The act of walking is so universal and so deeply human that it seems almost self-evident that it must develop through a well-defined set of fixed stages—a normal pathway. For almost sixty years, leading researchers and medical institutions agreed, insisting that children crawl, stand, and walk according to a normal developmental timetable. These authorities endorsed a sequence of age-specific milestones that a “typical” child was expected to progress through, based on average ages obtained from large samples of children.4 The presumption that there must be a normal pathway to walking seemed so
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