- Parents, let's talk about baby floor seats.
You've got so many varieties out there.
There's the Bumbo, the Hugaboo,
the Fisher Price Sit Me Up Floor Seat, and many, many more.
Now these products often claim
that they help your baby learn to sit
when they're not yet ready to sit independently
and also work on their fine motor skills.
Today, unfortunately, I'm here to tell you
that's not true at all.
And I'm gonna debunk these myths and give you
some alternative strategies that will definitely
help work on your babysitting's sitting skills
and their overall fine motor development.
(upbeat music)
Before we get into it,
make sure you click on that free PDF document
in the description box below,
which covers what you can be expecting
in your baby's first year of life.
It'll give you an invaluable piece of mind
as you'll know what developmental milestones to expect
and when to be concerned.
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make sure you start now by subscribing
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and tricks I've learned over the last 10 years
practicing as a pediatric occupational therapist
and being a mum to two children.
So let's debunk those myths about baby floor seats.
The first myth we're gonna cover
is that baby floor seats help your baby
learn to sit independently
when they're not yet ready to sit.
Now, this is totally incorrect.
And that's for a number of reasons.
Firstly, when your baby is placed into a baby floor seat
they're actually not yet ready to sit independently.
So to get them into this position,
the equipments such as the Bumbo or the Hugaboo
or the Fisher and Price Sit Me Up Floor Seat
essentially fixes your baby's hips so that they can't move.
And that means that the equipment itself
gives them so much support.
So the seats often come up past their hips,
up near their shoulders and kind of wraps around the baby.
That essentially means that their tummy muscles
turn off because they're not needed to sit upright
because the equipment itself is sitting in that position.
The other thing is sitting is a really dynamic skill.
So your baby needs to develop that ability
to control their head, their neck, their trunk,
and their hips, and their legs when they're in sitting,
and they need to be able to correct
any kind of imbalance in weight.
So when they start to shift to the side
they need to use their trunk muscles
to bring them back to the middle.
When they're sitting in baby floor seats
they don't have that ability
because they're essentially
fixed into that sitting position.
So they aren't able to correct any side movement at all.
So it's not working on that dynamic skill,
which was required for sitting.
And the last reason that this myth isn't true
is that when your baby's sitting in baby floor seats,
particularly the Bumbo,
their hips are placed in posterior tilt,
basically anchor them into sitting.
But when they're placed into posterior tilt
that means that their hips angled backwards,
which means that their back naturally falls back
because gravity is pushing against it.
So to get into a seated position, at this point,
they start to curve their spine and their neck.
This is the exact opposite position that we want
when you're looking at independent sitting for babies.
So it definitely doesn't help on working
on your baby's sitting skills,
but activities that do help in developing
your baby's overall sitting skills
and their muscles that are required to sit
are the general ones that we always recommend.
It's the tummy time.
Tummy time works on increasing your baby's head control,
helping develop their back extensor muscles,
and also shoulder stability.
Now, if your baby finds tummy time difficult,
make sure you check out my video on tummy time
where I cover the four different tummy time techniques
that you can use that are gonna make it easier
for your baby to do tummy time.
And then the other activities that you can do
is letting your baby play on their back.
When they're lying on the floor,
they're reaching out against gravity
to look at toys and hit toys.
But the great thing when they're
lying on the floor on their back
is that they start to kick their legs.
And that works on activating their tummy muscles,
which is a muscle required to sit.
Now, if your baby is starting to sit
for a very short period of time
or their around four months of age,
you can start supporting them into sitting,
and to do that you yourself sit on the floor
and have your legs out straight in front of you
and you place your baby in between your legs.
So essentially your thighs will act
as some side support for your baby,
and they'll be able to kind of
lean on them and prop on them
if they start to fall to the side
and recorrect their sitting balance.
But if they need a bit more support from you,
so they're not able to kind of achieve that seated position
without your additional support,
you can provide support by holding them.
Initially you can hold them at their rib cage,
so around their ribs,
which would give them a lot more support
because you're providing more trunk support,
and as they get stronger,
you can move it to their hips and further down,
and then you can remove it completely.
Now you can also use a nursing pillow
to help your baby when they're not yet able
to sit for a long period of time,
so they can sit for a short period of time
but then they topple over.
The nursing pillow, you just place that around them
when they're in sitting.
And again, that essentially provides them
with side support so that they can
lean on the cushion to bring themselves
back up into sitting if they start to fall over.
And the other added benefit is that
when they do topple over,
which they are gonna do quite a lot
when they're first learning to sit,
it gives them a bit more cushioning,
so it's not a harder fall for them.
So the second myth that these baby floor seats claim
is that it helps promote your baby's fine motor development.
I actually personally think, as an occupational therapist,
whenever I see a child in these floor seats
it actually doesn't promote fine motor development.
It actually hinders it.
And that's simply because the amount of support
that's required to help the baby sit in an upright position
means that the equipment is up so high
that babies generally have their arms
resting out really, really high,
which is really difficult when you're getting them
to try and play and interact with toys.
It's not a functional position.
It's not a position we would encourage at all.
The other reason is, as we talked about before,
when the baby's hip are placed in posterior tilt
and they're having to adopt that
really curved position to sit
then their arms are essentially like this.
And again, it's not a functional position.
It doesn't help work on fine motor development.
My preferred position to work on fine motor development
when they're under four months of age
is generally getting them to lie on their back
and play underneath the play gym,
because that encourages them reaching out
and batting toys and grasping them initially.
When they're over four months of age
I would recommend placing them in a pram,
which is in slight recline
and then placing a toy on their chest,
which they can play with an interact with.
And also when they're about five months
you can start using a high chair
when you provide a bit more support in the highchair.
But definitely from six months, I would put them
in the high chair to work on that
fine motor development if they're not yet sitting.
So those are a lot safer options to do
that are actually promoting good use of their hands.
Now, if you're still thinking about
buying a baby floor seat,
I want to encourage you to think about
how often your baby is actually
going to use this piece of equipment.
So for how many months.
So typically a baby doesn't yet have the ability
to sit upright in these baby floor seats comfortably
until after four months of age.
And that's because that's when they have the head control
and the trunk control to adopt this position
when they're in those baby floor seats.
So if you think about it,
babies typically start to sit independently
for a really short period of time
from anywhere from five to seven months.
So the most your baby is gonna use
this piece of equipment is for two months.
And when they're using it they're probably
only using about 20 minutes a day.
So after that two months you're then gonna need
to put it away into the cupboard.
I would encourage you,
if you're wanting a piece of equipment
that's gonna get your baby off the floor
to give them a different viewpoint of the world,
I would actually recommend buying a baby bouncer seat.
And that's purely because
you can use this piece of equipment
from birth till they start sitting up independently.
So it's, you can use it for six months.
Also, as I said, after about four months
you can start using the pram when it's in slight recline
to bring them up into a seated position.
And after about five to six months
you can start using your highchair
to bring them up into a seated position.
So you don't need to buy another piece of equipment
like a floor seat
if you're buying it purely to get your baby
off the floor and give you some hands free time.
So those are the reasons I wouldn't recommend
buying a baby floor seat, like a Bumbo,
a Fisher and Price Baby Sit Me Up Chair, or a Hugaboo,
and alternative options that you can use,
as well as activities that will develop
your baby's gross and fine motor skills.
Make sure you click on that free PDF document
in the description box below
and subscribe if you wanna make
parenting significantly easier.
And hopefully I'll see you next week
where I'll share more parenting tips and tricks.
(upbeat music)