Encouraging Your Child With Down’s Syndrome to Walk

For those of you coming across this blog for the first time. I’m a qualified registered Osteopath who also happens to work for Father Christmas! We have three children and the youngest is a 4 year old son with Down’s Syndrome.

I’ve written this post on encouraging your child with Down’s Syndrome to walk, hoping that it would help families to speed up the process of helping their children walk sooner rather than later. It is obviously much easier to encourage a smaller and lighter child to be a full time walker than it is when they’re older, so the sooner you can start on this, the better.

I would advise doing these in addition to all the exercises I’ve listed in my post about Encouraging Your Child With Down’s Syndrome to Crawl. The reason is that it is still important to continue strengthening all their key muscles. This will directly help them to progress naturally on to walking and to improve their stability and balance once they get up and going! The easier they find it, the more they will do it, the stronger they will get and the sooner you can throw that buggy away! You will still notice some duplicates here between the walking and crawling exercises. This is on purpose!

Again, the main aims of encouraging your child with down’s syndrome to walk are to strengthen muscles, improve co-ordination, to get and maintain a sense of balance and to not to be afraid of being moved in any direction! Unless the vestibular system (in the ears) is stimulated appropriately children can feel very wary and unstable generally. Therefore it’s really important to move them in all possible directions with and without warning. Obviously start slowly and build up if they are concerned. The rule is ‘whatever they find hard, do more of it!’ I am a firm believer of doing this through play so I’ve tried to come up with as much as possible that can just be integrated in to your normal playing day. Some of these exercises may seem irrelevant but I promise they will all help. DON’T feel guilty if you don’t do them all, they are just ideas. This list is not complete – I’m not sure that it would ever be!

The important thing is to have fun! So – have a read through – have a go and then move on to the ones your little one can’t do yet while continuing on with the ones they can! It’s really important to help them to maintain their strength, so just keep at it through play and even better: accompany with singing and generally acting the fool and soon it will all just happen naturally and won’t feel like therapy!

I personally try to discourage ‘bum shuffling’ because the hips are rotated outwards which is the opposite of what they need for walking. So, the lateral hip rotators end up quite short comparatively, which then need to be stretched and the medial rotators strengthened in order to get the leg in neutral if you like and ready for walking. I personally prefer to try and push through this tendency as quickly as possible. And crawling has several developmental benefits. If your little one is a bum shuffler, then adding massage in to their gluts (buttock muscles) will be helpful to help reduce the muscular tension that builds up around the hip joints as a result.

One more thing – these are not meant to replace any advice given to you from your OTs, osteos and physios! They will be able to give you specific and additional advice for your child.

Right….in no particular order….

Encouraging Your Child with Down’s Syndrome to Walk

1. Carry on with lots of crawling and rolling back and forth across the floor!

2. Make sure your little ones are in the right shoes for their stage – have a chat with your local shoe shop!

3. If you have floorboards make sure they have good grip on their feet while playing at home – either barefeet, rubber soled socks or shoes.

4. Get your child to practice standing up on your lap facing you. This will be really difficult of course but it is all good sensory input.

5. Hold one or both hands and walk up and down any steps you see – in the park, museums, in friends houses…

6. Try getting them to stand on your feet while you walk.

7. Come down slides on their tummies and encourage them to ‘wheelbarrow’ off the end – good for sensory input in to the hands (rough and possibly wet surface) as well as strengthening those all important abdominals.

8. Clamber up slides when there are no children wanting to slide down!

9. Climb up and down rope ladders – parks often have rope ‘things’ for children to climb up or across.

10. Play a game where you both walk on your knees.

11. While they’re standing – get a tea towel / small sheet or pillow case to waft up and down encouraging them to reach up / across and try to grab it.

12. While standing, throw bean bags in to a large bowl. Progress to doing this on a wobble board! Then one leg and the other…

13. Play with a ball – roll it to each other while standing (so bend down, push it, stand back up again and swap hands each time), play catch, kick it…try and put a ball in a bag while standing up – inevitably tricky involving lots of balancing while twisting and turning…

14. In soft play centres or in the summer on grassy slopes in the park – roll down and crawl up any slopes you can find. If the slope is steep enough, place your flat hand under their feet to encourage them to push up and away from you with their legs. When they are happy to stand up, see if they will walk holding your two hands. Then when they are able to walk holding both of your hands, get them to walk up and down the slopes holding just one hand and then on their own!

15. Help them over any humps or slopes or ramps up to slides in the park– place their feet against the bars/ steps to give them something to push against as you help them forwards.

16. Support them and help them ‘clamber’ along

17. Lie them down and hold their legs straight and together while encouraging them to sit up, forcing them to use their abdominals. Let them hold on to your fingers if needs be.

18. Have your child sit on your outstretched legs with their feet on the floor and one hand on their low back/ bottom and one on their chest – gently push them forwards and up to encourage some weight-bearing on their feet and then back to sitting again.

19. Find what they’re interested in – dust pan and brush, small ‘long’ brush you use while standing, the vaccum, pulling laundry out of a bag, loading the washing machine, playing in a pile of duvets….and just get them to do lots of it. Think movement movement movement!

20. Place your child’s favourite toys or snacks at a level that encourages/forces them to be in a high kneeling position as much as possible. E.g. one of the lower stairs, sofa, low coffee table etc as well as at standing level.

21. If you’re feeling uncharacteristically rich you could get one of those toy kitchens that children stand to play at. This will help to keep them upright for longer and also help with role-play and various other motor functions too. Please don’t go and buy one just because I’ve suggested it though – you child will still walk without one!!

22. Pull a chair up to the kitchen work surface and stand them on it (you will need to support them obviously so they don’t fall). Let them watch you do something ‘interesting’ and maybe they could help. As well as standing practice, this might encourage them to go up on to tip toes (foot strengthening). Likewise – put really interesting and tantalising things on the kitchen table and see if they will go up on to tip toes to try and look.

23. Get them to crawl up stairs as much as possible using bait, bribery or whatever you can think of! Sparkly necklaces from the pound shop, tissues, food, noisy toys…get them to push up with alternate legs to make sure one leg isn’t doing all the work. Progress on to walking up sideways like a crab holding on to the banisters if you have any.

24. Wheelbarrow (their hands on the floor and you support their body up and straight as if to help them walk on their hands). Progress to you just holding on to their ankles.

25. While they are on all fours, straighten out one arm or leg at a time and then progress on to one arm and opposite leg and hold for as long as you can up to 10 seconds. Repeat on both sides.

26. You sit on the floor cross-legged and get your child to sit in your lap with their hips and knees bent to 90 degrees. Hold their hands and gently force them forwards and up so that they move in towards standing, then get them to sit again. A good song for this is ‘the grand old duke of york’! There’s also a great 2nd verse – he marched them to the left, he marched to the right, he marched them all the way around /upside down, oh what a silly sight (tickle tickle tickle)!

27. Progress to squatting down and standing up while they face you and hold your hands – do this as much as both of you can stomach! A good nursery rhyme for this is ‘Ring a ring ‘o’ roses’.

28. An extension of no. 27 – get them to help you unpack the shopping – lots of squatting and standing up and lifting.

29. Put all the cushions from the sofa in a line along the floor and get them to walk along them, holding your hand(s) if necessary – this will force their muscles to work harder than on a hard predictable surface.

30. Get them to tidy their own toys with your help – as well as good practice, it will involve a lot of lifting, bending, twisting and all the other lovely muscle strengthening movements.

31. While standing shout ‘hooray!” with their arms straight up – this will challenge their balance in a good way and engage those extra muscles.

32. Find logs / steps / chairs or anything you can do to squats and supported jumps off…after the count of 3 to help with numbers!

33. Encourage clambering on and off the sofa.

34. You could try walking reins on children that are just too scared to let go of your hands. Hold the reins really closely to their backs and pull slightly up so they can tell they are being held. This will enable them to practice walking using their two arms for balance. You can then progress on to one of those backbacks with a single rein that looks less toddler like and can carry a nappy. Tempting though it is to ditch the reins, having something there means that you can slow any falls down for them and in practice means that you are more likely to take them out for a walk because it’s just easier for them and you. It also stops them darting off when they get to that stage and means you can relax a bit more and don’t need to be holding their hand the whole time.

35. Get a ‘baby’ buggy and place a 2 litre bottle of water or in it for extra weight. This will make it more stable and easier for your little one to push around. I prefer this set up to baby walkers as they are more upright and provide more space for the feet while walking!

36. Hold their hands and get them to stand on one leg and then the other.

37. Hold their hands while they practice their balancing – walking along walls, along lines painted on the path, at soft play centres etc etc. Move on to encouraging ‘aeroplane arms’ – arms straight out to the side.

38. For anyone with £8 to spare, you can buy wobble boards off amazon – great for them to stand on to improve proprioception, balance and foot muscle strength etc. And it’s fun AND it’s very good for you too – try standing on one leg at a time with good general posture to improve your own muscle strength! Good old pilates exercise….

39. Once they’re walking confidently, ditch the buggy and go for walks – they choose which way. Get them to stop at roads (use the bobbles in the pavement / yellow lines / curb) and as a reward carry them across. This will help to reinforce that you stop before crossing the road plus is gives them a bit of a rest! Try to resist carrying them if at all possible – coax them with things to look at and touch and looking at the colours of the front doors etc. As time goes on they will build up their strength, stamina and their interest in the world about them.

40. Swimming!

41. Lie them on their backs with their knees bent and feet flat on the floor.  Ask them to push their bottom up in the air enough that you can reach underneath them / roll balls under them.  This will strengthen their buttock and leg muscles!

Please do leave any comments or ask any questions below.  I’d love to hear from you. x

Books you might find interesting:

Gross Motor Skills in Children with Down’s Syndrome: A Guide for Parents and Professionals (Topics in Down Syndrome) [Paperback]
Gross Motor Skills in Children With Down’s Syndrome

Fine Motor Skills for Children with Down’s Syndrome: A Guide for Parents and Professionals (Topics in Down Syndrome) [Paperback]
Fine Motor Skills in Children With Down’s Syndrome

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Emily x