I'm Crawling on Sunshine...

Thursday, February 4, 2010 at Thursday, February 04, 2010
Er, what? Now before you think I have lost my marbles and forgot that the song is actually "I'm walking on sunshine", rest assured I have not. And you are welcome for now having that song stuck in your head :)

My in-laws just came for a visit and we were discussing the fact that Conner is crawling and cruising his little tushie off. However, he is not walking yet. Now I know he just turned 1, but I am sure every parent is excited around the 1st birthday because that is when you start expecting the little wabbly legs to walk. Or so I am told. In our discussion, my in-laws (Pam and Rich) mentioned that there is a link between intelligence and prolonged crawling. The longer a baby crawls is apparently linked to their intelligence. WHAT? So I had to do some investigating.

I tried to find a lot of information about this topic, but surprisingly found little. It seems that the main person behind this theory is Glenn Doman, a childhood educator that specializes in right-brain training (whatever that means). He is also the author of How To Teach Your Baby To Be Physically Superb. Here is a great quote from the article summarizing what Doman contends:

"...crawling forwards is an essential skill to master. Doman claims that crawling stimulates the brain to develop convergence of vision - and that as a result, people who skip this phase as babies may find it extremely difficult to learn to read and write as children. In addition, children who missed out on crawling may suffer from speech problems, he says - because the same part of the brain controls both functions"

Now I will admit that I have not read his book. I have noticed that he gets a lot of good reviews and has written a number of books. So I can't really critique his book and I am sure it has plenty of scientific research to back up his assertions. But I do take some issue with the claim that learning to read/write and speech are controlled by the same part of the brain. I think that is way way oversimplified. Any of my fellow neuroscientists feel free to chime in if I am wrong.

I have seen babies that crawl "normal", crawl on their butts, or skip crawling all together. And lets not forget that there are some babies that walk by 9 months, and some by 18 months. So to any parent or grandparent out there...did you notice any differences in reading and writing abilities and the length of crawling/onset of walking? I will address this issue more once I have read the book, but for now I thought it would be cool to get some anecdotal input.


http://www.articlesbase.com/babies-articles/crawling-is-it-important-398848.html

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