Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Gross motor skill and fine motor skills

In the early childhood the children go through the development of many different areas. The gross and fine motor skills are, in my opinion, the most important of them.

First, the gross motor skills develop faster than the fine skills so I will write about them first, so this skills are abilities that are acquired in the toddler and early childhood stages. This is the process know as child's motor development. When they reach a certain age, may vary, they are able to walk, run, walk up stair, give little jumps, and many other things. The first element that is develop is the posture, it's a gradual process that starts when the child tries to erect their heads, then it follow when they erect their head while prone and so on until they are able to support on a chair by themselves. With these actions they star to learn about balance.

The action of walking needs a coordination of some things as the balance, the strength to stand upright and put a foot after the other. Al thought this might look simple to us, it is a difficult challenge since they are still trying to master these skills, however, most of the child are able to perform this action around their first birthday. An interesting fact that I found is that in some cases when children have vision problems this may delay the process of walking, even if they have no direct relation to the motor skills , this could be a major setback on the normal development of the child. 


Is in the middle of their firs and the second year is when the parents have to be more careful, this is because the children will start to move around the house, they will start to be more active, a direct result of that will be the increase of the dangerous areas that the children can reach. In this case is responsibility of the parent to create a secure environment for the child. Is in their second year when they begin to be able  to walk backwards, in circles and they, sometimes, star to run. Is in this moment when they become more likely to get injured, because they start to go to places that could be out of their houses, for example the street and yard, parents need to be much more careful in this stage and keep and an eye on the children at all time.


In the early childhood the movements are basically the same, yet they are smoother and more coordinated, this leads to the wide area of movement also the increase on the speed of their actions, having the child practice a sport will increase the coordination the this posses. Is in this stage that children start to control their body movements in a more sophisticated way.

The fine motor skills, is the coordination that occurs between small muscles, as fingers, and the eyes, this also receives the name of manual dexterity,  the level of manual dexterity that a human posses can be directly related to the level of control over the neural system. The fine motors skills are also a sequence of movements to produce a efficient action to master a specific task.







The fine motor skills orders are given from the primary motor cortex, what is interesting about this information is that there is a specific area of the brain that is assigned to the regulation of the fine motor skill, this just give us an idea that these skills are very complex and that a lot of practice is needed in order to master them. 


With the fine motor skills there are many situations that can lead to problems in the development, among these situations are the illnesses, injuries, strokes, congenital illnesses, and others. If a child suffer from any of these problem, they might have problems to develop the fine motor skills.


Resources: Wikipedia

No comments:

Post a Comment