Is it better when kids learn to talk and walk later?

Faith's gotten her 1-year inoculation today for Hepatitis A and the last shot for her pneumococcal jabs today.

While at the paedi's, her doctor and I were chatting about her growth and development amongst other things. He remarked that she had a rather cheeky grin and seems to be a mischievous baby. Indeed, this little baby of ours, while petite, is big on cheek and also getting more playful as each day passes.

At this stage, Faith seems entirely contented to be crawling her way around the house and not the least bit interested in cruising nor walking. When I have tried to hold her by the armpits and walk her, she usually struggles to be put down on the floor and once sitted, will crawl away.

Given that the acceptable age range for babies to walk is quite wide (9-18 months), I am not in the least worried that she's not showing interest in walking yet. Every time I tell my mom about my observation of Faith's disinterest in walking, my mom would say that kids who learn to walk at a later stage are actually better, although she couldn't tell me the reason why. By better life, I had thought she meant that they will have good fortunes. I had laughingly dismissed that as one of those old wives' tales.

Was telling the paedi about what my mom said when he asked if Faith's walking. His immediate reaction was that my mom was right. I looked at him incredously and said, "Isn't that old wives' tale?"

"No, no... its true. They do better in life...", he said.

The reason, he said was that kids who walk later spend more time crawling, building up a stronger foundation for when they actually learn and start to walk. I didn't ask for further explanations but after some googling, I've only managed to find on Dr Sears that late walkers may be less accident-prone.

Told my mom about it when I returned home, and she was like "Yah lah! Its true what. I told you already. Your grandma used to tell me that...". Her point was that the older generations do have great wisdom to share. What they however lack was the actual explanations for these supposed "old wives' tales" to convince new generations like myself :)

Anyways, the other little tidbit of information that I got from Baby Center was that late talking babies are supposed to be more intelligent, like Einstein :) That's a relief since Faith's not keen to call me Mummy or Louis, Papa, anytime soon. Sure, she babbles a lot, mainly baby gibberish that no one can comprehend.

She loves "singing" loudly to the music that I play off my cellphone or whatever music she hears. For no apparent reason, she might start yabbering non-stop. The only word that she masters successfully is "mum-mum", which is baby-speak for food or that she wants to eat. However, its a little hard to qualify that as an accepted English word although Faith seems to know what's her priorities :)

As always, I know that different babies develop at different pace. Louis and I are confident that Faith would learn to walk and speak at her own pace. Right now, we're enjoying her very much and while she can be a handful, she's a lot of fun too. And we wouldn't have her any other way.

The above picture is a fairly recent one of her eating her first sphagetti. I was trying to introduced pasta to vary her daily servings of porridge for both lunch and dinner. She was initially rather enthusiastic about it. After chomping her way through some 10 spoonfuls or so of pasta, she started spitting it out. Oh well... guess she might still prefer her porridge for now. Nonetheless, I would still try pastas again a little later with her.