Giggle, Wiggle, And Roll: Infant Motor Skills Connected To Brain Development

There are many reasons that explain why small and youngsters need to move. Early movement experiences are critical to the neural stimulation required for your child’s brain development. An infant’s brain is chock-full of brain cells at birth and over time these cells form as much as 15,000 connections with other brain cells. It is the first three infant-to-toddler years that the majority of these connections are made. Physical activity and play during infancy has a crucial role in the sensory and physiological stimulation that creates more of these connections in the brain.

Physical development in early childhood can be stunted when small children fail to have enough exercise. Commonly, babies are spending upwards of 60 waking hours per week in confining strollers, carriers, and strapped into car seats, for example. This isn’t just confining to your little one, it doesn’t give them the important tummy or floor time. Placing your youngster in the upright position all the time, and not giving proper time on the floor, tells the brain to start preparing for walking and skip over the steps of rolling over, creeping and crawling. Motor development in children starts with them playing on the floor. As they become inspired to reach for objects and toys, the child’s brain develops the concept of the goal of movement, and his is how your child is inspired to start rolling, and ultimately learns to crawl.

All parents accept that crawling is a motor development marker in young children but many do not realize why it’s so so importance. When the baby coordinates his movements to move in one direction, he moves the right arm and the left leg and then the left arm and the right leg; this is known as a cross crawl pattern. This pattern permits the two sides of the brain to inter-communicate and interchange interchange information at a rapid rate. A great illustration of how physical development in infancy links together child brain development with motor development in children, the development of “crawling” patterns are the same that later on in life will be used to perform complicated tasks like walking, running, passing one object from one hand to the other, or even taking notes in class while listening to the teacher.

When crawling, the infant’s body must stay in equilibrium or balance. This helps to strengthen the spinal structures and correctly develop the curves in the neck and back, setting the stage for proper spinal development and posture. Always remember your baby or toddler is never “just moving” or “just playing”. Each and every action extends your child’s development in some way, shape, or form..

If for any valid reason a toddler seems to be slow to reach certain motor development stages, it is less vital that they reach these milestones by a certain age but urgent that they do process that stage. Letting a kid skip past learning to crawl and to let them to press right into walking will impact the child’s functionality to engage future development processes of both the motor development variety and the brain development variety. If there is concern that a youngster is suffering a physiological difficulty that’s impeding their development, taking the youngster to a pediatric chiropractor might help to identify if there is indeed a structural disorder in play, and catching issues like this early can usually result in a fast and complete correction.