When Do Babies Start Walking?

Most babies take their first unaided steps somewhere around their first birthday. The AAP puts it plainly: many babies' first steps come around twelve months, and starting earlier or later is normal. The outer edges usually quoted are roughly nine months at the early end and eighteen at the late one.

What makes that workable rather than useless is that the CDC splits it into two checkpoints. By fifteen months, most children take a few steps on their own. By eighteen months, most walk without holding on to anyone or anything. Those are different skills: three wobbling steps from the sofa to your knees is not the same as crossing a room and arriving intact.

One thing about the ages themselves is worth knowing, because it explains why they may look later than the ones you grew up with. The CDC's checklists describe what 75% or more of children can do by a given age. A milestone appearing at fifteen months does not mean fifteen months is typical; it means most children are already past it by then.

Walking is the last item in a sequence that starts months earlier. At around a year, the CDC's movement checkpoints are pulling up to stand and walking while holding on to furniture. That second one is cruising, and it is the real rehearsal: your baby is practising weight transfer, one leg at a time, with the coffee table taking the balance problem off their hands.

Getting from cruising to walking is mostly a question of nerve. The mechanics are already there; what is missing is the willingness to let go. Some babies cruise for six weeks and then walk. Others cruise for four months and then cross a room on the first attempt, as though they had been rehearsing privately, which in a sense they had.

The wheeled seat sold as a baby walker is one of the few pieces of nursery equipment with a clear position against it. The American Academy of Pediatrics has called for a ban on the manufacture and sale of baby walkers with wheels.

Its position on what they do is blunt: there are no benefits to baby walkers, and they can actually delay when a child starts to walk. That is the opposite of what the name promises, and the reason is not mysterious. A baby in a walker is being moved rather than learning to move. The alternatives the AAP names are a stationary activity centre, which looks like a walker but has no wheels, a play yard, or a high chair.

Floor time and space, which is the same answer as for every other movement milestone and is boring for the same reason it is true. A baby who spends their waking hours in a seat, a carrier or a bouncer is not practising, and practice is the entire mechanism. Clear a stretch of floor, put something worth reaching at the far end, and let the falling happen: falling over is how balance gets calibrated.

Shoes are for outdoors and not much else at this stage. The AAP's position is that in the early months feet develop best when they are not confined in shoes, and that socks are all that is needed to keep them warm. Once your child is walking outdoors they need shoes, and the job of those shoes is protecting the foot from the ground rather than supporting the ankle or shaping the gait.

• Bare feet or socks indoors where the surface is safe; shoes once your child walks outdoors
• Hold both hands rather than lifting under the arms, so your baby carries their own weight
• Push toys with some resistance beat ones that roll away
• Skip the walker; a stationary activity centre is the version that is not a hazard

Eighteen months is the age worth remembering. If your child is not walking at all by then, that is a reason to ask at a checkup rather than to panic, and it is the point at which most paediatricians would rather look than wait another few months.

Two other things are worth mentioning whatever the calendar says. One is a consistent asymmetry: one leg doing noticeably less than the other. The other is a lost skill, meaning something your child could do a month ago and now cannot. Neither means something is wrong. Both mean the question belongs with someone who can watch your child move.