My baby isn’t walking yet

Becoming a parent is a huge step to take in one’s life, having two children myself I can honestly say it has been the best and hardest thing I have ever done. At 10 months old, my youngest, took longer to walk than his sister. At first I thought, why is he different and should I be concerned, have I done something wrong? Mother guilt right! So first thing is, children do things in their own time. Expecting my baby to walk at the same time as his sister was unreasonable and generally we see most children starting to walk at 12mnths - 18mnths of age. Though you might find children of physios may be a little earlier for obvious reasons.

The first thing to consider as a parent is that there can be many reasons a child is not meeting their developmental milestones. The most common I find in clinical practice is having the opportunity to do so. Turns out, my youngest liked to be carried everywhere, and with the COVID pandemic just starting at the time, my husband had been home more and as such, my baby was carried around more. So there was no need to walk early for him. But being able to explore one’s environment at his age is crucial for brain development, which is at its’ peak in the first two years of life. 

Being a paediatric trained physiotherapist, and this is a very specific area of physiotherapy, I could easily make sure there weren’t any other issues that would be impacting on my son’s ability to walk. This is something a paediatric physio is able to do. We conduct very specific testing against standardised tools including the Hammersmith Infant Neurological Assessment (HINE), Alberta Infant Motor Scale (AIMS), and the Neurological, Sensory, Motor, Developmental Assessment (NSMDA), just to name a few. We assess things like joints to exclude a ligament issue like hyper mobility, or hip dysplasia, conduct neurological testing, mobility analysis and some other fancy tests. For piece of mind if you are concerned see a paediatric physiotherapist such as myself so you know for sure that what your child is displaying is normal for them.

Stay well, we’re here for you.

All the best

Sam