Your Fitbit displays 11:52 am. Two little footsteps register 459 steps. A heart beating 98 BPM. Temperature 96oF (36oC). With your eyes squinting, eyebrows coming together, your hand over eyes to protect you from the glare of the searing sun … before you - a steady uphill climb! Your destination 100 meters away. You tell yourself it’s not so far, but your body is screaming! Pearls of sweat furiously coming down the sides of your head cementing your hair to your scalp. Tiny bubbles of sweat appear on the top of your nose and upper lip. You take quick puffs of air but your lungs are trying to catch up. Then as you ascend to the 100-metre mark. You hear the splishing and splashing of gloriously cool fountain water. A smile breaks out of your strained, sweaty face and your heart waltzes to a steady beat of joyfulness. Aaaahhhh! Relief on a hot day. The end!
Would you believe me if I told you the paragraph above was actually an introduction to the topic of development of motor skills? It is!
This story shows that you need to be able to perceive something in order to motivate yourself to act. To achieve something, you need to engage both the body and the mind. It is critical for development of language that infants develop both cognitive and motor skills.
Speech development is linked to motor development?
You might be wondering why a speech and language therapist should be even concerned about motor development. The answer is this: speech and language therapists are concerned about brain development and what comes out of the mouth. And there might be more connection to motor skills than you would think. Let me explain how motor skills, speech and language development, and wait for it … cognitive skills are linked.
Motivation and child development
According to the psychologist Esther Thelen (1941-2004), for a child to develop motor skills, they have to be motivated to do something. Motivation starts with perceiving or seeing something in the environment that makes a child want to touch it, feel it, smell it or sometimes even eat it! Let's look at some examples of infant behaviour and subsequent language development.
So for instance, think about an infant who is lying in their cot. If you put a mobile above their cot, they see it and sometimes hear music from it. It seems so interesting that the infant does something about it. They flail their arms and legs to try and get it but aren't successful. Everyday they do the same actions hoping that they will one day touch the mobile.
Then one day while moving their arms and legs, they accidentally catch their foot and discover that they can put their foot in their mouth! They explore their foot with their hands and mouth, and learns that they have five little stubby toes. You see them do that and say something like, “you found your foot! Is that foot yummy?” For days you will see them repeat the same actions until one day they stop.
As a parent you might think that your baby just become bored. In a way this is true. They have mastered their leg and arm movement at the right speed and distance and therefore it is no longer exciting.
With the ability to control those movements, your baby is now able to do other things and explore even further. So if they roll, their perspective is different. They do not see the mobile when they are lying on their tummy. Instead they see things lying on their cot. Or if they crawl they will see things on the floor. Those things might be motivating so they experiment by moving their body, arms and legs until one day, they get close enough to touch it or pick it up.
Talking to your baby
With each little motor milestones, your baby’s perspective is different and you talk to your child using language that matches what is happening at that time. When they are lying in their cot and can only see the mobile, you don’t talk about the cat sleeping on the floor. That’s because your baby can’t see the cat and it won’t make sense to the baby if you talk about the cat when they can only see the mobile. In the same way, you won’t be able to point out a bird flying in the sky if you baby is lying on his tummy - they won’t see it.
So you can see that the language that you use is influenced by what your child can do physically. And what they do physically and the language that you use will make those connections to the brain, helping them grow their cognitive skills.
Typical vs atypical development
The paragraphs above describe what typical development looks like. You give your child opportunities to explore so that your child learns more about their environment. You are a responsive parent -- sensitive to your child’s communication attempts and responding at the right time. Congratulations! There will be others though, despite doing all the right things, that find their child isn’t where they should be. Some children might be bigger and older, walking and running but still not getting their language going.
So let’s say that a child does not have an underlying medical condition or developmental delay diagnosis, like autism spectrum disorder, cerebral palsy or an intellectual disability, to explain why their language skills are not developing. Looking at the child’s motor skills can sometimes give us a clue about why there is a language delay.
Types of motor development
There are two kinds of motor skills; gross and fine motor skills. Gross motor skills describe a person’s ability to do big movements using the larger muscles of our body. For example we use the big muscles of the legs to walk, run and jump. Fine motor skills describe a person’s ability to do small movements using the small muscles of our body, like moving our finger tips to button a shirt or hold a pencil to write. The fine motor skills require more control so that the actions done by those muscles are accurate.
Our motor skills develop in a sequential pattern. There are two patterns – cephalocaudal and proximodistal patterns. Cephalocaudal pattern is the sequence of growth that starts from the top of the body and works its way down to the bottom. For example an infant’s neck muscles gain strength and stability before the shoulders and the trunk of their body. The same sequence occurs in the head area, so that the upper parts of the head (i.e., eyes and brain) grow faster than the lower parts (i.e., jaw). Proximodistal pattern is where the sequence of growth starts from the centre of the body and then moves away from the centre towards the limbs. For example muscles controlling the trunk and arms of the body develop before the control of the hands and fingers mature.
Interaction between gross motor skills and fine motor skills
The centre of the body is the spine and it is the spine that supports our posture. A child needs a stable posture to be able to explore the environment. It is through using the big muscles that a child can explore and learn about the words used to describe how a toy feels, how big it is or how smooth it feels. It is through exploration that a child can climb a chair and understand the concept of high/low or tall/short. Or feel exhilaration when they come down a slide. Only when children do these things can they know and understand what these experiences truly mean.
Once a child develops gross motor skills, the begin to develop fine motor skills. These use the smaller muscles that are farther away from the centre of the body, like the fingers and toes. Did you ever wonder why a child does not learn to walk and talk at the same time? Well, walking uses big muscles and talking uses small muscles.
Speech development and fine motor skills
So what does talking have to do with the fine motor skills of the hands? Remember that there are two patterns of development; one that goes from centre of the body to the sides of the body, and one that goes from the top of the body to the bottom. The brain develops first, before control of the muscles of the mouth for talking. When a child is exploring using their big muscles, the information they are getting from those muscles is helping the top of their body (the brain) to develop. This is the reason why children understand things before they are able to produce words that come out of their mouths.
If you listen to the first sounds that babies make, they babble and say “mamama”, “dadada”. These babbles are made using the same positions of the tongue, mouth and other parts that make us talk. As the muscles below the mouth gain more strength and control, you will notice that the sounds that children make become more sophisticated. For example they will be able to say the /k/ sound. For a child to say the /k/ sound, they need to control the tongue to go back, the back part of the tongue touch the roof of the mouth, and control the airflow so that the muscles of the lungs work just enough to allow the vocal folds to close, open quickly and a small puff of air escape while the tongue moves forward - and then you hear /k/. It is a mouthful to say how all those muscles work and it would be easier to demonstrate it. From describing all of these small muscle actions you can see how this control is important for the development of speech, language and cognition.
Remember: development is not linear
Here’s a bit of a disclaimer – although I have portrayed a very linear progression of motor, language and cognitive development, a child’s overall development is not linear. All those areas of development interact with each other in ways that will be influenced by so many factors. So expectations for every child are different. If you are concerned about your child’s development, it is always wise to consult with a professional.
References:
Sanders, J.O., Qiu, Z., Lu, X., Duren, D.L., Liu, R.W., Dang, D., Menendez, M.E., Hans, S.D., Weber, D.R., & Cooperman, .R., (2017). The uniform pattern of growth and skeletal maturation during the human adolescent growth spurt. Scientific Reports, 7:16705. DOI:10.1038/s41598-017-16996-w
Santrock, J.W. Child development. Fourteenth edition. (2014). McGraw-Hill Education, NY, USA
