How much does your 1 year old walk to places outside the house?

[prettygirlincrimsonrose]

How do you go from mainly using the pushchair to get to places to encouraging more walking? DS (20 months) can walk and enjoys doing so, usually very quickly away from us. Will hold hands a bit (and knows he has to when crossing the road) but prefers not to and will sit down on the pavement if I insist, at which point I end up picking him up (if we've tried a short walk without the pushchair) or putting him back in the pushchair.

At the moment we tend to use the pushchair to go to places and then have some walking around time in places that feel a bit safer (park, soft play, child friendly museum etc). But I'm a bit worried I default to the pushchair because it's easier for me and I'm pretty sure I'd still have to have it with us even if we set off walking (so lots to carry). I'd like to be better at going at toddler pace and getting DS to start walking to places a bit more, but I'm not sure how to get to that stage.

As an example going to nursery is a 20 minute walk for me with the pushchair involving going uphill and walking on a busy road. Would your 1 year old walk any of that?

My 18 month old doesn't walk to destinations further than 10 minutes (school & the park) it is my choice though as it always takes longer. When we go on days out she does prefer to walk around now, and there are tantrums when we put her back in the pushchair.

My eldest was in the pushchair until 2.5 before we finally stopped using it, by then though she was mostly walking everywhere we went.

At that age with DC1 our walk to nursery was carrier then bus for most of the way, walking for the last 5 minute stretch from the bus stop. Ditto on the way home.

I saved most of my efforts at getting her to walk longer stretches for weekends or trips to the shops and so on when we didn’t need to be somewhere for a particular time - trying to chivvy along a toddler when you’re feeling the clock ticking down to when you need to be at work is more stress than it’s worth.

My DS is the same age and nearly always default to the pushchair because I have a 4yo I need to watch as well and I'd worry about keeping them both safe if he wasn't mostly contained. We do let him walk in safe environments where I know he can't run into a road. E.g we went to a farm park yesterday and he toddled around quite happily for a couple of hours, the same when we went to monkey forest a couple of weeks ago. I use a little life backpack if it's busy just so I know he won't get lost in a crowd and it's helpful to stop him stumbling too. DD stopped using the pushchair at 2y10, pretty much overnight as DD needed it. We did sometimes end up carrying her though.