Learning to Walk
I mentioned in a previous post that we have a little boy at home who has just learned to walk- now run. What is interesting about watching my son learn to walk is that there seems to have been a trade off going on. Every baby’s experience is different of course (friends of ours said that their son never crawled, just went from sitting to walking). But here is our experience.
Pretty soon after our little guy started crawling, he began pulling himself up to standing. Then he began “cruising” (walking while holding furniture for balance). I was kind of amazed how fast he went from sitting and not moving much at all to the cruising phase. Then there was a lull of a a few months. He was clearly getting better at balance, getting faster at crawling, standing more upright. But he wasn’t making that leap to walking solo. After a while it looked to me like he had the balance and strength but he just wasn’t fully doing it on his own. I noticed something: at the same time he was standing and cruising he was also learning how to crawl very quickly. Almost to the extent that his speed seemed to preoccupy him away from making advances in walking.
Now I could be totally making this up, and this could just be my warped view of what things looked like, but it drove home 2 points:
1. There was a real trade off going on. He seemed to forgo walking in favor of moving faster by crawling which, at the time was a more efficient (and less painful) means of locomotion
2. There may be long periods of real, but barely perceptible growth going on that don’t appear like milestones but are every bit as important.
About the first observation. Obviously when you first learn to walk, you fall a lot. It probably hurts. It’s clumsy and slow. At this stage, the little guy is moving with some purpose- “I want that remote control over there so I can put it in my mouth.” He’s soing to “choose” the mode of locomotion that ultimately fulfills his goal with the least effort and pain. As he continues to experiment with walking he gets better: less falls, more steps, faster motion. Because in the end crawling is less efficient than walking, and walking involves less skinned knees, he makes the transition. Eventually he rarely crawls and he’s off to the races.
The second observation is interesting as well. Our bias in this world is always toward what we can see. We don’t believe it until we see it. It doesn’t look like progress is being made until some inflection point or milestone is met. But progress is being made all of the time. Sometimes it’s just on the inside.
