Crawling is an important part in your baby’s development. He’s now getting mobile, so prepare to be chasing him around from room to room. In this article we’ll talk about the different skills that crawling helps develop.

Balance: Balance is an essential skill your little one will always need. Walking, running, jumping, kicking a ball, writing, and coloring require balance. As your baby achieves this, he’ll learn how to distribute his weight and move from side to side. Research at San Francisco State University found that babies who engage in tummy crawling (also referred as prone locomotion) learn faster how to control tasks that require a right posture and balance skills; this learning occurs through visual stimulation.

Fine and gross motor skills: As your little one presses his weigh on his palms, he’ll stretch the tiny muscles in his hands and fingers. This will help him with the skills of picking up small objects, manipulating toys, and writing. As he learns how to move, your son will coordinate large arm, leg, feet, and trunk movements which will give him strength and the ability to carry his body an achieve future skills, like throwing and catching.

Hand-eye coordination: As his hands become his guide, he’ll establish hand-eye coordination. This will serve him to focus his attention on something while his hands execute the task. This is a skill he will need for reading, writing, and sports activities.

Binocular vision: Your baby will train his eyes to look out into the distance and then back at his hands, while crawling and reaching for an object. He will use this skill later when copying something from a blackboard at school.

Cognitive processes: The mechanics of crawling stimulate different areas of the brain that control processes like comprehension, memory, and focus. Since your little one coordinates both sides of his body, it also stimulates both hemispheres of his brain enhancing his learning, navigation, and problem solving. As he crawls and moves through and around things, he’ll explore objects in his path and learn how to decipher the best way to get to the place of his choosing. This will also boost his confidence and self-assurance.

Remember that the process of learning how to crawl differs among babies and that each one of them figure out a style that feels good to them. If you see that your little one is not crawling, check out this article to read about some exercises you can do to help.

For more information on this subject you can visit: What’s so important about crawling?