Anyone who has chased a toddler across a park knows the feeling. One second they are holding your hand, and the next they are a small blur, running as fast as they can, heading for the gate, the pond, or the busiest corner.Your heart races, you call out even louder, and you think the child has become naughtier, and why won’t they just walk beside me?
5 Oct 2026 | 12:06
Parents, when your child refuses to greet relatives, do you make them say hello or respect their choice?
Many parents quietly carry that concern in their minds, and we tend to associate it with misbehaviour, especially when it happens in public. But toddlers are not tiny adults who have decided to test the rules; they are little furballs of energy who have recently discovered what their legs can do, in a world where everything is new.Psychologists offer different answers with a whole new perspective and might surprise you as to why children run away, and it is not about misbehaviour.
Why do toddlers often run off? Is it about curiosity or misbehaviour?
According to a study published in the National Library of Medicine, locomotion gives infants new chances to explore places, surfaces, objects, and people, and exploration is a main reason they move. The paper also says that toddlers take about 2,400 steps, travel about 700 metres and fall about 17 times in an hour of play. That is a lot of practice, and none of it is aimed at annoying anyone.
They are not always heading somewhere
Another paper found that 15-month-olds moved just as much in rooms with toys as in rooms without them. The paper also cites eye-tracking work suggesting that toddlers look at a destination before walking in only about 16% of walking bouts. Another related paper suggests that moving may be a goal in itself, and that many walking bouts are only one to three steps long. Sometimes, the movement is the point.
While moving little ones are trying to learn
In another review, “Learning to Move,” Karen Adolph argues that infants are “learning to learn” as they master locomotion. Adolph and colleagues also argue that exploration is what connects perception with motor control.A 2019 study in Frontiers in Psychology notes that infants’ curiosity drives them to interact with objects and people on their own initiative, and it found that they showed more gross motor activity once they began walking.
Running is an expected milestone
According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, their 2-year checklist “runs” is one of the milestones that most children, around 75% or more, can do by that age. A toddler who runs is hitting a marker, not breaking a rule.
