The idea that you need to crawl before you can walk is much more than a common adage. Many parents and pediatricians believe that the crawling phase is absolutely critical to proper development. But the truth is that, in some cultures, crawling is almost entirely avoided. Babies go from being carried to walking and there don’t seem to be any negative effects.
According to anthropologist David Tracer of the University of Colorado at Boulder, babies of the Au hunter-gatherers of Papua New Guinea do not go through a crawling stage. Instead their parents and other caregivers carry them until they can walk. Yet Au children do not appear to suffer any ill effects from skipping this phase. In a presentation given to the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in Chicago this past April, Tracer argued that, in fact, not crawling may be entirely normal and possibly even adaptive.
So you can either carry them until they can walk, or you can let them crawl until they learn to walk and then carry them everywhere for a few years after that because they look up with tears in their eyes and say, “Carry, Dadda, carry.” Either way, you end up with a normal kid and a sore back.
