Baby Not Yet Crawling? Help Your Baby Learn to Crawl by Teaching Your Baby to Get into Sitting

0:00 - As parents, we get super excited when our little ones learn to sit for the very first time, but sometimes babies get stuck in sitting, which means it's difficult to progress onto crawling. And one of the reasons this might be happening is because your baby doesn't know how to go into and out of sitting. So in this video, we're going to cover the two different ways that you can teach a baby to get into and out of sitting, which will hopefully get them one step closer to crawling.

0:24 But before we do, make sure you click on that free PDF document in the description box below which covers the developmental milestones you can be expecting for your little one in their first year of life. This will give you an invaluable piece of mind as you'll know when to be expecting certain skills and when to be concerned. Also, if you wanna make parenting significantly easy and make sure you start now by subscribing to my channel and hitting the bell where you'll learn the tips and tricks that I've learnt over the last 10 years practicing as a pediatric occupational therapist and being a mom to two children.

0:52 Babies can learn to get into and out of sitting independently from seven months to 10 months of age. But as parents, instead of placing our babies straight onto the floor and sittings, so just popping them on the floor and sitting, what you can do is you can help your baby learn the motor pattern to kind of go from sitting into lying and lying into sitting by helping them transition through this movement. By giving them that opportunity, you're allowing them to learn the motor pattern required to complete that movement as well as strengthen the muscles that are needed to do the movement.

1:21 Once your baby can independently get into and out of sitting, they're going to have new found freedom, and it's going to get them one step closer to crawling. So help them learn this motor pattern, there are two different techniques that you can use. So one of the techniques that you couldn't do to get them into and out of sitting is through side lying. So say we're going to roll them onto our rights, their right side. How you would do that is you would have them on their back, and then you would roll them onto their right side and ensure that their hands are out in front of their body.

1:49 Then you would place one hand on their left hip, and the other hand would be on their right arm. What you wanna do is when you bring them up into sitting you wanna apply downward pressure on that left hip, and you want to ensure that the right arm stays straight and drags along the floor, because that's essentially going to support their body until they get up into sitting. Once they're in sitting, how you would get out of this position is that you would again saying we're going through to the right side, you would use one hand to place it on their right arm, and then you would lengthen that arm and place it on the ground and trying to keep it straight you would gradually move that arm away from their body, again, providing support at the left hip or the trunk at this point, and then you would help them get onto their side.

2:37 Once they're on their side, on the floor, you would then roll them onto their back. Now, when you're doing this technique with your little one, you wanna make sure you do it equally going through the right side and through the left side because that ensures that your baby is going to have equal strength on both sides of the body. The second technique for getting into and out of sitting is through four point kneeling. Now these approach is only suitable if you know that your can support themselves in that four point kneeling position.

3:02 So the position know essentially that they go in when they're crawling. So what you want to do is when your baby is lying on their tummy and their arms are stretched out and they're lifting their body off the ground, you place your hands behind their thighs and you flick their legs underneath their body. So then they're now in that four point position. Once they're in that four point position what you would do is you would place your hands on their hips and then you would gradually and gently pool their hips slightly backwards and in a downward motion to the side and that would bring them up into sitting.

3:35 Now to get them out of this position from sitting into lying or into that four-point kneeling position, you would place your hands on their hands and put them out in front of their body and then encourage them to go up into that four point position. They would technically, if they're able to do that anyway, they would get into that position themselves. I would mainly be focusing on getting them from that four point position into sitting. So that's it parents, those are two different ways that you can teach a baby to get into an out of sitting.

4:03 Hopefully they learn the skill pretty quickly and then they have that new found freedom. Make sure you click on that free PDF document in the description box below, and hopefully I'll see you next week where I'll share more parenting tips and tricks. (slow paced music)