Your Six Month Old

Six months is roughly where your baby stops being carried through the day and starts acting on it. Most of what changes now is control of the head, the hands and the middle of the body, plus knowing exactly who you are and who you are not. None of it arrives on a schedule, and the schedule you have seen was never a deadline.

What usually changes

Milestone lists describe, they do not require. The CDC defines a milestone as something most children, around three quarters of them, can do by a given age. That means a quarter of entirely typical babies have not done it yet on the day the list says, and are fine. If your baby was born early, the fair comparison is corrected age, counted from the due date rather than the birthday, usually until around two.

With that said, here is what most services publish for around six months.

• Rolls from tummy to back, and pushes up on straight arms
• Sits leaning forward onto their hands, and sitting without hands usually comes later
• Reaches for a toy they want, and takes it straight to the mouth
• Takes turns making sounds with you, blows raspberries, squeals
• Knows familiar people, and studies unfamiliar ones carefully
• Closes their lips to tell you they have finished eating

The mouth is doing serious work here. Putting an object in it is not a phase to be managed, it is the highest resolution sense they have. Consonants also start turning up in the babble, like bababa, mamama and dadada. These are not names yet, however much you want them to be. Naming tends to come nearer nine months to a year.

A milestone describes what most babies do. It does not describe what yours owes you.

The floor beats everything

If you do one thing this month, put your baby on the floor more. Sitting, rolling, shuffling and eventually crawling all come out of time spent on a flat surface with something mildly interesting just out of reach. Tummy time is part of it, and it builds the neck, shoulder and back strength everything else stands on. Time in a bouncer, a swing or a seat is time not spent doing that, so keep the seats for when you actually need your hands.

Use a firm, flat surface at ground level. A rug or a mat, never a bed, sofa or changing table. Clear the area of pillows, loose blankets and anything small enough to swallow, and stay in the room. Short spells several times a day work better than one long one, and if they fall asleep there, move them onto their back in their usual sleep space.

Sleep and food, plainly

On sleep the guidance does not soften with age. Back for every sleep, naps included, on a firm flat separate surface, clear of pillows, bumpers, pods and loose bedding. Never sleep with your baby on a sofa or armchair. Once your baby can roll both ways independently, you still put them down on their back, and you do not need to spend the night turning them over. Details vary a little between countries, so follow your own national body. The AAP in the US, the NHS and the Lullaby Trust in the UK.

Around six months is also when most guidance has solid food starting, alongside milk, which stays the main source of nutrition through the first year. Bodies differ on the edges. Some allergy guidance introduces common allergens earlier than general weaning advice suggests, so take the timing question to your own professional rather than a chart. Whatever you offer, your baby eats sitting upright and supervised, never propped or in a moving car seat, and hard round foods like whole grapes and whole nuts are not given as they are.

New faces get serious

Somewhere around now, and often more strongly at eight to ten months, your baby may go still and solemn with people they do not know, including people who held them happily a month ago. This is a gain, not a problem. They have sorted the world into known and unknown, which requires holding your face in mind while looking at someone else's.

What helps is making the new person boring. Ask them to sit down rather than loom, to talk to you first, and not to reach for the baby. Stay in view. Your baby will usually make the approach themselves within ten minutes, and forcing it costs you an hour.

Skills that go missing for a week

Development is not a staircase. A baby who babbled constantly goes quiet the week rolling arrives. Sleep that was settled comes apart for no reason you can name. Feeding gets distracted. It reads as going backwards and it is usually bandwidth. A small brain runs one big project at a time. Give it two weeks and both things are generally back.

There is one distinction worth holding onto. A skill that pauses while another is being built is ordinary. A skill that is genuinely lost and stays lost is not, and every major body says the same thing about it. If your baby used to babble and has stopped, used to meet your eyes and no longer does, or used to respond to their name and has quietly dropped it, that is a call to your doctor this week rather than something to watch.

Sleep unravels, babbling stops, and two weeks later both come back. That is normal.

What tends to come next

• Sitting without support, then getting into sitting on their own
• Moving an object from one hand to the other, and banging two things together
• Looking for a dropped spoon instead of forgetting it existed
• Long strings of babble like mamamama and babababa
• Lifting their arms to be picked up, and reacting when you leave the room
• Being shy, clingy or wary with strangers

Note what is not on that list: crawling. Plenty of babies bottom shuffle, commando crawl, roll where they need to go, or skip the whole business and pull up to stand. It is a route, not a requirement. What matters more is that they are finding some way to get to the thing they want.

This is general information, not advice about your baby. Anything specific belongs with your pediatrician or pediatric nurse, and earlier is better than tidier. That includes feeding, growth, hearing, movement, a skill that has gone and stayed gone, or a worry you cannot put down. Safe sleep and weaning guidance differ slightly between countries; follow your own national body.

Where this comes from: the CDC, the American Academy of Pediatrics, The Lullaby Trust, the NHS.