I thought early standing meant we were doing something right. One appointment changed how I think about it — and how our living room looks.
At her eight-month check I was, I admit, a little pleased with myself. She could pull herself up on the sofa. She would stand there, wobbling, grinning, looking like she was about to take off.
I mentioned it to the physiotherapist expecting her to be pleased too.
She asked me a question I could not answer: “How much time does she spend on the floor?”
I could tell her exactly how long my daughter napped. I knew her feeding schedule to the minute. But actual floor time — on her belly, on her knees, moving — I had no idea. Maybe twenty minutes a day, between the bouncer, the car seat and the high chair.
Standing early is not a problem in itself, she said. But it is often a sign that the floor stages got compressed — and crawling is where a lot of the work happens. The two sides of the body learning to co-operate. The shoulders that later hold a pencil. The hips that make walking steady rather than stiff.
She was not telling me to stop my daughter standing. She was telling me to give her somewhere to do the rest of it.
We did not buy a programme or sign up for a class. We changed one corner of the living room, and we stopped putting her in things that held her upright when she did not need to be upright.
The part I did not expect was how much she wanted it. Given something she was allowed to climb, she spent far longer on it than she ever spent with a toy that did one thing.
She walks now. I have no way of proving the floor time is why, and I am not going to pretend otherwise — children walk anyway. What I can say is that the climbing and crawling stopped being a fight about the sofa, and the living room stopped being a place where I said “not there” forty times a day.
If you are in the stage I was in, the question worth asking is not whether your child is ahead. It is how many hours a day they actually spend on the floor.
Ramps, steps, wedges and blocks that can be rebuilt as she gets better at them. It replaced the pile of plastic toys she had stopped looking at.
No. Nobody told me to stop anything. The advice was to add floor time, not to take anything away.
Ours lives in the living room, against the wall. It is out all the time, which turned out to be the part that mattered.
Yes — this is a paid partnership with IGLU, and the set was provided to us. The appointment, and what I learned in it, happened anyway.
If you take one thing from this: more time down there, every day, with something safe to push against.
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