Safely Teaching a Baby to Walk

We all get to walk eventually (except for those special people of course who cannot). However, there are some children who start to walk early while there are those who start late.
Nevertheless, as parents, we try as much to train them in order to walk uprightly and would not need our support.

My baby started early at 7 months. Here is how we did it.

1. It is advised that we should not force children to stand or walk until they really want to especially at an early age because their bones are still soft and not strong enough to support their body weight.

2. Once the baby starts showing signs of wanting to get up on her own, that is the time to support her in standing up. In our case, I just look around one day, when she just turned 7 months, that I saw our baby already standing inside her crib while holding the sturdy sides.

3. When that happened, we got her on a walker where she can sit down when she gets tired. Since our baby is quite tall, she could already reach floor on the lowest adjustment. She enjoyed this walker so much, but sometimes, she would sit down for long periods without walking around. She would only walk when something has caught her attention and she wanted to reach for it.

4. After two weeks on the sit-down walker, we "invested" in a push-around walker that could eventually be transformed into a wagon when she will be older. This is how we taught her to use the new walker.

a. First we let her wear a nice pair of shoes with thick soles so that her feet will not be hurt when she steps on the ground

b. Next we got a long sturdy strip of cloth that we tied around her chest in order to support her while she practices walking. This is not tied tightly but just enough to pick her up when her knees wobble and she falls. This cloth also prevented back aches on our part as we did not have to bend so much.

c. We put her hands on the handle bar and urged her to move forward by having somebody stand in front of her and beckoning to her.

d. We would also give the walker a gentle push so that when she bends a little, she would be forced to move her feet.

Although many people would think that teaching a child to walk is no big deal, but consider this: this could also be a bonding moment with your child. Fifteen minutes a day is good enough for starters as we could not really let our babies stand for so long.

Enjoy this moment!