BABY MOVES #7

NOTE: Most guidelines are built for “birth at 40 weeks”. If your baby came early – it is recommended to “correct” or “adjust for due date”, specifically in movement. *Learn more about corrected age HERE.

It’s only going to get more coordinated from here on out – savor these moments. Here are a few new tools for the movement toolbox.

Try This

Sitting

Place baby in ring-sitting position (knees out, bottom of feet facing toward each other) and support at trunk or by holding hands. Get their attention from in front and slightly above eye level, to promote sitting up. You can also cue this by gently stroking with 2 fingers on the lower back along the spine. You’ll see the spine lengthen upward.

Sitting in tripod will progress to lifting a hand or both hands to reach for something and having the strength to hold up and stabilize the head and the trunk. From here (and some babies may be here) the goal of the activity becomes being able to do this for longer (endurance) to eventually having the strength to reach overhead while remaining stable.

Most babies will find their way to unsupported sitting by 7.5 months, but the range is through around 9 months.

Supported Standing

You’ve likely been doing supported standing and bouncing – and you may have seen baby get really into it in phases of excitement. Feeling the weight of the body through the feet helps with that sense and orientation.

Support the trunk or under the shoulders in a supported standing position, while allowing baby to start bouncing by extending/flexing the legs. You can increase the dynamic of the bounce by changing the surface of the activity. A soft surface (i.e: yoga/gym mat, pillow) will tend to promote more bounce with less pressure. ALWAYS encourage the heels to touch down in standing vs toes.

Reaching and Grasping

Continue to stimulate reaching and grasping from all directions and distances and with objects of various shapes, sizes, temperatures, and textures. Do this for tummy time, side lying, supporting sitting, and supported sitting.

As food and eating enter the routines – this becomes the ultimate playground for reaching and grasping, finding food with the eyes and hands, and bringing that food to the mouth – or close to it…

Another way to challenge the hands is to have them do separate things at one or holding separate objects at once.

Tummy Time

Encourage pivoting in a circle – which helps the arm develop more pushing strength and coordination.

Encourage weight bearing and support on the forearms – what you would do in an army crawl. The progression of this is to be able to grab a toy with one hand while supporting via the other forearm. This leads to the strength to go straight arm and push up – the start of developing strength to move to all fours (hands and knees), to rock back and forth, and lead to crawling.

Encourage rolling practice from tummy time. This can be done by holding objects of interest so the eyes lead the rotation of the head and shoulders. Fun objects may also trigger reaching across the body which prompts the trunk to rotate.

Challenging Control and Stability

We don’t want to make life too easy, but it’s also a balance against making it too hard. As your child develops, tune into their effort level with the “dad as coach” hat on. The concepts of scaffolding and zone of proximal development – they also apply to physical effort (including fatigue) – not just the progression of the skill itself.

As motion becomes more complex and coordinated, watch for control and stability within the movements – specifically in how they maintain and recover when their balance is challenged.

During supported sitting activities, for instance, it’s helpful to provide a slight challenge (while at the same time avoiding excessive stress) in reaching a little further for a toy or playing on a slightly unstable surface like a lumpy blanket or towel. Allow baby to explore loss of balance while reaching forward for a toy, to stimulate protective responses such as extending the arms forward. Learning from failure is also learning; just make sure there is a safe environment to learn in. A big part of babies learning to walk is in learning how to fall safely and in a somewhat controlled way. Exploring this, and the feelings in yourself, in a controlled environment will better help hone your coaching eye, as well as lessen the gasps of the big falls they will likely take.

This challenge can be done in many ways – start with providing light motions in multiple directions to challenge the posture and stability.

Speaking of challenges…

DAD MOVES #3

We have to mention it. Consult your physician before changing your physical activity.

Why are we spending weeks pushing breathing mechanics?
It is seriously that important. It’s foundationally tied to sleep quality, energy levels, metabolism, back pain, stress, anxiety – the list is growing all the time. While there is no “optimal” pattern (we are all individuals) – we are striving to give a foundation for more complete breathing. Complete breathing isn’t just “belly breathing” – it’s about how we breathe (nose vs mouth, deep vs shallow), as well as how the body is supported during movement.

The body wants to be efficient, and regardless of where you are on the journey, or how well you think you move – we all have more efficiency to unlock.

Dad Moves #4, brought to you by elite athlete preparedness coach Alex Bunt, covers the mechanics of using 360 rib expansion and deeper activation of the diaphragm to support the spine between the ribs and the hips and create stability through the spine [YouTube, 11min 37sec]. This is the concept of intra-abdominal pressure.

Building out more complete breathing is about training a pattern. We will always default to the most efficient patterns under any circumstance. Every time you try this, even for a few moments, you are firing and wiring, and building a more complete pattern.

For reference

1) Getting the Diaphragm Moving [YouTube, 1min 52sec]
2) 4 Zone Expansion Progression [YouTube, 5min 26sec]
3) Putting it all Together, full progression [YouTube, 10min]

Movement and Language

The relationship between movement development and language development is complex. It requires more research but currently it’s believed that…

1. Changes in motor skills often precede changes in language development. One example of this is that babies often show quick rhythmic motions of the arms and hands prior to rhythmic babbling (babababa). It is thought that the rhythmic motion of the arms helps the body learn and get practice in creating quick cyclical motions – to then transfer to sound production. It’s also been shown that babies that have been exposed to sign language and gesture based communication also “babble” with their hands.

2. Motor development unlocks new ways in which kids can explore the world, and language gives them new ways to think about objects and how they are used – which then promote new motor exploration. For instance, reaching and grasping means a baby can mouth an object. Mouthing an object helps them learn about how their tongue, and teeth, and jaw, and lips move, which is movement feedback for producing speech.

3. Motor development and language acquisition are not critically dependent on one another, meaning one does not “create” the other. Learning language relies on many things outside of motor development, however, delays in motor development is seen as a risk factor for delays in language development. Specifically delays in fine motor skill development from around 6-12 months (food is a great daily fine motor activity), and of the major milestones of sitting, crawling, and walking. Those major milestones are tied to enabling new opportunities for baby to explore (visually and physically) their environment and build new language due to new motor skills (in typically developing children). When children sit, crawl, and walk – caregivers also tend to change how they communicate – more range in tone usually due to warnings such as not falling off something or not putting things in an electric outlet.

Two ways to support almost any development trajectory are in A) providing a variety of experiences, which translates to new opportunities for whatever systems are firing and wiring at that time, and B) noticing how your communication style changes with respect to their development trajectory and adjusting as needed.

The Ol’ Comparison Game

The windows for the major motor developments are fairly large (see FD25) and they don’t always happen in the traditional order. One’s journey through life consists of millions of experiences that lead to various outcomes – which is why variety and quality of experiences and relationships will always help kids along their journey regardless of where they are. Your daughter will not turn into Serena Williams if she’s walking by 9-months, and your son will not get cut from the Varsity Basketball team if he isn’t walking by 18-months. Consider the big picture: putting extra comparison pressure when a child is under 18 months old might not be so useful considering the next 20+ years of development ahead. Check in on this as a team.

There are few things in life as dynamic as children, where we also have such little experience – we don’t know what you don’t know. It’s human nature to compare and to measure your baby up against reference points – to wonder about how you might compare with others – and this can amplify the comparisons of “why is Sarah’s baby standing and mine isn’t even sitting?”. This gets especially stressy around the walking milestone.

On the flip side, comparison can be helpful in motivating oneself to improve in some area. This is called an upward comparison as part of what psychologists call social comparison theory. But comparing too often, without all of the information, or in ways that frame others as “better than us” – these downward comparisons can fan the flames of contempt.

Different parents, different kids, and those little glimpses of others in person/public/social media – they don’t tell the entire story. It’s impossible to know all their factors, and this is out of our control anyway. Development differences are often tied to what the child focuses on. If one kid “practiced” sitting and hand based motor skills vs tummy time while another was all over the tummy time experience – you’ll likely get two kids that are both doing fine, but are currently specializing in different things.

Babies develop at different rates. Development is not a race. Every child is very different. But if you find the comparisons sneaking in – one way to reduce this is to really anchor down on the values that are most meaningful to you and your family and focus on the things that are in your control. This leaves little room for anything outside of upward comparisons.

Milestones can be easy to fixate on, but in the grand scheme of things, every tiny progression has its own importance. Keeping that in perspective is a useful mindset. Enjoy the journey – support it best you can. If extra insight is needed or if a delay is of concern, the guidelines and milestone charts are there for exactly that, especially when used with the context of what you know about your child.