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Toddlers: 12 - 24 Months
Mrs.EMS
member
stairs: 13 month old
Mrs.EMS
member
How did you show your child to come down the steps safely.... i showed her the butt method ( slide down 1 step at a time on your butt) but DH wants to show her the backwards crawl method. ( same way she went up but backwards)... help
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Re: stairs: 13 month old
I don't think you need to teach a 13 month old to go down stairs.
They will figure it out when it's more age appropriate without needing to be taught.
We taught dd to go down on her belly. It's too easy for them to tip forward when going down on their butt.
And pp, the reason we taught dd how to go down was b/c she is extremely mobile and if I turn my back for a second would be up the stairs. I would much rather her know how to properly come down, then for her to fall down before I could get there.
This exactly. My IL's have stairs and they watch her during the week while DH and I are at work. We just know that one day DD will figure out how to unlatch the baby gate and she will crawl up the stairs. We want her to know how to get down safetly.
We taught her to go down on her belly. We made it a game and mommy and daddy did it too.
It is more for precaution than anything!
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Blaine Emerson Bailey Rae
3-31-14 6-10-11
This.
I always used gates. I would never let my child play by going up and down stairs. Extremely dangerous.
Right, but if your hands are right by her waist as she's crawling up, why would she ever *need* to learn how to crawl down stairs? I stand by the fact that a child will learn how to do this on their own when it's age appropriate and don't need to be taught at 13 months old.
DS learned to go down stairs by about 13 months probably. We have kind of a multi-level downstairs, and there are a couple steps that go between the den/foyer and the rest of the downstairs, in addition to the stairs that go upstairs. Gates really don't work on any of our stairs with the way the walls & banisters are, so he needed to learn sooner rather than later.
I tried showing him how to go down backwards, although at first he would just go up since it was the same position as doing that. He caught on eventually though & it makes things so much easier to not have to constantly block off stairs wherever we go.
Now at 16-17 months, he's starting to want to walk forward down them, holding a hand or the banister.
I'm curious to know what is age appropriate. This is strange to me. We live in a multi level home with a ton of stairs and I'm not sure what I would do if we hadn't taught DS to go down the stairs. It seems only appropriate to me that if a child knows how to go up the stairs than they are taught how to go down the stairs as well. FTR He has been going both up and down the stairs with assistance since he was 11 months old and now that I have a 9 week old it is quite the blessing.
First, let me say that we use gates for our stairs and do not let our little one play on them. He can only go up/down when we are right behind him.
By 13 months old, my LO could climb on couches, so we taught him how to get down "feet first" by sliding down on his belly. Recently, he has used this exact same approach to get down the stairs (while under supervision). Now, when ever he is up some where and wants to come down, we say "feet first" and he turns and slides on his belly.
But to answer your original question, we never set out and explicitly said "okay, today we will teach you how to come down the stairs".
I think it's age appropriate when they figure it out on their own. Gross motor skills have a wide range of "normal". I just don't think one should set out and practice to teach a barely 1 year old how to use stairs. I don't know-it just makes me think they're going to be more lax when they're on the stairs and the child is going to get hurt. At that young an age regardless of their skill level, someone should be right there with hands ready to grab them should they lose their footing. You shouldn't be in a situation where you turn around and your child is halfway up the stairs.
My son figured out scaling the stairs at 6 months old, but I would have never let him do it at that age while I carried a baby in my arms.
I didn't read all the responses, but we "taught" our 14 month old to go down steps. We don't have them in our own house, but during the holidays we spent a week at a home that had two carpeted steps down to a sunken family room. The steps were very wide and would have needed a really specialized gate.
She wouldn't have really gotten hurt if she did fall, but we showed her how to slide down on her belly. I just kept saying, "You have to crawl" and she got it. By the end of the week, she was going up and down no problem.
We taught my son to crawl backwards down the stairs at 10 months. I would guide his legs down to each step to show him how. He became an expert by 11 months. He's still very careful with stairs at 2.
ETA Oh and KC we have gates on all of our stairs. I really didn't want my son to find out the hard way how NOT to crawl down stairs. So IMHO it's best NOT to wait until they "figure it out on their own". Which by the way, how are they going to do if you never let them try, you know, with the gates and all?
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Ditto. My son was extremely drawn to the stairs and I felt like it was a good idea to show him how to do it safely as early as possible -- we showed him the backward crawl. We started that at around 10 months, also. He learned that really fast. A few times he would start to go down the wrong way, and look at us, and we'd say "no...." and then he did it the right way. He went through a phase (a few weeks) where he slid down the stairs pretty quickly on his belly, then back to crawling down again (backward), and now he's trying to go down them upright. He braces himself on the wall and takes big boy steps (sideways). Sometimes I hold his hands so he can go front ways like an adult would. He LOVES the stairs....
FWIW we have a gate at the top but not the bottom. I guess I'm bad, I let him on the stairs all the time. They are carpeted and have a turn with a large landing in the middle.
Ditto this for us, too! My son was walking at 10 months and has always raced for the stairs.
This is us exactly, however we never let him climb stairs or go down them by himself. That is why we have baby gates. Even though DS has known how to work stairs for months he still sometimes tries to take a dive down them. If we were not there he could become seriously injured. I'm sure your pedi would tell you the same.
My son learned how to walk up and down the stairs holding a rail around 15 months old. My daughter learned to crawl down stairs around the same age on her own.
We never pushed to teach him during the crawling phase. My kids were allowed to explore the stairs when I was right there behind but never pushed to teach him. We just let them figure it out on their own time.
If you have gates on your stairs, how would they figure out the "hard way"?
I agree that's it's not something you should push, but it doesn't hurt to show them how to get down if they start climbing stairs or on furniture. My younger DD is a climber, and my older DD occasionally leaves the baby gates open in spite of my constant reminders. There have been a couple of times where my younger DD made it halfway up the stairs before I could stop her. We also had a sunken living room in our old house, so we taught my younger DD how to get down that step as soon as she started showing interest in it.
Honestly, the best thing I've done is show my younger DD how to close the stair gate if her sister leaves it open
It buys me some extra time to latch it!
You know what works well for that? Those gates that automatically close behind the child. My son is also older so he can go up and down stairs alone but my youngest can't (obviously, lol) and he also would never remember to close the gate. They are awesome!
The point is there's no "safe" way for a 13 month old to go up/down stairs. Kids learn by exploration, so there's nothing wrong with allowing a child to explore when you're right there with both hands free. Kids don't need to be taught the skill how to so you can just let them go up and down the stairs though.
When my babies were both really small, we did do two trips up and down stairs for the kids. When my son was around 18 months/the baby was 6 months old, I could hold her in one arm while I held my son's hand while he walked the stairs.
When I'm taking DD down the stairs, I encourage her to go on her belly because she's less likely to tumble that way. It's what we did with DS, and that worked well. Kids need to practice a skill before they can master it.
So your kid could do it at 15 mo but there is no way a 13 mo old can do it? Kids develop their motor skills differently. sure, kids shouldnt be going up & down full flights of steps at 13 mo old w/out an adult next to them but I will respectfully disagree w/ you b/c I see nothing wrong with turning them on their belly to show them how to go down feet first if they're trying to go down on their own and want to either walk or do the butt thing b/c the belly IS safer...gates get left open, accidents happen, you go to other people's homes, etc and I just don't see the harm in showing them feet first on the belly vs trying to walk or go face first. (I can't tell if the OP is intentionally setting out to 'teach' stairs or if her LO is trying and she wants to show the safest way).
And good for you for doing 2 trips all the time but mine were the same exact age & the 2 trip thing was not going to work for us for basically a full year every time we wanted to go up & down, and the fact that they both went down feet first made me much more comfortable even when right next to (behind) them. Everyone is different in their comfort level & setup of their house.
No we don't use gates. Our stairs down work with them unfortunately. And it wouldn't really matter since at 8 months old she learned how to climb over the gates at my friend's.
And I agree with pp. Teaching them how to go down the stairs properly and not using gates doesn't mean I just let my kid play on the steps. But kids are fast. Dd would be halfway up the stairs before I could get to her sometimes. Unfortunately it happens.
Exactly this. KC- I'm not sure if I'm reading your tone properly here, but it sounds like you're stepping on your soapbox here and I'm not sure why. It's really a stupid argument.
I agree with pp that accidents happen. I'm not going to hover over my child because I feel 1000% comfortable with him going down the stairs by himself. Prepare to clutch your pearls because we don't have gates on the 4 flights of stairs we have either. Until I was comfortable I would stand next to DS as he was going down or keep a watchful eye on him when he was around the stairs and now I don't have to fight those stupid gates.
I have a tri-level, and never had to teach either of my kids how to come down the stairs. They figured it out on their own, my son by 11 months and my daughter probably about 13 months. No gates for my daughter at all.