Toe-Walking: Steps to a Better Step
Yay! Your baby is finally walking! This exciting milestone opens a whole new world of play opportunities for your little one. It’s always worth celebrating, but it can start off a little rocky. There’s a reason there are so many funny videos of babies learning to walk out there, looking like they’ve had a few too many margaritas and are trying to do yoga on a stand-up paddleboard. It’s not easy to figure out how to get it right, especially when their bodies just won’t seem to cooperate yet.
Like all of these milestones, it’s a process. It’s normal for babies to work their way through different foot patterns when they’re learning to walk and run. Some of these patterns are just habits that stick, but others could be due to an underlying challenge — and that’s where they might need some extra help.
What is toe-walking?
Toe-walking is a reliance on the front of the foot to move, placing pressure on the toes instead of using a heel-to-toe pattern. It often starts in a baby’s second year, but you’ll sometimes see it during the first year. This behavior begins when little ones are learning the sensations of walking, figuring out how to balance, and discovering how the floor feels on their feet. It might happen because your baby wants to move faster or run. It might happen because they’ve learned to feel comfortable moving that way. It might be a learning phase, and if that’s the case, you don’t need to worry.
However, if you’re not noticing a more consistent and typical heel-to-toe walking pattern by the time your babe is 2.5 or three years old, they may be having difficulty with a few key aspects of walking. If they aren’t able to move beyond these patterns, it could negatively affect their joint stability, causing muscle weakness over time through their legs, from their feet to their hip joints, due to poor posture. It could also poorly affect their balance, and you’ll notice more clumsiness or poor coordination as they get older. There are a few steps you can take to make sure that doesn’t happen.
Since there are multiple reasons why a child may walk on their toes, it’s important to check with a physical therapist or a pediatrician to figure out exactly what’s going on and how to manage it.
Once you have seen a medical professional and gotten their advice, you may determine there are things you can do at home to help. Here are four of the most common reasons for toe-walking, as well as some steps you can take to help remedy the practice:
Sensory Aversion
Kids who walk on their toes because of a sensory aversion don’t like the feel of their feet on the floor. Maybe your child loves socks or only loves certain socks or hates socks completely. He might love the wood floor or only want to be on the carpet. These aversions vary widely and each one may manifest differently, but the corrective actions to ease most types of sensory aversion are fundamentally the same.
Slowly integrate uncomfortable feelings to improve tactile input and decrease the sensitivity to different sensations on your child’s feet. Use toys with different textures, such as blankets, socks, towels, or anything you think might feel interesting. While you play with those items and run them along your babe’s feet, sing their favorite song, practice counting, or eat a favorite treat. You can also let your child run those items along your feet too!
Poor Balance
Having poor balance can keep kids on their toes when they walk in an effort to stay stable. Luckily, learning balance is a great opportunity for fun play. There are lots of activities that can improve this skill. Here are a few:
To find details about these games and activities, check out our post on balance and core activities for toddlers.
Decreased Core Strength
Our children’s bodies are amazing little machines working extra hard to learn brand-new tasks. Sometimes certain muscle groups are able to work harder and gain strength before others.
If that’s the case for your babe’s abdominal and core muscles, they may have decreased strength in those areas, which can lead to poor balance and coordination when walking or attempting to run.
One easy way to check whether your little one has abs of steel or room for improvement is to have them lie on their back and get up to standing any way they can. By 2.5 or three years old, children are typically able to do a sit-up, or modified-sit-up using their hands to assist, to transition from lying on their backs to sitting up. If their abdominal muscles aren’t quite up to the task, they may roll over onto their tummy and push up onto hands and knees to transition to standing.
Check out our post on toddler balance and core strengthening for exercise ideas.
Tight Calf Muscles
Maybe your child cannot wait to run after the dog or their big brothers and sisters and is just constantly on their toes to move as quickly as possible. If they do this before they’ve mastered walking, they might be on their toes all the time! This can often lead to tight calf muscles, just as it would in an adult. To figure out if this could be the problem, have your child sit on the floor or in your lap with one knee straight and try to bend his ankle as far as comfortably possible until you feel some gentle but noticeable resistance. It’s much easier to walk with a typical heel-toe pattern if your ankles can bend to more than a 90-degree angle.
This simple check can also become the stretch you use to improve your child’s tight calf muscles. Hold one ankle at a time and do the same motion twice for 60 seconds each time. Instead of counting, you can also do it while singing their favorite song a couple of times a day. If your child hates this stretch, don’t feel like you need to be above a good distraction, whether that’s a snack or a Moana viewing.
Once this stretch is tolerated and easy, bump it up to stretching the calf muscles while standing. Now that their ankles can flex more easily, squat together to pick up a ball and toss it or roll it to one another, or simply have your child squat to pick up a toy when cleaning up. When squatting, be sure their heels are still on the ground, stretching those calf muscles as much as possible! Don’t fret if their heels aren’t down on the first few tries, just keep it up. Your consistency and gravity will continue to help.
