Crawling Is Not on the CDC Milestone List Anymore — Here's Why That's Good News

If you have gone looking for “when should my baby crawl” and come away confused, there is a reason. Crawling is not on the CDC’s developmental milestone checklists at all — it was removed in the 2022 revision the CDC developed with the American Academy of Pediatrics.

That change, and the other one made at the same time, were reported almost everywhere as the bar being lowered. Both readings are backwards. Here is what actually happened and what it means for the baby on your floor right now.

Quick Takeaways

• Crawling was removed from the CDC checklists in 2022 — not because it stopped mattering, but because there was too little data on when 75% of babies do it, and plenty of healthy babies skip it entirely.
• The threshold changed from 50% to 75% of children. The old lists showed the average age for a skill. The new ones show the age by which most children have it.
• That change makes delays easier to spot, not harder. It is a change in how children are screened, not a lowering of expectations.
• A baby who never crawls and goes straight to pulling up and walking is doing something well documented and usually unremarkable.
• What matters more than any single skill is losing one — that is worth a call whatever the checklist says.

Why crawling came off the list

The AAP’s explanation is refreshingly plain: there was little or no normative data on when crawling should be achieved by 75% of children.

That is not a statement that crawling is unimportant. It is a statement that the data needed to put it on a screening checklist did not exist — partly because babies crawl in so many different ways (classic hands-and-knees, the army shuffle, the one-leg scoot, rolling to get places, the bum shuffle), and partly because a meaningful number of babies never really crawl at all. They sit, then pull up, then cruise, then walk.

If you have been quietly worried because your nine-month-old shows no interest in crawling, that is the single most useful thing on this page: the people who build the checklists could not agree on a normal age for it either.

The bigger change: 50% became 75%

This is the part that got reported as “the CDC lowered the standards,” and it is worth understanding because it is close to the opposite.

The old checklists used the 50th percentile — the average age at which children do something. Half of all typically developing children reach an average-age milestone later than the listed age. So when a parent saw their baby miss one, it meant very little on its own, and a pediatrician had no clear signal either.

The new checklists use the 75th percentile — the age by which about three quarters of children can do something.

Think about what that does. If your baby has not reached a milestone that 75% of babies have reached, that is a meaningfully unusual position, and it is a reasonable trigger for a conversation. Under the old 50% lists, missing a milestone put your baby in the bottom half, which describes an enormous number of completely typical children.

The CDC and AAP were explicit that this is a change in developmental surveillance strategy — how children get screened — and not a downgrade in what children should be able to do. The point was to stop the “wait and see” response that the old, fuzzier lists encouraged, and get the roughly 25% who are genuinely behind toward early intervention sooner.

For families who have been through that process, this is the change that matters. Our month-by-month milestone chart reflects the current guidance.

So what should a baby be doing around 9 months?

Rather than crawling, the current checklists focus on things with better data behind them — and note that these are things most babies do by that age, not the average age:

• Gets to a sitting position without help
• Moves things from one hand to the other
• Uses fingers to rake food toward themselves
• Sits without support
• Looks when you call their name
• Reacts when you leave (fusses, watches you go)
• Makes different sounds like “mamamama” and “bababababa”

Notice how many of those are social and communication items rather than motor ones. That is deliberate. Social and language signals carry more diagnostic weight than the specific order in which a baby learns to move.

The signal that outranks any checklist

One thing is worth more of your attention than whether a skill arrived on schedule: a skill that goes away.

A baby who was babbling and stops, who made eye contact and stops, who used a wave or a point and no longer does — that is a loss of previously acquired skills, and it is worth a call to your pediatrician regardless of what any list says about ages. It is one of the few things in early development where the standard advice is not “keep an eye on it.”

Language specifically is where parents most often wait too long. If that is your worry, when babies start talking covers the first-year picture, and toddler not talking at 2 covers the point where waiting stops being reasonable.

What this changes for you

If your baby skips crawling: almost certainly nothing to do. It is common, it is documented, and the checklists no longer ask about it.

If your baby misses a milestone that is still on the list: it means more than it used to, because the bar is now “most children,” not “the average child.” That is a reason to mention it at the next visit — not a reason to panic, and not a reason to wait six months either.

If you are being told to wait and see: the entire point of the 2022 revision was to make that answer less automatic. You are allowed to ask what specifically you are waiting for, and what would change the answer.

If autism is the worry behind the question: motor timing is a weak signal for it either way. The stronger early signals are social and communicative — autism vs speech delay in toddlers covers how those get told apart, and one mother’s account of the early signs covers what it looked like from inside.

The short version

Crawling left the list because the data for it was never good enough, not because it stopped counting. The 75% threshold replaced the 50% one so that a missed milestone finally means something. Both changes were designed to get children to help sooner.

If your baby is not crawling, you are probably fine. If your baby stopped doing something they used to do, make the call.

This article is general information based on the CDC and AAP developmental milestone checklists and does not replace medical advice. Your pediatrician is the right person to raise any specific concern with — and raising it early is exactly what the current guidance is designed to encourage.