The first year of a child’s life is so exciting, full of surprising turnovers and amazing changes, supported by learning and the acquisition of many skills. Every day is a new day for you and your baby. Your infant discovers the new world around them and you discover your child and their extraordinary abilities.
Early childhood is marked by a fast development of skills. The first development areas are motor, communication and language, cognitive and social and emotional. Those areas overlap and are marked by congruous development, largely depending on each other.
Motor development, together with hand coordination, grasping, eye focus and sound reaction, starts at the earliest stage of their life. It seems like it happens overnight, but it’s not that simple. If you don’t give your child support, it will take time and it might not even work out well.
What Are Motor Skills and Why Are They Important?
Motor skills are very important for children’s health and future quality of life. It is closely connected to cognitive, social and emotional development. For example, when a child starts walking and using their hands, they start exploring their surroundings which represent cognitive development. Consequently, using their legs, arms, hands and fingers leads to increased needs for cooperation and hence communication. Social and emotional skills develop through communication.
Motor development involves physical growth, strengthening of bones and muscles and the ability to move in order to explore their surroundings. Gross motor skills include holding heads up, sitting, crawling, walking, running and jumping. Fine motor skills are facial expressions, like moving lips and eyes, and using their fingers, hands and arms.
Here are several tips you can use to help your child develop their motor skills painlessly and diligently.
Be Patient
Parents’ impatience can sometimes be overwhelming to the proper development of a child. Namely, mums like bragging about their children, so you can hear all sorts of things but please always take that with a grain of salt. Mums and even grandmas are known to exaggerate their children’s development and present them as wunderkinder waking at seven months, talking at six, spelling at one and adding and subtracting at one and a half. It seems as though they have finished the first grade of a primary school at the age of one!
Naturally, anyone would like their child to achieve something special. Honestly, this is such a young age to urge and shape them. Give them some rest while they can have it. There is enough time for them in their lives to be moulded and shaped according to life’s needs. For now, they only need to be kids and their primary task is to play and be happy. There will be time for bragging, for now just let them develop their abilities.
The usual course is, upon hearing that a friend’s child already walks and ours doesn’t even think about it, we hurry to put them in a walker thinking they might consider catching up with their maternity ward friends. Thus, we can do them more harm than good. If their body was ready for it, they would already walk.
Watch Them
Children’s development doesn’t go by the book. Books are helpful but they are not to be followed strictly. Always use them for ideas and information, but don’t take them for granted about the appropriate age for any task performance. The age given is estimated according to the experiences which are varying for kids with different kinds of support and in different surroundings.
You need to watch your child in order to help them develop properly. They are just babies and their development is pretty predictable if you are careful enough. You will know their next move and you will be able to help them. For example, if your child has been crawling for days, the natural order of events would be straightening up by holding onto the bed or an armchair. So you have to be there to get their back.
Helpful Toys
There are lots of toys that help children take the right path. I guess you won’t make a mistake with any toy that demands some activity from children, either motor or mental. However, my emphasis is always on natural, healthy toys and I always strongly recommend wooden toys. Still, not all wooden toys. They have to be safe to use, so careful attention is needed when choosing the right ones.
If your baby is in the period of lifting their heads and trying to reach something, you can help them hold their heads firmly with a stimulating enticing toy. You can place your baby on their tummy and place a toy near them. Babies stretch and lift their heads in order to see and reach the interesting toy. During this period, the best toy is a sound toy that would attract their attention. Personally, I choose the natural sounds of wooden rattles as they sound calming and pure compared to squeaky and loud musical toys that may even frighten children and be irritating to parents.
Another suggestion to help keep their heads up is a baby gym with lots of attractive hanging toys. Hung toys sway and even if they touch each other, they make a clapping sound that attracts children’s attention.
Babies won’t sit if they are bored. Again rattles may be helpful as they are adored by all children. Many other toys will do, but don’t give them all at once. Observe, when you think the child has had enough of that one, change it, and give them another to prolong their motivation to sit.
For crawling, similar exercises and toys may be used for head holding. Adapting the distance of a toy, children will become specialized in this activity. Later on, you can put a toy on a couch so that your baby can stretch upwards and stand up to reach it.
Once the baby has stretched and felt the firm ground under their feet they start walking. Here, I strongly recommend walkers that can be pushed in order to make steps. They need support and the walker not only provides support but also entertainment as it has a lot of activities on its sides, so when babies get tired they can sit and play. There are all sorts of wooden baby walkers to choose from. According to your children’s interests and likes you can choose from shapes and sizes to colours and activities they provide.
With pull toys, children keep practising their motor skills and the more they practice the more precise and experienced they are. Therefore, they become faster in their performance and consequently they start running and jumping. Balancing boards considerably improve children’s stability and self-confidence.
Conclusion
Those specific movements of muscles to perform the given tasks make muscles and the whole body grow along with brain development as the brain has to coordinate all those activities. The goal of this activity is to optimize the ability to perform a skill as precisely and successfully as possible and to reduce the energy needed for this performance. In simple language that means that as children become more skilled, they need less effort and energy to do the same activity that at the beginning seemed like they were struggling with.
Finally, after all this talk, you are left to observe your children and choose what’s best for them. You may want to read my article about choosing the right toy, it may be helpful to you. From my experience and knowledge about wooden toys as well as children’s development, I recommend anything that you, as a parent choose after thoroughly reading reviews and experiences, carefully thinking it over and closely observing your child. I believe in parents’ decisions because no one else can wish your child better than you!
