Motivating a Blind Toddler to Walk

Let your child practice walking while holding onto something. This builds the child's strength and gives her confidence.

When my daughter was learning to walk, we would take long walks with the stroller. Rather than ride in the stroller, my darling would walk along behind it and hold onto the basket while her dad or I would walk behind her and hold onto the stroller handle.

She also loved to push her highchair around in the kitchen. Fortunately, we had bought one with a wide base and a low center of gravity, so this worked great.

Provide your blind child with plenty of push toys, such as doll strollers, and preschool shopping carts. If the toy is too light and tips over, weight it down with books or canned foods.

As parents of blind children, we need to give our little ones lots of opportunities to explore the world. Often blind children walk inside buildings and on sidewalks, but get little experience walking on uneven surfaces such as grass, gravel, mulch, sand and other surfaces encountered in nature. This is important at every age, but it is especially true for babies, toddlers, and young children as they develop their sense of balance.

Your child also needs a lot of exercise to build her strength and fitness level in order to be able to walk. Often blind children develop low muscle tone which makes it hard for them to achieve their motor milestones. Lots of opportunities crawling, climbing, bouncing and swinging will help your child develop her strength and balance in order to walk independently.

A daily trip to the playground to play, walk on mulch and practice walking up the slide, across the swinging bridge and through the grass will benefit your young blind child tremendously.

A blind child often feels insecure walking in open areas. It can be disorienting, and there is nothing there to grab if they lose their balance. Providing a blind baby with a place where she can get bilateral support can help motivate her to walk faster.

A good place to start is a narrow hallway where your child can grab the wall if she starts to fall in either direction. If the hallway is too wide, you can make it more narrow for her using boxes filled with books or plastic totes containing out-of-season clothes. Another possible location for this is the area between the sofa and the coffee table. Just be sure to cushion edges for those inevitable spills your baby is going to make.

This can be hard for parents and grandparents, but when we do things for our blind children that they can do themselves, we participate in making them passive. Of course, it is easier for our children to stay in one place and have some sighted person bring them everything they need. Who would not want this kind of royal treatment?

The sad fact is, when we treat our children this way, we handicap them by making them into passive blind people who lack crucial life skills, have no confidence in their own abilities, and who wait for sighted people to take care of them. This behavior doesn't seem so bad when the child is two or three years old. When the child is eighteen or twenty we see just how horrifying it is when the young blind adult has an "I can't" attitude and lacks the skills to make his way independently in life.

When my daughter was a baby, I met a blind adult who had been treated this way her entire life. Although she was around 40 years old, her mother always took care of her and did everything for her. Very basic things she should have been able to do for herself, she could not. When her mother died she was utterly helpless and could not find her way from her chair to the door because she was so dependent on her mother., She did not know what to do except sit and cry, and wait for some sighted stranger to have pity on her, so that is what she did. It was horrifying to me as the mother of a young blind child, and I determined that I would not leave my daughter in this kind of situation.

It is still difficult to always make her do things independently. It is faster for me to do things for her or to help her do something rather than wait for her to struggle through, and often in life we are in a hurry. The school bus is here and she is trying to figure out which way her socks go. We are late for an appointment and she is taking the tiniest steps it seems possible to make. Allowing extra time helps, but I don't pretend that I always do this perfectly.

Make a rule of not doing for your blind toddler what he can do for himself. If it is time to eat, insist he come to the kitchen under his own power, whether that is crawling, walking or cruising. When he gets to the kitchen, if he is able to get himself into his chair, insist he do that. Let him do what he is capable of doing rather than mom doing it for him.

When you are going someplace with your child, do not carry him if he can walk. Do not put him in the stroller or the shopping cart. If he can walk, insist that he do it.

This can be difficult at first, because we get into the habit of doing things for our children when they are babies. Sighted children usually start declaring their independence around age 18 months and say, "I can do it myself." Blind toddlers often do not go through this stage and do not develop an "I can" attitude unless we make them.

Expect some loud protests from your blind child about these increased expectations. His protests arise from the fact that life is easier when Mom does all the work, as well as his belief that he is incapable of doing things for himself and is dependent on you to do for him. If you are consistent and let him know you have faith in his capabilities, he will develop a sense of his own mastery and ability that will serve him well throughout his life as a blind person.

One challenge for parents as they start implementing this rule in their child's life is, "How do I know if my child can do this task or not?" obviously, we do not want to be cruel and insist a child do something they are not capable of. The rule is: If your child has ever done it, he has the skill.

I am not talking about insisting your child walk if he has never taken his first steps. I am not talking about making your child walk from his bedroom if he has only ever taken a handful of steps from Mom's hands to Dad's hands. But, if your child can get off the sofa and get himself over to the television when he wants to hear better, then he can get off the sofa and get himself to the kitchen when his lunch is ready. If this is the case, then we need to insist he do it and not go pick him up because it is easier or because he cries and has a fit while waiting for us to do it for him.