Babies sit straight up naturally. But the rest of us have to put effort in to having good posture, why?
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Their spines are shorter, and their bodies are squatter. They don’t bend because not-bending requires basically zero effort.
I think its because when babies are born they’re first becoming aware of their bodies for example learning to hold their heads up or else they will fall over the same goes for sitting up they end up needing to learn to support themselves physically. The older and bigger we get the less we need to support ourselves as our bodies sort of even out if that makes sense. Our heads dont feel bigger than the rest of us (so no real reason to support our bodies with the right posture). Also just general factors such as the work place and how we have to sit / stand for hours, the same with modern technology and sitting at desks ect
It’s actually because of 2 reasons. They are also kind of interlinked.
– firstly babies have very large heads (relatively) and they have a straight spine (that gets bent in and out as we age – which is normal). Having a large and heavy head and a weak neck will make it very hard to hold the head anywhere other than straight over the rest of the body. You can try wearing a heavy helmet and you’ll see that slouching to look at your phone becomes extremely difficult.
– this brings us to the second reason. That is modern society habits. Looking at phones, or writing in schools. We spend a lot of times doing things where we are slouched forward after about age 6,7. This is not natural and this can cause you to just get used to this slouched position. Some muscles become stronger, some weaker and as a result your body adapts to this ‘wrong’ position. Which then feels very unnatural to correct. This is made even worse by the fact that a young body develops around the environment it’s in and sometimes spending your childhood slouched can lead to such changes that will never be naturally corrected.
So how do we change that? It’s very simple actually. Do the thing that makes it worse – less. Sit on the phone less. Walk with your head up more. Some specific exercises can help too those can easily be looked up.
But the advice I’ll always give to any parent is make sure your child does some sort of physical activity. I’m not talking about making them squat 3x their body weight, but do some sort of consistent physical challenge. Be it football, or swimming or running or whatever. From the age of about 7-8 to 18 is the age at which you are making use of the growth hormone. This is basically the age during which your body builds bones and connective tissues that will then be used for the rest of your life.
Not only that but also during a young age people can learn proper(or bad) body patterns (like good posture) that will almost never be broken later even if they stop doing any sports and spend 20 years sitting over the desk. This is why paying attention to this during a young age is extremely important.
I forgot to add that in poorer societies that don’t have modern habits like sitting in cars or over the desk, all of the adults have postures just as perfect as any child.
Baby seats level out their knees to their hips. You’ll find if you sit like that too your posture will naturally be better.
You’d sit upright easily too if you only weighed 10 pounds.
Similar reason why small kids have “so much energy”.
Their heads are enormous and weighty relative to their torso, so they MUST align their spine under it. As we age the size of the torso grows and we can adopt many more postures and retain head control, so we often adopt very low-energy positions and slump, to our detriment in the long run.
One thing to consider in addition to these good answers is that babies are way way less massive than adults and our strength doesn’t necessarily keep up with our volume, so good posture and most effort in general becomes more difficult as we grow.
It’s like how ants have incredibly skinny appendages and yet they lift relatively incredible weights and they don’t really get injured from falling from any height, right – they are *strong for their size*. If you used a Science Ray(tm) to make ants huge like in those horror movies from the mid 20th century they’d just be crushed under their own weight and unable to stand at all because their legs don’t scale up to hold all that weight.
There is an ELI15 for the math at work that demonstrates this called the “cube-square law”, but *very basically* as you grow a creature its capacity for strength goes up by a factor of 2 its volume goes up by a factor of 3. This doesn’t 100% map onto a baby becoming an adult because our proportions change quite a bit, but the general idea is still in play; small things need small strength to hold up, big things require way more strength to hold up.
Because society is a dog and pony show. And poor posture gets the best grades for most moneyx
Because people get fat and lose flexibility. We also sit in chairs that put us in bad postures.
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