Encouraging Crawling: Building a Pillow Mountain
There are a lot of important skills that are developed uniquely by crawling.
Aside from the obvious strengthening of the upper body and hands, and bilateral coordination… crawling encourages babies to learn how to make calculated risks, explore their boundaries and potential, experience failure and learn how to overcome it. They begin making some of their first decisions about where to go, when to go, and how to do it.
That’s why I hesitate to brush it off when a baby skips this milestone.
However, if your baby does seem to be skipping this step and going right into pulling to stand and cruising… no need to panic. There are still ways to encourage crawling.
Try this:
Build a pillow mountain.
Gather pillows and cushions from around the house and build a mountain on the floor. The structure of the “mountain” should be an obvious slope that your baby can crawl up on one side, and down on the other.
This works well to encourage crawling for babies that are at 2 different stages:
1. They are transitioning from army crawling to hands-and-knees crawling. The height of the pillows encourages your baby to push up through their hands and knees and off of their tummy to get up onto the “mountain."
2. They went right from army crawling to pull-to-stand, skipping crawling on hands-and-knees. The slope of the “mountain” prevents them from pulling to stand. Instead, they need to attempt to crawl to get up and over.
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P.S. This information is for educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not a substitute for skilled physical therapy intervention. While I am a physical therapist, I am not your child's physical therapist. If you have questions or concerns about your child's health and/or development, please contact your pediatrician.
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