THE IMPACT OF BABY WALKERS ON THE NEUROPSYCHOMOTOR DEVELOPMENT OF CHILDREN

This article addresses the issue of the impact of baby walkers on children's neuropsychomotor development. Its scientific relevance lies in the need to discuss ways of providing comprehensive care to children in the sensorimotor development phase. Its social relevance lies in the opportunity to provide a broad public with scientific knowledge and discussions about the negative impact of this device on children's entire physical structure, influencing creative performance, learning and problem-solving ability. This is a subject of extreme scientific relevance and public interest, with few studies taking a holistic approach to it. This is a bibliographical research, based on traditional authors on the subject of childhood and supported by extensive observation of babies in the sensorimotor development phase, at different socioeconomic levels. The baby walker, even though it is a very old device in human history and is widely accepted by parents because it provides comfort to them and not to the children, is still an object that poses great risk to users, such as accidents and traumas, which can be fatal and prevent the healthy and regular development of children, both physically and cognitively, intellectually and creatively, interfering in the process of building children's autonomy. We sought to describe the situations of risk and deformations that it can cause to the child's body structure, as well as possible future problems related to resistance, considering that the absence of physical exercises that strengthen the bones and the cardiac and pulmonary muscles that the child would naturally have to do until reaching the stage where he or she can walk upright is no longer performed.