Devices of the Soul (Hardcover)

Chapter 10. Three Notes: On Baby Walkers, Video Games, and Sex

Beware the Baby Walker

The revelations in recent years about the risks of baby walkers ought to be a wake-up call for those parents eagerly buying educational software for their children. The revelations concern those cute little mobile seats with wheels that allow infants to move around in an upright position, with their feet touching the ground, so that they can propel themselves with their own legs. There may be perfectly good reasons for employing such devices in particular situations, and infants seem to delight in them. But my concern now is with the satisfaction many parents take in seeing their little ones “develop strong, well-coordinated legs for early walking.” The general thinking seems to run like this: “The child must sooner or later learn to walk; if we put him in a walker so he can practice using his legs, maybe he’ll learn faster, and surely this would be good.”

Not so — and the reasons ought not to surprise us. Here’s how the Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics summarized one study:

Walker-experienced infants sat, crawled, and walked later than no-walker controls, and they scored lower on Bayley scales of mental and motor development. (Seigel and Burton 1999)

Another study, this one published in the British Medical Journal (Garrett et al. 2002), found “strong associations between the amount of baby walker use and the extent of developmental delay.” Children who spend time in walkers ...