The knee caps of the babies are a myth now days. Do new born have knee caps? Anyone who has been around toddlers would have realized by now that crawling is possible earlier than tweaking. The ability of them to keep on ticking is another important point of consideration. Until and unless the people around them react with a fear on their face, they are going to bounce back the next instance.
The knees are known to take a majority of the damage as far as toddlers evolve. In a way they seem tailor made for it. The knees of the baby are soft and resemble a rubbery feeling when you touch it. Be it the age of 2or 92, knees are known to work around a lot that helps you to move. An important point emerges where the thigh bone, the shin bone and the femur meet.
The question do baby have kneecaps itself spells out confusion. The main reason for such a situation arising in the first place is that there is no clear cut answer to this question.
When it comes to the question of the knees of your little ones. Once the baby is born they have a patella, but it is made of cartilage and not of bone. This piece that is present in the knee of the baby is gradually going to form into a bone by the process of ossification. A thing that needs to be mentioned is that all the bones tend to start as cartilage and before you are born they emerge into bone. The patella is a single piece of bone which remains intact as it is as a soft piece of tissue before the baby is born.
The process of ossification tends to start at around the age of 3 years. The region around the bone, that is embedded with the cartilage of the patella starts growing together into the bone cap. The entire knee cap does not turn into a full bone till your reach puberty.
Now you might be thinking of the kneecap as an extension of the bone! So the answer to this question is that your baby is going to have one for sure. If you are thinking on the lines that a knee cap is a piece of cartilage that you can connect it to the femur from the middle of the tendon then on all counts your baby is going to have one for sure.
Now the question is if babies do not have knee caps at birth, it holds good for a valid reason as well. The reason for is not that clear, but lack of a hard bone is better when you are aware of the fact that crawling on a hard bone is a difficult task than on a soft piece of cartilage. The kids also tend to fall on their knees a lot as well, so a soft knee cap is less prone to damage as well.