| During the first year of life an infant develops a multitude of new skills. Two of these skills, self-locomotion and wariness of strangers, tend to occur close in time. The current study seeks to investigate if a functional relationship exists between onset of crawling and stranger anxiety. Participants included 160 parents of infants between 6-to-10 months old, who were recruited via social networking sites, the Cognitive Development Project webpage, message boards, a commercially available mailing list, and flyers. Parent-report on infants' self-locomotion and stranger anxiety behaviors was collected. Results suggest a significant temporal relationship between the milestones, where trying to crawl precedes stranger anxiety, which then precedes hands-and-knees crawling. This pattern (present in 51% of infants) is a common, but far from universal, pattern. The current work adds weight to the argument that crawling and stranger anxiety are related in more than a coincidental way. |
