If, before being a father, someone had told me about baby gyms, I would have been surprised to imagine weights and devices to strengthen the muscles of babies. Then as a father I learned that they were not exactly that, but some padded blankets with a pair of bows crossing each side and things hanging on them.
Those things that hang are dolls, rattles or mirrors, all of them full of colors, with diverse textures and with different sounds when pressed or touched.
The goal is to have a good time, to be entertained and stimulated with all those colors, with those hanging shapes and with the interaction that occurs when manipulated. However, it usually happens that when they seem to understand how it works the most is when they have to start quitting, because when babies turn six months it is recommended that gyms disappear.
There is no fixed date, but ...
It is not that we have to do it just the day they turn 6 months because it is not that suddenly, from one day to the next, gyms become a dangerous or harmful element for babies. If you like it very much, well, hey, to play some more time with him, enjoy those games that months ago I did not understand and now they are so funny.
Gyms are a limit to the evolution of the psychomotor system
However, if you spend a lot of time playing lying on your back you will spend very few times playing upside down and, for the children's movements to flow, they have to be able to adopt different positions.
For example, by 4-5 months many children are already able to turn face down. Sometimes they have an arm in the middle, which does not let them finish taking the full position, but sometimes they do it in a great way. This means that they begin to be prepared to play in that position.
If at 6 months he still plays with a gym there is not much problem either, but it is better not to let him continue using it in later months, to promote prone play (upside down). They no longer have to play with things that hang, but play with the things that are around.
Promoting its autonomy
We lay the baby on the floor or in a blanket and when he sees that he has nothing hanging he will turn his head looking for something to take or what he will play with. That will be the first step to turn the body and there the first desire to get to things will appear, of trying to catch them.
At that moment he will start thinking about how to do them, to move to them and this is the way in which what I call the bargain, also known as "crawling" like soldiers, which will then evolve, when it has more strength and balance, until the crawl we all know, with straight arms and the culete up.
