Encouraging your child to walk

Over the past ten months of our travels, Michael and I have fallen into a bad habit. We try to encourage Marlow to walk wherever we go, but she never gets far before asking (and then demanding…) to be carried. She has become so spoiled having both her parents (and big brothers!) with her every day, as inevitably there is always someone willing to carry her for a bit. She ends up like this…

or like this…

or even like this…

This girl has got it good, and you can tell from the look on her face that she knows exactly what she’s doing! : )

But now we’ve gotten ourselves into a bit of a trap. We’re heading to Italy tomorrow where we will spend the next five weeks walking up and down hundreds of steps every day, and the last thing we want to do is to carry our heavy 3-year-old everywhere we go. So I need to have some tricks up my sleeve for encouraging her to walk. I know the promise of gelato will be good incentive for her to walk… but you can’t dangle that carrot all the time.

A couple months ago while we were in Japan I realised that if I gave Marlow her own umbrella to carry, she would walk happily without complaining, which proved that she will walk if distracted – it’s all about getting her to forget she’s walking.

Later, on the Babyccino Instagram feed, we asked our followers to share their tips for encouraging their kids to walk, and people left some great comments.  I thought it’d be helpful to share the tips here and continue to ask readers to come up with more. Here are the tips people have shared so far:

• Bring the dog – let them help hold the leash
• Count how many red cars you go past (or yellow, or green…!)
• Play ‘I spy…’ as you walk
• A kid’s digital camera encourages kids to walk and look for things to photograph
• Scooters!
• Bikes!
• Ask big siblings to help push their little sibling in the buggy
• Let them bring a toy buggy and pretend to push around their own baby

Please share if you have any other tips. I’d love to hear!

Courtney x

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