Aren't some children too retarded to learn to walk?

Before we can address this question, we need to explore our definition of the term "learn". It is true that human babies, unlike most animals, cannot walk immediately after birth. Most people "learn" to walk automatically around the age of one without any active intervention or teaching process. The most important and possibly the only necessity for automatic walking is that the motor areas of the brain have not been tremendously damaged.

Experience, or the chance to practice the movements necessary for walking, keeps muscles from atrophying while the brain matures; but lack of experience does not seem to play a vital role in learning to walk. Studies with American Indians and Eskimos who kept their children in papooses as well as children who have been ill or restrained during the first months of life indicate that they quickly "catch up" when given the chance. Damage to the cognitive areas of the brain seems to have little or possibly no effect on learning to walk.

Bleck, 1984, reported that mental retardation had little if any effect on the ability to walk. In 1979, Shapiro, et al, (in Bleck, 1984) studied 152 children with profound mental retardation. These children had neither an acquired nor a progressive degenerative disease. The majority of the children who had no major neurological disability walked by the age of six years; however, only 10 percent of the children who had both mental retardation and cerebral palsy learned to walk. These authors concluded that the major determinant for learning to walk was the lack of brain damage to the motor areas of the brain. Cognition was a far less important determinant.

The conclusions that most experts draw from the existing information is that damage to the cognitive areas of the brain alone may slow down the process of automatically learning to walk but will not preclude walking.