Crawling is not on the CDC’s 9 month checklist. It came off in 2022 and it was not moved to a later age either. It is simply not there.
So if your nine month old sits, grabs, babbles and has shown no interest whatsoever in getting up on all fours, the blank line you keep staring at on that printout is not a blank the CDC is looking at anymore.
The printout on the fridge
Somebody gives you a milestone chart. It goes on the fridge, and for about six months it is a pleasant thing, because everything on it happens roughly when it says.
Then one line does not, and the chart stops being decoration.
You start checking it more often than you would admit. You start watching your baby on the floor with a slightly different quality of attention, less watching and more assessing, and you notice yourself doing it and feel bad about that too. And there is always, without fail, a baby in the group chat who crawled at six months, announced with a video, and there is no way to receive that message that does not end with you looking at your own baby afterwards.
The chart is probably out of date. Most of them in circulation predate 2022, and this specific line is the one that changed.
What actually changed
The CDC’s Learn the Signs. Act Early. program funded the AAP to convene an expert working group and rewrite the developmental surveillance checklists. The results were published in Pediatrics in March 2022.
The old lists were built on median ages, meaning the point where half of babies can do a thing. The paper is blunt about why that was a problem. Lists based on median ages, it says, might encourage a wait and see approach because half of children are not expected to achieve the milestone by that age.
The new rule is the 75th percentile. A skill only appears at an age where at least 75% of children would be expected to have it.
That inverts what a blank line means. On the old chart, missing something put you in the half who had not got there yet. On the new one, missing something puts you in the minority, and that is the whole point of the signal.
It was not a light edit. 216 milestones across 10 checklists became 159 across 12, and the old developmental warning signs were removed entirely. There used to be 77 of them, and the working group cut them because a second, scarier list was only muddying the message.
Why crawling did not survive
The paper does not go through crawling case by case, so nobody can honestly tell you the exact reasoning. What is on the record is the rule and the data.
The best of that data is the WHO Motor Development Study, which followed 816 healthy children in Ghana, India, Norway, Oman and the USA, assessing them monthly through the first year.
4.3% of those children never did hands and knees crawling at all. They got to walking without ever passing through it.
And the ones who did crawl ranged from 5.2 to 13.5 months. An eight month spread. Compare that to sitting without support, which lands in a much tighter 3.8 to 9.2 months.
Now hold that against the rule. A skill that a real slice of healthy children skip entirely, and that everyone else picks up somewhere across eight months, is a bad fit for a list meant to say most babies do this by now.
What the checklist asks instead
These are the current CDC motor milestones, from Table 6 of the Pediatrics paper.
| Age | Motor milestones |
|---|---|
| 9 months | Gets to a sitting position by herself. Sits without support. Uses fingers to rake food toward himself. Moves things from one hand to her other hand. |
| 12 months | Pulls up to stand. Walks, holding onto furniture. Drinks from a cup without a lid, as you hold it. Picks things up between thumb and pointer finger. |
| 15 months | Takes a few steps on his own. Uses fingers to feed herself some food. |
| 18 months | Walks without holding onto anyone or anything. Climbs on and off a couch or chair without help. Scribbles. Drinks from a cup without a lid and may spill sometimes. Tries to use a spoon. |
Look at what the nine month row is actually testing. Trunk control, and what the hands can do. Not one item asks your baby to travel across the room.
The first thing that expects real ground covered is at 12 months, and even then it is cruising along the furniture. A baby who bum shuffles to the sofa, pulls up and cruises has met that milestone whether or not they ever crawled.
What to do with all that
Bin the printout. Charts, wall posters and baby apps made before 2022 still list crawling at nine months and plenty are still circulating. Work from the current checklist for your baby’s age.
Floor time. The AAP says tummy time can start the day your baby comes home, two or three times a day for three to five minutes, building to 15 to 30 minutes a day by seven weeks, and that it prepares babies for sliding on their bellies and crawling.
This is the one that quietly disappears in the newborn weeks. Between feeds there is sometimes no gap at all, particularly in a cluster feeding stretch, and floor time is the first thing to go. Worth knowing those minutes are doing something for later.
Write down what they can do before the appointment. Not what they cannot. Ten minutes on the floor with a notes app beats trying to remember anything in an exam room while a stranger holds your baby.
Do not wait and see. That instinct is the exact thing the 2022 rewrite was designed to break.
When to call
The nine month visit is already built for this. The AAP recommends standardised developmental screening at the 9, 18 and 30 month well child visits, plus autism specific screening at 18 and 24 months. You do not have to ask for it, but you can ask which tool they used and what it showed.
Between visits, raise it when you notice it rather than saving it. The same Pediatrics paper notes that fewer than a quarter of children with developmental disabilities get early intervention before age three.
And on crawling specifically, WHO is careful about how its windows should be used. They exist to signal the need for appropriate screening when individual children appear late, not to hand out a pass or a fail. The whole checklist is the better instrument.
Milestone anxiety runs deeper in the first year than anybody admits, and the normal range is nearly always wider than parents expect. That goes for the ordinary things too, right down to what turns up in the diaper. If something feels off to you, you do not need a missed milestone to justify asking.
The short version
- Crawling came off the CDC checklists in 2022 and was not moved to a later age.
- The lists now use the 75th percentile, not the 50th. A blank line means minority, not half.
- In the WHO study of 816 healthy children, 4.3% never crawled on hands and knees, and those who did ranged from 5.2 to 13.5 months.
- At nine months the motor list is about sitting and hands. Getting across the room is not on it.
- Screening happens at the 9, 18 and 30 month visits. A concern in between is worth calling about.
Sources
- Zubler JM et al., “Evidence-Informed Milestones for Developmental Surveillance Tools”, Pediatrics 2022;149(3):e2021052138 (doi:10.1542/peds.2021-052138)
- WHO Multicentre Growth Reference Study Group, “Windows of achievement for six gross motor development milestones”, Acta Paediatrica 2006 Suppl 450:86-95
- American Academy of Pediatrics, HealthyChildren.org, “Back to Sleep, Tummy to Play”
- American Academy of Pediatrics, HealthyChildren.org, “Identifying Developmental Disorders Through Surveillance and Screening”
A note on this post. Written and edited by the NewBloom editorial team. NewBloom is not written by doctors, nurses or midwives, and nothing here is medical advice. We read the current guidance from bodies like the AAP, the CDC and the NHS and write down what it says, with every claim traced to its source and named in the sentence where it appears. General guidance is not the same as an answer about your baby. Your pediatrician, midwife or health visitor can see your child and we cannot, so anything here that raises a question about your own baby is a reason to ask them. If something is wrong right now, contact your doctor or your local emergency number. More about how we write these posts.