The newborn stepping reflex: why babies make stepping motions, when it fades, and how it connects to learning to walk.
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Hold a newborn upright, feet touching a surface, and they start sketching out steps. It's striking, and surrounded by myths. The most stubborn one: believing this reflex disappears.
Hello there, movement professional,
It's one of the reflexes that fascinates parents the most: you hold the baby upright, their feet touch a surface, and they begin making walking motions, as if they already knew how. It's called the stepping reflex. Plenty of shortcuts circulate around it, including one particularly stubborn claim about its famous disappearance. Let's set the record straight, and along the way put a name to something most pages overlook.
The stepping reflex is an archaic reflex triggered by two conditions met together: holding the baby upright and contact between the soles of the feet and a surface. When you hold them up under the arms with their feet down, they alternate leg movements that look like steps. It's involuntary, driven by the lower levels of the nervous system, with no conscious decision.
Of course this isn't real walking; the baby has neither the balance nor the strength to support themselves. It's a primitive locomotor pattern, an early draft of the rhythmic, cross-lateral organization of the lower limbs. As such, it's also one of the reflexes clinicians check to assess the maturity of the brainstem and the command pathways. The real question, the one everyone asks, is what becomes of it afterward.
Here's what few articles put into words, and yet it's one of the most elegant findings in developmental science. Everywhere you read that the stepping reflex "disappears" in the first few weeks, often around the second month. On the surface, yes. In reality, the work of researcher Esther Thelen (Thelen and Fisher, 1982) showed that it doesn't truly fade away: it gets masked.
The explanation comes down to the baby's growth. In those first weeks, their legs gain mass quickly, and they become too heavy for the stepping pattern to stay visible when the baby is held upright. The most telling proof: if you submerge that same baby's legs in water, which lightens their weight, the walking movements come back. The program was there all along; the mechanics of the body were hiding it. This nuance changes everything, because it replaces the image of a reflex switching off with that of a system in constant interaction with the body's constraints. That leaves the question of how this early draft connects to real walking.
The intuition is appealing: the newborn's automatic step would directly prepare the independent walking that arrives at the end of the first year. That's partly true and partly oversimplified. What this reflex sets in motion are building blocks of locomotion: the rhythmic alternation of the legs, the sole of the foot as a trigger, the cross-lateral coordination between sides. Those blocks will serve a purpose, but voluntary walking is a far broader construction, one that depends on balance, strength, trunk control, and the urge to explore.
In other words, the reflex step is one of walking's preparations, among others. Presenting a direct, mechanical link between the two would overstate the case. That doesn't stop us from working intelligently on the baby's environment to support their motor development as a whole. This is where we can be genuinely useful without overpromising.
A baby's locomotor development doesn't need sophisticated equipment; it needs free movement. Keeping them barefoot as often as possible feeds the sensory life of the sole, the very sensor that triggers the step. Time spent on the floor, crawling, pushing off with the feet, getting over small obstacles, builds coordination far better than any forced exercise. Varying surfaces, mats, foam, grass, enriches the information the foot sends back up.
On the flip side, one point of caution draws consensus: baby walkers and sit-in walkers are not recommended. First for safety reasons, they're a recognized cause of accidents, and also because they place the child in a posture and a weight-bearing pattern that don't match real walking. The idea that they "block the integration" of a reflex is a practitioner's phrasing more than a proven fact, but the advice to avoid them is solid. And all of this fits into a broader logic, our own.
Our reading lines up with what developmental science says: locomotion doesn't come from holding the baby upright; it gets wired from below, on the ground, through sensorimotor exploration. The stepping reflex is only one of the markers of that work in progress, the sign that the circuits for rhythm and weight-bearing are in place. When we read a child or an adult, what interests us is the quality of that locomotor organization (weight-bearing through the foot, the crossed rhythm, the trunk's availability), more than the reflex itself.
It's the same logic as for the rest of the body. We read an output, here walking and weight-bearing, and we trace it back to the sensory inputs that feed it, starting with the foot. Walking isn't corrected by walking more; it's rebuilt by giving the foot and the ground their dialogue back. That's the framework connecting the newborn's first reflex step to the adult's stride.
It's an archaic reflex: held upright with their feet touching a surface, the newborn sketches out stepping motions. It's a primitive locomotor pattern, involuntary, not real walking.
It stops being visible in the first few weeks, often around the second month. But it doesn't truly disappear: Esther Thelen's work showed that it's masked by the legs gaining weight, and that it reappears if you lighten them in water.
It sets in motion certain building blocks of locomotion, like alternating rhythm and the sole's contact, but voluntary walking also depends on balance, strength, and trunk control. The link exists, without being direct or mechanical.
No, they're not recommended, for safety reasons first, and because they place the child in a weight-bearing pattern far from real walking. The best support remains free movement on the floor, barefoot, on varied surfaces.
A clearly absent or asymmetrical response in a newborn warrants a professional's opinion, since this reflex is a marker of sound neurological function. Interpreting it is a clinician's job.
By the LabO RNP team
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