Eek! I’ve got a bottom shuffler!

But my question is - does it matter?
After months of commando creeping backwards, Sienna has decided her preferred method of moving is bottom shuffling. She puts her hands in front of her and rocks backwards and forwards so that she moves. She gets all around the house, and she's pulling up to stand on the furniture, so does it matter if she doesn't crawl?
Mum did developmental therapy with both my brother and sister and is insistent that crawling is a vital stage for development of spacial awareness and that I should be doing crawling patterning with her, but my sister who is doing ECE training reckons that there's no evidence to support that.
Oh and Mercedes doesn't crawl properly either, she's happy to creep around backwards.

isnt crawling related to using both sides of the brain together? the whole left/right concept starts from there i believe.....

and the spatial awareness is a big thing, dhs cousin who never crawled has broken his collarbone so many times from falling, and not being able to stop himself - as ridiculous as that seems!

get maya to crawl round after the kids, save your knees! at the end of the day if they dont want to crawl no matter how much you show them they just wont.

Oh, just remembered: MIL said it doesn't really matter what order they do things, just that they do it eventually

Okay, I rung my MIL but she's teaching at the moment so she'll ring me back in an hour. I'll let you know what she says!

Totally unhelpful, but ooooh bum shuffling is SO cute!

I bet she looks so cute shuffling across the floor Alize used to roll instead of crawl all over the place. That was hilarious He crawled about a week later so she may crawl once she has mastered the art of shuffling. I wonder if Mercedes will copy or she may just crawl, then Sienna might copy her.

Maya wrote: The interesting thing is that my grandma reckons my mum never crawled, she was a shuffler, and my sister was a shuffler too and now they are both really clumsy so maybe that's coz they never developed spacial awareness?

Yep my mum is proud of the fact I never crawled and I am the most unco, accident prone person I know (see my recent thread about driving the car into the back of the garage if you need proof), but i read real good

Paris was a shuffler, thing is she never rolled or tried to roll or crawled or anything at all hence our dilema.. all she could do was sit.. and then shuffle.

eventually she did start to stand at things.. then went back and did a little normal crawling and a learnt to roll.. but we did (me and daycare) focus on that and do little exercises and coditioning as you called it, basically taking her through the motions bit by bit of how to roll etc first, then how to crawl as we had heard the same thing about cross-over of the brain and stuff. she only did that for maybe a week or so (not long enough..) but then just got up and walked. so i did encourage things like pretending to be animals etc every once in a while just to get the crawling thing happening and well-developed but she was about 17 months at that stage not a wee dot like your little chickie..

If she wants to shuffle, she will.. and despite all of my efforts i found that if she doesn't want to crawl you can hold her there etc until you go blue.. it won't work well, if at all.

I have found though that compared to Ayja, who crawled fairly early-ish.. Paris is terribly unco-ordinated with some things.. ie riding a bike, it had only just happened, cos for the longest time she couldn't co-ordinate her legs taking turns etc to get the peddles moving.





Edited by mum2paris

I have talked extensively to Gaz's mum who is a teacher about this and she says crawling is pretty important but that it doesn't matter what age it happens. So don't fret too much, they'll crawl later.

She also said that developmentally it was important for kids to do things like hang upside-down on monkey bars etc and that schools getting rid of those sorts of things because of the potential danger was going to have an effect down the line... of course that isn't yet proven, but interesting.