GMA: SIDS Awareness Has Delayed Crawling

May 1 -- It is taking children longer to learn how to crawl, and experts believe it because of the way they sleep.

Since 1994, when the American Academy of Pediatrics began telling parents to put infants to sleep on their backs, the incidence of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome has fallen by more than 40 percent.

But the unexpected side effect is that these infants are crawling later than 6 to 8 months, the standard age at which many baby books say infants should begin crawling.

Dr. Beth Ellen Davis, a developmental pediatrician at Madigan Army Medical Center in Tacoma, Wash., told Good Morning America that the delay is not a problem, because children are not taking any longer to learn how to walk. Instead, some children just skip a step and go directly to walking.

While working for the Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, D.C., Davis and her colleagues published a study in 1998 that followed about 400 babies until they started walking, keeping careful track of the position they slept in.