Developmental Milestones

walking blog

A father recently disclosed to us that another healthcare professional told him that crawling is not a developmental milestone, yet as their colleagues, we strongly disagree. 

Proper crawling involves a cross-crawl pattern with the arms and legs that plays a huge role in brain development. If your child has difficulty crawling, crawls in an alternative manner, or is not crawling by 10 months of age, they are experiencing a developmental delay that can lead to a cascade of sensory and motor difficulties down the road. 

Developmental milestones occur in stages that build upon each other. Each stage is crucial to ensure the healthy and proper growth of your child. The American Academy of Pediatrics lists crawling as a primary motor developmental milestone between the ages of 7 and 9 months. Many parents praise their children for walking early, or skipping the crawling stage. We highly encourage all parents to allow their child to crawl and to find the root cause if their child is unable to properly crawl. 

All pediatric healthcare professionals looking for the cause of a delayed developmental milestone will look for an underlying sinister condition or disease. The majority of the time, this is not the case. 

A slight developmental delay can show your child’s nervous system is not developing in the proper sequence. The mainstream approach to addressing a developmental delay would be to imply that “it’s okay, your child will catch up” or to prescribe a program to jumpstart the delay with motor exercises. Although beneficial, exercises do not address the root cause of the delay. Your child’s developmental delay is a neurological delay and the only way to correct it is to improve the function of your child’s brain and nervous system.

Crawling on time and reaching other developmental milestones on time is ESSENTIAL to the proper development of your child’s brain. 

An early developmental delay shows there is interference in the central nervous system, the brain and spinal cord. This interference is commonly caused by the birth process. If the interference goes uncorrected, it can affect crawling. The cross-crawl motion begins the cascade of the communication between the right and left side of the brain. Right and left brain communication is the foundation of talking, walking, and higher human intelligence. 

A trained and certified pediatric chiropractor addresses this neurological interference from its source, the central nervous system, by focusing on gentle, specific spinal adjustments to re-establish brain to body communication, therefore re-establishing right and left brain communication. 

Pediatric chiropractic is drastically different from what you might know about traditional chiropractic. Trained and certified pediatric doctors of chiropractic do not pop, crack, or twist the spine. Adjustments are as light and gentle as checking the ripeness of a tomato. They are very safe and specific. 

At Pure Light Family Chiropractic, we provide a thorough chiropractic evaluation to assess the integrity of your infant or child’s central nervous system. We walk you through every step of the process. We provide safe, specific, gentle adjustments to the tiniest of newborns through every stage of development.