Crawling got quietly deleted from the milestone list

For decades, crawling felt like a rite of passage every baby had to pass. But in 2022, when the CDC and the American Academy of Pediatrics overhauled their official developmental checklists, they removed crawling as a milestone entirely. The reason is simple: many perfectly healthy babies skip it. Some scoot on their bottoms, some roll or 'commando' crawl on their bellies, and an estimated 1 in 7 never crawl on hands and knees at all before pulling up to walk.

The 2022 update changed something even bigger. Old checklists listed what 50% of children could do by a given age — meaning half of all kids were 'behind' by design. The new milestones describe what 75% of children can do, so if your child hasn't hit one, it's a clearer, calmer signal to ask, not a coin-flip. The update also added checklists for 15 and 30 months, ages that previously had gaps.

The takeaway for parents isn't that crawling is bad — it's that development has many valid routes to the same destination. What matters more than the specific mode of movement is that a baby is finding some way to get around and explore, and steadily gaining new skills over time. A missing milestone is a reason for a conversation with your pediatrician, not an automatic alarm.