something incredible because that means that they have this primitive link between the brain and the spine, and the vision, and the motoring activity to say, "Hello, I see something and I am moving according to what I see.
" And this was, for us, really the first evidence that this crawling pattern that you see at birth is coming from the brain.
What we have here is an extension of the leg at the same time as movement of the elbow and arm.
Now, having seen this baby just swimming literally in air with arms and legs, this definitely shows that this crawling pattern that a lot of people believe was just a reflex is not a reflex.
It's wonderful.
Let's take your hat off for a minute.
Voilà .
Look at Mom and Dad.
We started to think of how to study and analyze the same kind of movement if we put them on land.
We knew thatit's very difficult for babies to propel themselves, because the head is very heavy, it's one third of the weight of the body.
So they are not able to support that in the gravity.
Oh! - Can I come in? - Yes.
- Hello.
- Hello.
Ah! So, Hello little Helmi So now we start about thinking how to make the baby free to move around, and how to find a tool finally for them to be not crushed by the gravity and having their arms and legs free to move.
Would you like to participate in this experiment which will last around ten minutes and a little longer to get Helmi downstairs? Let's go.
So we were thinking a lot about how to construct such a tool.
We thought it will be easy to do it.
But not at all.
It took us, like, one or two years to build this kind of tool.
- Hello.
- Hello.
So we started to test our first baby on this mini skateboard in 2016, and, uh, we call the final version "the Crawlerskate.
" He's looking now.
They are comfortable, that sometimes triggers it.
They do whatever they want.
We explain what is the Crawlerskate, and all the time they are very interested because they think their newborn cannot at all crawl.
Hop, hop, hop! Ah.
Some babies are making a huge movement, even crossed the mattress once or two or three times.
It seemed really incredible.
Wow! Bravo! Bravo! Bravo, Helmi.
We were just shocked to see that these little two days newborn babies were able to do that on our Crawlerskate.
I find it emotional every time they move like that.
Huh? Too good.
It was really a very emotional moment, I can tell you.
Not only for us, but for the parents.
Hop là .
If we look at the results that we obtained with the Crawlerskate, what that suggests is that the nervous system that is important for the baby to move their arms and legs and crawl and to propel themselves is already in place.
- Thank you very much.
Goodbye.
- See you later.
Goodbye.
So what we have found is very new, and controversial.
Because for decades, people believed that we were born as bipeds.
That means that we are walking only with our two legs.
But what we have found is a completely different picture.
We believe now that we are born moving arms and legs as quadrupeds.
If you look at adult walking, it seems to be automatic to move our arms when we are walking.
But in fact we can do much more than that.
We are still quadrupeds inside us, in the nervous system.
So is crawling just a transitory stage? I think now, no.
Wake up now.
We need you today.
In fact, if you see the baby as a car, the engine is, like, sleeping and waiting for the bodywork to be ready, for the moment where the baby will be strong enough, with strong muscles, to take care of the weight and to be motivated to move it.
For that, the baby will have to grow.
And this is another story of how the baby grows up Hey! and changes the body with maturation and experience.
Mwah! Hey! What a yawn! Good boy.
All right, should we see if he can do the crawl? Come on.
Oh.
A bit of a A bit of a bump.
Oh, there's a push.
There's a push.
Use those legs.
Come on.
Good boy.
Good boy.
Oh, oh That's it.
You little champion! Push up.
Good boy.
Oh, hello.
Very good.
Good boy.
Lift yourself up.
Wahey! Look at that! Right, just getting a bit happier staying on his front.
There, you've got that the play with.
Pascoe does seem a little bit unsettled during the day.
Probably he's just going through a bit of a growth spurt, or a developmental spurt.
He seems to just be getting longer and longer, and stronger and stronger.
You can do it.
That's it.
He's got the legs going.
The legs are pumping.
He's getting bigger, that's for sure.
He's got some good power in his legs and I think he's starting to feel that in his feet.
Okay.
- Good work, buddy.
- See? I think we thought that he would be crawling by now, so You can start crawling if you'd like.
Would you like to start crawling? I started out in anthropology with an interest in the interaction that babies had with their families.
Every parent experiences how disruptive babies can be.
They're sleeping, and then there's no way they will go to sleep.
There are times when they're not very hungry, and times when they become very hungry.
Or out of nowhere they become kind of morphed, and parents will say, "Who's this monster who yesterday was such a good little girl?" It occurred to me that knowing something about growing would be informative here.
In 1979, my neighbor was about to have a baby, and I suggested to her at some point, would you mind if we measured your baby? She was very kind and she said, "Yes, of course.
" - Good morning.
- Good morning.
Okay, should be see how long you are? Measuring a baby's length is a two-person job.
Are you ready? Set? Measure! Whoopsie! You have somebody who can focus the attention of the infant correctly, and then you need somebody to actually stretch the baby out.
Good job.
Excellent, Aspen.
Thank you so much! Very good job! Yeah! I very clearly remember that I was a little concerned about doing it, but we did it.
And I wrote the measurement down, it was 62.
7 centimeters.
The next day I come back and we go through the process again, take the measurement.
It was very different.
Sixty-four point five.
I thought, that can't be, because yesterday it was 62.
7 centimeters, but today it's 64.
5 centimeters.
My first reaction was, "Well, I'm really terrible at this.
I mean, I'm terrible at this.
Because that's way too much.
" I came back several more times.
And each time we measured the baby, the length of the baby was 64.
5 centimeters.
Now I was actually quite unnerved, because there was no growth.
I've just taken five measurements, none of which are what you would expect to see.
One is too much, and then there's no growth at all, and that's not possible.
How much of my data reflect the fact that I don't know what I'm doing because I'm new, and I'm a novice? And how much of this might be um, a moment of "Who knew?" And that's where I began.
Hey, bubba.
Hey, Mateo.
Yeah, you're smiling now.
Your sleep has been more difficult lately, hasn't it? And Mama is very tired.
What else is going on with you? He's going through a growth spurt, and there have been moments where Mateo has just, like, randomly just burst out into hysterical crying, and there's been no particular reason for it.
Yeah, you're lucky you're so cute.
Yeah, you're lucky you're so cute and that I love you.
'Cause you've been a handful.
Yes, you have.
Yes, you have.
You've been more difficult with your naps.
Yes.
You don't want to sit down for too long.
Yeah, you want to pull yourself up.
Yes, you do.
Oh, don't get upset.
Don't get upset.
Yeah, I know you don't like to lay down.
Okay, it's okay.
He's definitely taking more attention now.
He wants more attention now.
Which is harder to get things done in the house.
Mateo.
We used to think that babies grew every day.
Little by little.
Slowly, very slowly.
That it was a kind of background noise of life.
There's a growth chart in every pediatrician's office, so every parent has seen their child's size plotted on a growth chart.
These particular charts show the size of 882 children that were measured at ages one week, two weeks, four weeks, six weeks, eight weeks, and then monthly thereafter until one year of age.
When we look at a growth chart, we see a curve.
But the curves are actually a result of a connect-the-dots process.
There were no measurements between these two specific time points.
But it creates the visual image of how growth occurs.
Very slowly and continuously through time.
Is it actually continuous, little by little, every day, as we all assume it is? I set out to measure 30 babies, because 30 babies would be a reasonable scientific size.
Also, when I started measuring babies, I asked parents to please keep a record of their baby's behavior on a day-to-day basis.
These notebooks are the original data.
This was a typical day in my life.
On the 23rd of August in 1981, I visited 12 children.
And for each of them, I measured at least their head and their length.
I met the first family at 7:20 in the morning, I remember that quite precisely.
And I saw the last person on this page Um, I left their house at 10 p.
m.
It looks simple, but that's what it took to do the measurements.
I noticed that babies who were measured once a week did grow in the course of a week.
This led me to wonder, did it really take a whole week for that growth to occur? I decided to measure them twice weekly, and I noticed that babies grew in half a week.
And I thought, does it really take them one half of a week to grow? And that moment is when I first started measuring babies daily.
Scientifically, it was a remarkable experience, because I did not know what we would find.
On the 19th of February in 1986 this child was 59.
8 centimeters.
Next day, the length measurement for this child was 59.
8 centimeters.
The following day, the child was 59.
8 centimeters.
Uh, and one day later, the child was 60.
8 centimeters.
So in this one day, the child was one centimeter longer.
Among the babies I measured every day, their growth varied between one half of a centimeter and 1.
65 centimeters in one 24-hour period.
In one day, they grew.
And these growth days were separated from one another in an individual by two to twenty-eight days of no growth.
And then these bursts, these spurts, occurred.
From these records I was also able to identify a clear link between the times during which they were having a growth spurt and dramatic changes in babies' behavior.
Changes in their sleeping behavior, tantrums, and times of insatiable hunger.
Wow.
I was thinking, this is a very big thing.
I was shocked.
I was awed.
I thought this was remarkable, and it was a moment of It was a moment of, I have no idea how this happens, but these are the data.
So what we used to think is that growth happened in a curve.
And what we now can see is that growth happens in jumps that separate times of no growth.
Two very distinctive phases.
And the reason that we can see this now is because of the increased frequency in the measurements themselves.
The day that the paper was published it was on the front page of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and it hit a number of media outlets.
There was a genuine interest.
This is remarkable.
Isn't it exciting that we now know this about children? What I did not expect was the reaction from the scientific community.
I was invited to a conference.
And I had a few very nice, very sensible questions.
And then a leading figure in the field stood up and started by mocking the data, that this can't be, we all know this can't be, because look at the growth curve.
That this wasn't credible, that it stretched their imagination, that babies could grow so much in one day, it simply wasn't possible.
I was not prepared for that level of rancor, at all.
Just not at all.
But I think it's an example of when one has a model in one's mind, a model of how things work.
This is classic in science, and somebody comes and says, "Well, wait a minute.
Let's consider this.
" The reaction to that is very frequently a kind of hostile disbelief.
But I think it's absolutely consistent with how science progresses.
Understanding that the baby is experiencing its own growth It's fun for me, too, you know.
Yes.
and that its body is changing, and it has to adjust to its own changing body, and where it is in space and what it can do, is a very different way of thinking about the influences on early development.
What does this mean for a baby who's learning to crawl? Ready? One, two, three.
And then they just stand up.
Yeah! Is that funny? Hello.
- Hello.
- Hi.
There's Pascoe! Hello, Paxie.
So we've been doing loads of tummy time.
- Has he? - But not showing much signs of wanting to crawl.
Wow.
Well, the toys he'll grab, - but he doesn't - Yeah.
He'll try and reach for things, but his feet don't move.
Yeah, he kind of happily goes on his tummy for a bit, but then he gets really annoyed.
It's really worth persisting with that, Mimi, though.
It's terribly important for them to crawl, and to use all those muscles, because that's really important for their future development, you know? - Get those legs going.
- Yeah.
It's just hard when he really hates tummy time, - and is really upset.
- Yeah.
It's hard to keep doing it.
- Do you think you want to crawl, mate? - Are you listening to that? Grandma says you have to.
Oh, he shook his head! - "No! No, I don't want to.
" - No? Cheeky boy.
I can definitely see where she's coming from with her concerns, but there's not much you can do with a baby.
You can try telling him so many times "You need to crawl before you walk," but if that's what he wants to do I haven't always been a scientist.
In college I actually studied fine art.
And on the first day of class, the professor handed me a plant.
And he said, "Draw this.
" Every day he would come with a different plant and he would tell me "You need to really look at it and understand how it grows.
" So now, all these years later, um, I feel like I'm essentially doing the same thing, only now I'm looking at babies, and I'm looking at their movements, so that I can understand how does behavior grow? In the real world, the ground is not perfectly flat and empty and uniform.
But for the last hundred years, and even going on now today, people study infant crawling by encouraging the babies to crawl in a straight line over uniform ground.
But that's not how real mobility works.
In the real world, as babies are crawling around, they actually have to make decisions, they have to use perception to guide their crawling movements.
So, you know, "Should I crawl over the edge of the bed or should I stop at the edge?" Um And so I wanted to find a way to test how do babies use perception to guide their crawling movements? If a baby really could perceive what they can do and what they cannot do, then they should be able to do it in a totally novel situation, something that they've never encountered before.
So I built an adjustable slope apparatus.
So, for this study, we want to see how babies, um, know what actions are possible and what actions are not.
- Mm-hmm.
- So we're going to ask him to crawl - over this walkway.
- Great.
It's gonna make a noise, Grant.
It can have really small slopes like this - Yep.
- or steeper ones like that.
Gotcha.
Good.
I love it.
All right, kiddo, let's go.
Grant is about ten months old, and he's been crawling for a little over a month.
Come get it! We've got it all down here! Come here! Grant, come get these.
Yeah.
Good job.
Aah! You got it! We increased the degree of slant six degrees at a time.
All right, Grant, are you ready? I've got it on the tower again.
- Come here.
- Go, go, go! Go, go, go! We're trying to figure out how precise are the babies' decisions about what they can and cannot do? - He couldn't get 'em - You've got all of 'em down there! Go! All right, working on that arm.
Here you go! Come get the blue one! On a successful trial, he crawls from top to bottom, belly off the floor, and nobody has to touch him.
Go, go, go! Go, go, go! On an unsuccessful trial, his arms give out or he stumbles or, you know, he's about to do a faceplant on the surface and the experimenter has to rescue him.
- Okay, we're waking 'em all up.
- Come here.
You want to put 'em down to sleep? Wanna put 'em to sleep? That's good.
Come put 'em down to sleep! Go to sleep.
All right.
- Good try.
- There you go! He's making judgments thatare completely off from what he really can do.
Then finally we present them with the largest slope, which is really a 90-degree drop-off.
Go, go, go! It's all the way down there, you gotta go get it.
- You coming? - He will.
You coming? All right! - Good try, man.
- You got 'em! Grant approached the 90-degree drop-off the same way as he was approaching the shallower slopes.
Come over to the edge, look and see what's at the bottom Oh, the pop-up pals! And then just crawl right over the edge.
All right! That's telling us that Grant is not yet able to distinguish what he can do and what he cannot do.
It's absolutely typical that babies, when they first begin crawling, when they first begin any new skill, they just are willing to try everything.
And it's actually a pretty good way for development to work.
If you don't try things, you're never gonna learn.
And so they just take the leap.
Go, go, go! - Go, go, go! - Yeah.
Marlow's interesting because she's quite a strong hands-and-knees crawler.
Down you come! Down you come! Down you come! Good crawling, Marlow.
In terms of having alternative ways of coping with a difficult motor problem, she was, like, right on the edge of understanding that, you know, there was other positions that are available to her to solve the problem.
Come here.
You can do it.
Babies show really different kinds of behaviors as they're approaching the brink of an impossibly steep slope.
Come on down.
I know, it's so funny.
Just come on down.
So I'm pretty sure you can figure it out.
The babies who make smart decisions, those are the same babies that will generate perceptual information by looking and by touching.
You see that? You coming? Marlow was quite good at perceiving what she could and could not do.
She knew if the steps were very steep that they were impossible.
Xylophone, and Yeah! Wee! Okay.
Good Good try, man.
All right.
- I'm gonna send this down to Justine.
- Can I have that? I'll hold it for you.
Dax would switch freely between crawling on hands and knees and crawling on hands and feet like a bear.
A little more challenging.
He actually can move faster when he's up on hands and feet, and so when he really wanted to get to something, he would just extend his legs and, you know, crawl down the pathway on hands and feet.
He's crawling.
What's that? He was just, you know, reconfiguring his body on the fly to kind of figure out how to solve that problem.
- Let's do it again.
- Perfect.
All right.
Are we coming down? Ready? We built this tall tower for you.
Dax really, really could perceive the limits of his own abilities.
Wow! You did it! So as the slope started to get too steep for him to crawl safely, that's when he was beginning to switch to find alternative strategies.
Ready? Come get some down here.
Yeah, they're all waiting for you.
Wow! Smart thinking.
You got it.
It takes about 20 weeks of crawling experience before a baby is showing adult-like accuracy when they're looking at an impossibly steep slope.
What is it that babies are learning over all those weeks of crawling? Definitely not in Manhattan.
Good job.
Good job.
They're learning how to figure out, in this moment right now, what is my body like? What is the environment like? And what can I do with this body in this environment? And those things will change from day to day, because they can wake up and find that they've grown another two centimeters.
Their mom could dress them in a different outfit that is functionally changing their body dimensions, or the way that they can move.
Go, go, go! Go, go! And it's good for your baby to crawl on grass or crawl on sand or crawl on whatever, because learning to crawl isn't learning some specific pattern of coordination between your arms and legs, it's learning to behave in a really flexible way so that the baby can get around in the world.
It's tummy time again? Huh? What do you do in tummy time? Is that a laugh or is that a cry? Mateo.
Is that a laugh or a cry? Where's Laura? Yeah, you don't like this position.
Are you going to crawl, Mateo? Think you can crawl? Come, come, come.
I see you, Mateo.
Come.
Come on.
Hey! Oh, detour.
A few weeks ago, he just started crawling, and then as soon as he started, he's just been going nonstop ever since.
So, yeah, he goes between rooms, he climbed up the stairs the other day, which I was shocked by.
Come, come, come.
And so I really have to watch him now.
Hey, come on.
Come on.
Hey, good boy.
Hey.
Good boy! Come.
Come here.
Come.
Yeah, now I really need to be careful with him, because Yeah, you're all over the place, bubs.
It's okay, come.
Come, come.
It's okay, come.
More recently he's getting more independent.
Just kind of going for it and feeling confident to just explore on his own.
Good boy! You're on the move, bub.
All right, let's go.
Want to have your milk? Want to go take a nap? Night-night, Papa.
Over the years, I've watched hundreds and hundreds of babies crawl.
One of the things that I found out, to my surprise and my frustration, was that a baby who could demonstrate that it could crawl on Monday would not be able to crawl on Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday, and then could crawl again on Friday, and then not Saturday, Sunday.
So this raised the question of whether there's a long period when a baby can't crawl, and then, like turning on a light switch, all of a sudden now this baby can crawl? Does it really work like that? Well, the only way to know would be to observe babies every single day and see whether you turned on the crawling switch.
This is my daughter, Lily, when she was a baby.
And she was in my diary study, and we tracked babies from when they were born until they were about 18, 20 months old.
We asked parents to track every little skill that babies might display on the way to being able to crawl.
This whole file is Lilly's data.
So, in March Lily took her first crawling steps.
So, on March 19th, she did a combat crawl, and then we never saw it again.
And on March 28th she did a belly crawl, and then not again until April 1st.
Now Lilly is doing a whole variety of little sort of crawling steps of different types of crawls.
Sometimes they go away, sometimes they stay for several days in a row.
We learned that crawling is incredibly variable and incredibly creative, and that every baby's trajectory looks different from the other babies.
The whole idea of motor milestones, where there's a kind of orderly progression "First, babies can roll and then they can sit up and then they can crawl and then they stand and then they cruise.
" You know, it's been in the literature for a century, in every pediatrician's office, in every parenting book or magazine.
It just really doesn't happen like that.
He's just done the same words you've made.
Or noise.
Oh.
Get your balance right.
That is brilliant.
Our findings show that there really is no sort of steady march from one stage to another.
Ah, success.
From whatever, lifting your head up, and then all the way to walking.
Good strong legs.
Instead, babies are acquiring their skills in different orders, and skills are sort of appearing and disappearing and reappearing, and then, bit by bit, babies gradually make their way toward walking.
He's on the move and there's no, sort of, turning back.
I don't think he's gonna crawl, I think he's completely missed that stage.
Seeing other babies crawling and getting places, there was a thought of, "It'd be nice if Pascoe could do that," but once we got the feeling that he wasn't gonna crawl, it was just, "All right, just let him stand up.
" - Watch your head.
- On the table.
Here.
Hey! Where is it? Where'd it go? He's just decided, "No, I like standing up and I like moving around this way, so I'm just gonna continue like this.
" No.
No.
- Yes.
- No.
It's just eagle eyes, watching him all the time.
That's funny.
Making sure that he's not grabbing something that he shouldn't grab.
Oi! It's really important for parents to know that crawling isn't mandatory.
It is not an obligatory stage that babies have to do before they begin walking.
And so, if your baby decides to crawl, great.
What's that? It's a footy.
And if your baby finds another solution for getting around, like bum-shuffling, great.
And if your baby decides to just wait and get up and walk, that's also great.
- That's it, that's it.
- Good cruise, good cruise.
Yes! Reach.
- Almost.
- Get closer.
Good boy.
Babies all develop in their own way.
One hand.
Hey! So just relax and enjoy and watch your baby's beautiful development.