Stairs

I have no idea when to let my little ones attempt to go up or down stairs. They have been crawling for about 2-3months already and are very good at it, but I am not comfortable with the idea of teaching them the stairs yet - when do you normally start to teach them how to maneuver the stairs?

 

Good question, I'm wondering the same thing. Sophia is able to climb up one step and we only let her do it when both DH and I are watching her. I don't know if stairs should wait until they are walking or what.

 

We have stairs in our house, but only to a storage space and I'm surprised the girls have only now started to get interested in them (spiral stair case). At the sitter's house she has stairs, but since she has hard wood she gates them off. She does have one step that goes from the den to the kitchen and the girls learned to turn around and go down backwards (when they were crawling) and to sit and go down on their bums (when they learned to walk). At 14 months they learned to climb up stairs at my SIL's house (they were walking at the time- started walking at 11 months), and when we go back to my SILs this week (she lives 3000 miles away!), we'll teach them to go down. She is the only one I know who has carpeting on her stairs and below so I figure any falls won't hurt as much as hard wood.

Gosh this is a wordy post... but basically they started learning the basics of steps at 10 months and we've gone slowly from there. GL!

 

DS and DD have been crawing for 4 months now and I let them play near the bottom two stairs when I am watching them just for practice but for the most part...they don't understand that they fall backwards. Just like when they are on the bed and they continue crawling and if I didn't stop them, they'd fall right off.
They just mentally don't get it yet.
Sure they can climb up two steps but they can't get down, unless they fall.
DS is walking, too and I won't let him get near them.

I don't think they are ready to go up stairs until they understand that they are stairs which isn't for awhile.

 

My girls are obsessed with stairs!! They can both climb all the way to the top of our stairs in no time and have been able to do so for quite some time. They are blocked off by a baby gate, so we only let them climb them if we are standing right there. Within the last couple of weeks they have learned how to scoot down the stairs on their tummies as well. I don't worry too much about it because they have no access to them unless we are supervising.

 

Umm...I didn't really teach our DS.

I left them downstairs happily playing when he had just turned 9 months old, and went upstairs to check my e-mail.

Then I heard a pad-pad-pad right outside our office door. He had never even played at the stairs before.

At the time, I was all panicky, because I totally didn't expect that. But people suggested going ahead and teaching him how to climb the stairs the right way. And buying a baby gate, LOL!

 

As soon as they seemed interested, I let my girls attempt to crawl up the stairs. That was around 10 months. They could easily crawl up stairs by 11 months, crawl down backwards by a year. Then they started walking and wanted to walk up and down the stairs. By about 14 months they could both walk up the stairs, and by 16 months they were walking down with no assistance. We have TONS of stairs at my house, a full wood flight between garage and main floor, two tile steps down to living room, a full wood flight up to bedrooms, three carpeted steps up to their room, and two carpeted steps to my bathroom (we live on the side of a mountain). So, stairs were not an option. They had to learn. I was surprised at how easily they learned and how much fun they have on the stairs.

I let them teach themselves early because before they were born I watched a friend of mine have a horrible week a a shared beach house because her two year old couldn't do stairs. A few families rented the three story house, and all of the kids could handle stairs except for this one girl (who had a very over protective mom). She brought gates, but they kept getting taken down by everyone else. So, she spent the week chasing after her daughter and freaking out every time the girl went near the stairs.

At my house currently, we have gates blocking off the full flights of stairs so I don't worry about anyone accidentally tumbling down. When we're all here together we keep the gates open.