Eli5: why do babies sit with perfect posture when they learn to sit, but the older you get, the worse it gets?

Question

Babies sit straight up naturally. But the rest of us have to put effort in to having good posture, why?

In: 1304

Answer 1

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.