Is There a Relationship Between Crawling and Reading?

Are reading and crawling connected, and if so, how?

— Marie G.

In 2022, the CDC removed crawling from its list of developmental milestones. Some people were upset! The CDC made the case that many children skip crawling or engage in some form of movement that isn’t traditional hands-and-knees crawling around, and this isn’t a sign of a problem.

Some people objected to this, arguing that a failure to crawl was an early sign of a developmental delay. In my view, this is an inaccurate read of some flimsy data. The CDC experts apparently agree, which is why this came off the milestone list.

However, there is still some sense in the world that crawling is a necessary step and that it wires something in the brain that allows for other development, which could include reading.

This idea is actually quite old; here is a dissertation on the topic from 1967. There is an underlying theory in this literature that the cross-body communication, which is required for crawling, engages some aspect of brain development that is necessary for fully developing language skills (and by definition, reading). However, even in this early dissertation, the empirical tests of the theory fell somewhat flat, showing little or no relationship between crawling skills and reading.

Although this theory may persist, which is presumably why you have heard of it, we have no better evidentiary support. There is simply no reason to think that crawling and reading skills are related.