Child Physical Development:
Gross and Fine Motor Skills
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This page represents an introduction to child physical development, followed by detailed descriptions of the average physical achievements to be expeceted at various ages.
Child physical development means the way in which children's body increases in skill involving movement. Developmental norms are patterns of growth that a child is expected to follow when growing.
It is dangerous to assume that children are abnormal if they do not all progress in exactly the same manner. Variations will always exist, since each child is an individual developing in their own unique way.
A likely expection is that babies will be mobile (rolling, crawling, creeping, bottom-shuffling or walking) by the time they reach their first birthday. However, a baby may have been concentrating on acquiring fine motor skills, social skills or language skills and may have advanced beyond the average in one or more of these developmental areas.
In the development of gross motor skills, they may not have progressed beyond sitting, but have been absorbing huge amounts of information from the world around them.
Gross Motor Skills
This is the ability of children to use two legs and walk and involves their whole body. The whole-body movements are described as gross motor. Sometimes they are referred to as posture and large movements.
These terms have the same meaning and cover the stages a child goes through in developing control of the body:
- learning to support the head
- rolling over
- sitting
- crawling
- pulling to stand
- walking
- running
- climbing stairs
- hopping
- playing football
- skipping
- riding a tricycle and a bicycle
- standing on one leg
- swimming
- climbing etc.
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Fine Motor Skills
Fine motor skills is the use of the hands in co-ordination with the eyes. This allows children to perform very delicate procedures with their fingers, with the eyes influencing the precise movements of the fingers.
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Source:
Babies and Young Children: Early Years Development (Paperback). Buy from Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
See Also...
Physical Development of Toddlers - At Birth
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