- As an occupational therapist,
parents often ask me what they can do
to help their baby learn to sit.
After watching this video,
you are going to know what age babies
typically start sitting independently
and most importantly, five key activities
that you can do with your baby right now
to help them learn to sit independently.
But before we get into it,
make sure you click on that free PDF document
in the description box below
which covers the developmental milestones
you can be expecting for your little one
in their first year of life.
This will give you an invaluable peace of mind
as you'll know what to be expecting
and when to be concerned.
Also, if you wanna make parenting significantly easier,
make sure you start now by subscribing to my channel
where you learn the tips and tricks
I've learned over the last 10 years
practicing as a pediatric occupational therapist
and being a mom to two children.
So babies learn to sit up independently
anywhere from six to nine months of age
and generally there's a natural progression
they will go through.
So firstly, before your baby can sit independently,
they need to have sufficient head control.
So they need to be able to hold their head upright,
without any support from you.
Once they've got head control,
they're then able to start sitting with support from you,
either at their rib cage
and as they get stronger, it'll move to their mid torso
and then at their hips
and then once they've got that trunk control,
you'll be able to move your hands away completely,
and your baby might be able to sit propping up on toys
or using their arms and placing them on the ground
to prop themselves up into sitting.
And then their muscles continue to get to get stronger
and then they're able to see independently,
where they don't need to use their arms
to help them prop up into sitting
and they start reaching out with that arm,
as they reach their body adjust to that change in balance
and then they're able to coordinate their muscles
to bring them back up into sitting.
So once your baby has good head control,
so they can hold their head out without your support,
then you can start working on
developing their sitting skills
by practicing these different sitting positions.
So the first position you can do
is when you're holding your baby in sitting
when they're either on your lap
or when you're sitting on the floor
and they're on your lap,
in that position, you can provide support to them
at the ribcage
and then as they get stronger,
you start to move your hands down their torso,
so that it's just on the hips.
What you can do once they're just requiring support
at their hips,
is start to gently and slowly tilt their body to the side
very slightly,
and then you'll notice
that your baby will kind of activate those side muscles
and bring them back up into sitting.
So it's helping to continue to strengthen those muscles
that are required to bring them back up into midline.
Another sitting position you can do with your baby
is when you're sitting on the floor with them,
you can place them in between your legs,
so your legs are out straight
and then you place your baby in between your legs,
when they're in this position
and they're around that four months of age,
you can provide additional support at the rib cage
and then as they get stronger,
you start to lower those hands down to their hips
and then you remove those hands completely
and essentially your thigh provides them with side support.
So as they start to lean to the side
which they're going to do
'cause they're still working on balance,
they can use your thighs
so they'll put their arm on your thigh,
and then they'll help bring themselves back up into sitting.
And as they get stronger still,
you can move your legs further apart
so that your baby will have to do more adjustments,
because they've got more flexibility
in falling more to the side.
Once your baby's able to see in between your legs
when you're sitting on the floor
and they're just needing the support
provided by your thighs,
you can move to using a nursing pillow or a Boppy pillow
or some cushions that surround your baby
when they're sitting.
So what you do is you place the nursing pillow
on the ground,
then you place your baby in between that curve
and essentially the nursing pillow
provides your baby with support
particularly when they're going to fall to the side,
it gives them something to fall onto.
But the other thing is as they lean to the side,
they might be able to use their arms to prop themselves up
on that cushioning,
to bring themselves back up into midline.
And the next sitting position you can do with your baby is,
you can place a toy directly in between their legs.
So in this video, I've used a baby wipe dispenser.
So you place it between their legs
and then you help position their hands on top of the toy
so that essentially they can prop themselves up.
You might wanna put the pillows around their body
so that if they do topple over there's that cushioning
or the other option if you don't wanna use a toy
is that you can place your baby on the floor
and then you put their hands on their legs
or on the ground, directly on the ground
so that they propping up at that point.
Now the second tip is when you're practicing sitting
with your baby, you want to do it for short burst
every wake period during the day.
And that's because sitting itself
is really really difficult, it's tiring for our babies,
we want them to enjoy the activity.
So you just do it for short bursts
and then you go back to tummy time or lying on their back.
Now you might feel like
that's a lot of additional activities to do with your baby,
I guarantee you, it's not actually gonna be that hard
to bring it into your day
because at some point in every waking period,
you are going to be holding your baby in sitting
either on your lap or on the ground.
So you just need to think about
where you're placing your hands
and that additional support you're providing a baby
and as they get stronger,
start to move those hands down their body
or completely off
so that they have to use those muscles to sit.
Now the third tip is make sure you use toys or yourself
to motivate your baby to practice the skill of sitting.
As I said, sitting is really, really hard.
So we use toys or yourself to make sure that they're happy
when they're practicing this.
What you could do is,
you could place the toys directly in front
so they can prop themselves up in sitting
or the other thing is that you could place a toy
at eye level so that encourages them to look up
when they're sitting.
They're not necessarily gonna be reaching out
and grabbing toys initially because it's very hard.
So if you have it at eye level
that encourages them to look up
and try and straighten that back.
Tip four is to encourage lots of tummy time
and giving your baby the opportunity to play
when lying on their back.
Now that's because these two activities
continue to provide an opportunity for your baby
to develop the underlying muscle strength
and control required for sitting.
So tummy time allows your baby
to develop the extensor muscles, so their back muscles,
their neck muscles
and then increase shoulder stability
which is all required for sitting
and the other thing is when they lying on their back
what that helps is when they're lifting their legs,
it activates their core, so their tummy muscles
and when they're reaching out for toys,
they're working on their chest and shoulder muscles.
So we know that for sitting your baby
needs to coordinate the front part of their body
so their shoulder and their chest in their tummy muscles
with their back muscles and their back shoulder muscles
to sit upright.
So we wanna provide an opportunity to develop those muscles.
And the fifth tip that often parents forget to do
is when your baby is going from the ground into sitting,
you need to show them how to do that movement.
So don't ever pull your baby up from lying into sitting
by holding on to their arms and pulling them up.
If you want more information on that,
check out my video which I've done
which outlines why you shouldn't do that.
But what you should be doing
is helping them learn the movement
required to go from lying into sitting
and from sitting into lying.
So you do that every time
you're bringing your baby up into sitting
and when you're moving them out of sitting.
This also provides another opportunity
to strengthen those muscles.
The other reason you want to help them learn
this transition movement from lying to sitting
and sitting to lying
is because it will ensure
your baby doesn't get stuck in sitting
so that when they're sitting,
babies just staying in sitting,
they don't move out of that position
which makes it difficult to progress on to crawling.
So they're the activities that you can do
to help your baby learn to sit.
Make sure you click on that free PDF document
in the description box below
and hopefully I'll see you next week
where I'll share more parenting tips and tricks.
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