Motor Development Discussion

Motor Development Discussion

Motor Development Discussion
TAKE A MOMENT… Observe several 2- to 6-year-olds at play in a neighborhood park, preschool, or child-care center. You will see that an explosion of new motor skills occurs in early childhood, each of which builds on the simpler movement patterns of toddlerhood.

During the preschool years, children continue to integrate previously acquired skills into more complex, dynamic systems. Then they revise each new skill as their bodies grow larger and stronger, their central nervous systems develop, their environments present new challenges, and they set new goals.

Gross-Motor Development
As children’s bodies become more streamlined and less top-heavy, their center of gravity shifts downward, toward the trunk. As a result, balance improves greatly, paving the way for new motor skills involving large muscles of the body. By age 2, preschoolers’ gaits become smooth and rhythmic—secure enough that soon they leave the ground, at first by running and later by jumping, hopping, galloping, and skipping. Motor Development Discussion.

As children become steadier on their feet, their arms and torsos are freed to experiment with new skills—throwing and catching balls, steering tricycles, and swinging on horizontal bars and rings. Then upper- and lower-body skills combine into more refined actions. Five- and 6-year-olds simultaneously steer and pedal a tricycle and flexibly move their whole body when throwing, catching, hopping, and jumping. By the end of the preschool years, all skills are performed with greater speed and endurance. Table 7.1 provides a closer look at gross-motor development in early childhood.

As balance improves, preschoolers can combine upper-and lower-body skills into more refined actions, such as walking on stilts.

TABLE 7.1 Changes in Gross- and Fine-Motor Skills During Early Childhood
AGE

GROSS-MOTOR SKILLS

FINE-MOTOR SKILLS

2–3 years

Walks more rhythmically; hurried walk changes to run

Jumps, hops, throws, and catches with rigid upper body

Pushes riding toy with feet; little steering

Puts on and removes simple items of clothing

Zips and unzips large zippers

Uses spoon effectively

3–4 years

Walks up stairs, alternating feet, and down stairs, leading with one foot

Jumps and hops, flexing upper body

Throws and catches with slight involvement of upper body; still catches by trapping ball against chest

Pedals and steers tricycle

Fastens and unfastens large buttons

Serves self food without assistance

Uses scissors

Copies vertical line and circle

Draws first picture of person, using tadpole image

4–5 years

Walks down stairs, alternating feet

Runs more smoothly

Gallops and skips with one foot

Throws ball with increased body rotation and transfer of weight on feet; catches ball with hands

Rides tricycle rapidly, steers smoothly

Uses fork effectively

Cuts with scissors following line

Copies triangle, cross, and some letters

5–6 years

Increases running speed

Gallops more smoothly; engages in true skipping

Displays mature, whole-body throwing and catching pattern; increases throwing speed

Rides bicycle with training wheels

Uses knife to cut soft food

Ties shoes

Draws person with six parts

Copies some numbers and simple words

Sources: Cratty, 1986; Haywood & Getchell, 2009; Malina & Bouchard, 1991.

Fine-Motor Development
Fine-motor skills, too, take a giant leap forward in the preschool years. As control of the hands and fingers improves, young children put puzzles together, build with small blocks, cut and paste, and string beads. To parents, fine-motor progress is most apparent in two areas: (1) children’s care of their own bodies, and (2) the drawings and paintings that fill the walls at home, child care, and preschool. Motor Development Discussion.

Self-Help Skills.
As Table 7.1 shows, young children gradually become self-sufficient at dressing and feeding. But parents must be patient about these abilities: When tired and in a hurry, young children often revert to eating with their fingers. And the 3-year-old who dresses himself may end up with his shirt on inside out, his pants on backward, and his left snow boot on his right foot! Perhaps the most complex self-help skill of early childhood is shoe tying, mastered around age 6. Success requires a longer attention span, memory for an intricate series of hand movements, and the dexterity to perform them. Shoe tying illustrates the close connection between motor and cognitive development, as do two other skills: drawing and writing.

Drawing.
When given crayon and paper, even toddlers scribble in imitation of others. Gradually, marks on the page take on meaning. A variety of cognitive factors combine with fine-motor control to influence changes in children’s artful representations (Golomb, 2004 ). These include the realization that pictures can serve as symbols, improved planning and spatial understanding, and the emphasis that the child’s culture places on artistic expression.

Typically, drawing progresses through the following sequence:

· 1. Scribbles. At first, children’s gestures rather than the resulting scribbles contain the intended representation. For example, one 18-month-old made her crayon hop and, as it produced a series of dots, explained, “Rabbit goes hop-hop” (Winner, 1986 ).

· 2. First representational forms. Around age 3, children’s scribbles start to become pictures. Often children make a gesture with the crayon, notice that they have drawn a recognizable shape, and then label it (Winner, 1986 ). Few 3-year-olds spontaneously draw so others can tell what their picture represents. But when adults draw with children and point out the resemblances between drawings and objects, preschoolers’ pictures become more comprehensible and detailed (Braswell & Callanan, 2003 ).

A major milestone in drawing occurs when children use lines to represent the boundaries of objects, enabling 3- and 4-year-olds to draw their first picture of a person. Fine-motor and cognitive limitations lead the preschooler to reduce the figure to the simplest form that still looks human: the universal “tadpole” image, a circular shape with lines attached, shown on the left in Figure 7.4 . Motor Development Discussion.

· 3. More realistic drawings. Five- and 6-year-olds create more complex drawings, like the one on the right in Figure 7.4 , containing more conventional human and animal figures, with the head and body differentiated. Older preschoolers’ drawings still contain perceptual distortions because they have just begun to represent depth (Cox & Littlejohn, 1995 ). This free depiction of reality makes their artwork look fanciful and inventive.

LOOK AND LISTEN
Visit a preschool or child-care center where artwork by 3- to 5-year-olds is plentiful. Note age differences in the complexity of children’s drawings.

FIGURE 7.4 Examples of young children’s drawings.
The universal tadpolelike shape that children use to draw their first picture of a person is shown on the left. The tadpole soon becomes an anchor for greater details that sprout from the basic shape. By the end of the preschool years, children produce more complex, differentiated pictures like the one on the right, drawn by a 6-year-old child.

(Left: Reprinted by permission from Artful Scribbles by Howard Gardner. Available from Basic Books, an imprint of The Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 1982. Right: From E. Winner, “Where Pelicans Kiss Seals,” Psychology Today, 20[8], August 1986, p. 35. Reprinted by permission from the collection of Ellen Winner.)

The complex drawings of these kindergartners in Suzhou, China, benefit from adult expectations that young children learn to draw well and from the rich artistic traditions of Chinese culture. Motor Development Discussion.

Cultural Variations in Development of Drawing.
In cultures with rich artistic traditions, children create elaborate drawings that reflect the conventions of their culture. Adults encourage young children by offering suggestions, modeling ways to draw, and asking them to label their pictures. Peers, as well, discuss one another’s drawings and copy from one another’s work (Braswell, 2006 ). All of these practices enhance young children’s drawing progress.

But in cultures with little interest in art, even older children and adolescents produce simple forms. In the Jimi Valley, a remote region of Papua New Guinea with no indigenous pictorial art, many children do not go to school and therefore have little opportunity to develop drawing skills. When a Western researcher asked nonschooled Jimi 10- to 15-year-olds to draw a human figure for the first time, most produced nonrepresentational scribbles and shapes or simple “stick” images resembling preschoolers’ tadpolelike shapes (Martlew & Connolly, 1996 ). These forms seem to be a universal beginning in drawing. Once children realize that lines must evoke human features, they find solutions to figure drawing that follow the general sequence described earlier.

Early Printing.
When preschoolers first try to write, they scribble, making no distinction between writing and drawing. Around age 4, writing shows some distinctive features of print, such as separate forms arranged in a line on the page. But children often include picturelike devices—for example, a circular shape for “sun” (Ehri & Roberts, 2006 ). Only gradually, between ages 4 and 6, as they learn to name alphabet letters and link them with language sounds, do children realize that writing stands for language. Motor Development Discussion.

Preschoolers’ first attempts to print often involve their name, generally using a single letter. “How do you make a D?” my older son, David, asked at age 3½. When I printed a large uppercase D, he tried to copy. “Dfor David,” he proclaimed, quite satisfied with his backward, imperfect creation. By age 5, David printed his name clearly enough for others to read but, like many children, continued to reverse some letters until well into second grade. Until children start to read, they do not find it useful to distinguish between mirror-image forms, such as b and d and p and q (Bornstein & Arterberry, 1999 ).

Individual Differences in Motor Skills
Wide individual differences exist in the ages at which children reach motor milestones. A tall, muscular child tends to move more quickly and to acquire certain skills earlier than a short, stocky youngster. And as in other domains, parents and teachers probably provide more encouragement to children with biologically based motor-skill advantages.

Sex differences in motor skills are evident in early childhood. Boys are ahead of girls in skills that emphasize force and power. By age 5, they can broad-jump slightly farther, run slightly faster, and throw a ball about 5 feet farther. Girls have an edge in fine-motor skills and in certain gross-motor skills that depend on balance and agility, such as hopping and skipping (Fischman, Moore, & Steele, 1992 ; Haywood & Getchell, 2009 ). Boys’ greater muscle mass and, in the case of throwing, slightly longer forearms contribute to their skill advantages. And girls’ greater overall physical maturity may be partly responsible for their better balance and precision of movement.

From an early age, boys and girls are usually encouraged into different physical activities. For example, fathers are more likely to play catch with their sons than with their daughters. Sex differences in motor skills increase with age, but they remain small throughout childhood (Greendorfer, Lewko, & Rosengren, 1996 ). This suggests that social pressures for boys, more than girls, to be active and physically skilled exaggerate small, genetically based sex differences.

Children master the motor skills of early childhood during everyday play. Aside from throwing (where direct instruction is helpful), preschoolers exposed to gymnastics, tumbling, and other formal lessons do not make faster progress. When children have access to play spaces appropriate for running, climbing, jumping, and throwing and are encouraged to use them, they respond eagerly to these challenges. Similarly, fine-motor skills can be supported through daily routines, such as pouring juice and dressing, and through play that involves puzzles, construction sets, drawing, painting, sculpting, cutting, and pasting.

Finally, the social climate created by adults can enhance or dampen preschoolers’ motor development. When parents and teachers criticize a child’s performance, push specific motor skills, or promote a competitive attitude, they risk undermining children’s self-confidence and, in turn, their motor progress (Berk, 2006 ). Adult involvement in young children’s motor activities should focus on fun rather than on winning or perfecting the “correct” technique.

ASK YOURSELF
REVIEW Describe typical changes in children’s drawings during early childhood, along with factors that contribute to those changes.

CONNECT How are experiences that best support preschoolers’ motor development consistent with experience-expectant brain growth of the early years? (Return to page 128 in Chapter 4 to review.)

APPLY Mabel and Chad want to do everything they can to support their 3-year-old daughter’s motor development. What advice would you give them?