BABY MOVES #8

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.

Regardless of where your baby is in their developmental journey – there is still a LONG road to actually mastering movement skills – to become efficient with those movements – to be more stable in more circumstances. Just because a baby can sit upright, or has started to pull up – it does not mean it’s time to rush the next thing. Unlocking a new way to hold/move the body simply unlocks learning to do that thing well in more ways. It means continuing to integrate, or wire together, all the systems of the body. It means building more tone, endurance and stability in as many positions as possible, which is a foundation to coordination.

Consider this Framework:

Each new milestone can be further shaped by three areas of play that widen and diversify the experience (alongside their interests of course). This model can be applied to sitting, pulling up, rolling, crawling, walking – just about every movement.

1) Play that builds more stability in more situations.
2) Play that practices transitions into and out of positions.
3) Play that integrates senses and combines actions.

Thinking of it as play can help foster tuning into the baby and following their lead. Play is how kids learn, but play can also be shaped to help scaffold skills and development.

Sitting

As sitting upright becomes more stable, look for opportunities to move from self support “tripod” sitting, to one and two handed toy play (transfer toy from one hand to the other, bang and shake), and in different positions of the upper body.

Here is a play by play of the variety possibly in 10 seconds of action:

Playing with things big, small, cause/effect (ramps up 7-9 months) are all part of developing more endurance in sitting. As sitting stability and endurance progresses, watch for how the legs support sitting.

Additional Play Ideas

Similar to the above sitting play – offer objects from the side to encourage rotation/twisting motions and crossing over the midline. This is practice of “seated trunk rotation”.

Support their exploration of transitions from sitting back down to tummy and back up. And Dad, get in some moves too if you can – moving alongside baby helps your mobility and continues to show this part of human behavior to your child.

Transitions (Tummy Time)

Tummy down ground play is the root position for most movements. Rolling to side and back, lifting the trunk, moving into sit, tucking the legs under to crawl (btw ~ 5% kids skip crawling) and eventually on to walking. Repeat as the inevitable falls happen.

Regardless of the path – here are a few ways to promote more muscle tone, stability, and variety of experience.

Continue weight bearing on the forearms, watch for how they shift weight and position the arms under the shoulders, and under the rib cage to push up. Hands under the ribs are for raising the trunk. Hands under the shoulders are for supporting the trunk once getting onto knees. Usually the bottom will rise, kid will be able to “plank”. Tuen into these movement as their patterns build different strength and coordination patterns – and even when they have achieved it, there is still room for growth.

Try it for yourself – how many ways you can get up from the ground laying face down based on hand position as well as knee position? When arms can support weight under straight arm under the shoulders/chest – this means they can support being on all fours.

Continue to encourage rolling. Practice creates cleaner and more efficient movements.

Reaching for objects just out of reach helps to lengthen the range of the movements. Just with early reaching, let them try a few times, then move the object into reach so they get the WIN for all that work – and help keep the motivation high. As they build strength and endurance on arms, they will be able to further explore motions with the legs and feet.

The idea is to look for and promote transitions out of laying on the ground. Roll from tummy, pull to sit, knees to crawl, support to stand – and maybe one day pro surfing? (only if they want, of course)

Pulling Up

Many babies may begin pulling themselves up or onto things around this time (though the range spans the next few months). The additional movements below will help promote the muscles that are involved, and help refine and reinforce those patterns.

If they are showing interest, move the play items a little higher (your lap counts). Place toy or object of interest upon furniture to prompt baby to pull up independently – using their arms to pull themself up.

With baby standing at furniture, a stair step, a cardboard box – place objects in different positions in order to promote baby’s next move – requiring a weight shift when reaching or moving from one side to another.

With baby standing at furniture, place a toy at furniture level within baby’s visual field, 3-4 feet away so that baby must take side steps to get to it. Place toy alternatively on right and left side of baby.

Transitioning up into being more vertical is its own skill – as is transitioning back down onto the ground. Most babies take a while to learn how to lower themselves back down. Make the environment around them safe so they can learn by collapsing/falling vs your help. While that may give some dads a bit of anxiety, learning to not fall down involves falling down.

Take a celebratory break with a hike around the block! Hiking backpacks may make indoor chores and cooking more interesting.

All Fours (Quadruped)

Time on all fours builds strength, mobility, sensory/tactile development. It’s also a very unique visual position. Even if babies move through this phase (or crawling) quickly, there are many unique coordination activities associated with time on all fours, one of the first being the quadruped rocking back and forth.

With baby on tummy, get their attention with toy held above them to prompt trunk and head looking up (extension); once they’re weight bearing on straight arms, you can assist by gently bending their knees (gently press your thumbs into the back of their knees – this is also helpful for diaper changes!!) and tuck their hips to promote quadruped position (on all fours). See gif above for the motion. Support them in quadruped for a few seconds then slowly let go to allow baby to maintain position independently. The idea here is to promote transitions out of laying on the ground.

With baby in quadruped, get attention from different position in front, from the side and behind, to promote side-to-side weight shifting alongside back-and-forth rocking. This is a form of crossing the center / bilateral coordination.

With baby on all fours, cue to return to tummy by gently and slowly pulling the feet back or pushing his hips forward. Try it for yourself – how do you go from all fours to tummy – see if you can do it 4 ways.

Lastly, consider traction and how hard/soft the floor is. If on hard floors,then socks and pants give experience in slipping while bare knees and feet give them extra traction to push against the floor and learn the task in a more stable way.

A Life of Change

Continual change is the essence of life, and every day sees change in the life of a human. Human development scientists look at this through stages of growth and development over life. Growth is defined by rapid changes in size. Development describes changes in form, function, and behavior. Growth, mainly height and weight, are fairly well understood – but development, outside of major milestones, is still very much wrapped in layers of mystery. That said, most researchers agree that there are sensitive periods for experiences that help bolster the next stage – it’s just not clear on exactly what experiences do what and when.

The major stages of the human lifecycle are fetal, infant/baby* (birth to 18 months), toddler* (1.5 to 3 yrs), childhood (4 to 7*, 8 to 12), puberty* (13 to 16), older adolescence, adulthood, middle age, and the senior/senescence years. The quality of experiences (move, think, feel, breathe, sleep, eat) shape the trajectories of each phase, especially in the blocks of highest growth and development marked by *.

At the root of this – all change/growth happens within the biology – with development mostly tied to the brain, in how it tunes and prunes to find efficient ways to guide behavior and get things done. Biology supports this more easily earlier in life, but change at all ages is possible with the right effort.

Here is a Mental Model that helps in thinking about how biology and even motivation work. The brain is built to survive and to be social. The brain does this by trying to manage how the body uses its resources. It’s trying to keep all the internal “stock markets” balanced. It makes those decisions (mostly out of our conscious control) by trying to interpret sensory input (“data” from the body and “data” from the world), and make sense of it (best achieved by running it against past experiences). New experiences take extra energy. There are theories that suggest this is how motivation may work – and may explain how active behavior connects to if the body has the resources to support that.

Here might be a helpful way to think about learning:

We are learning… this takes energy.
We have learned the foundation… this now takes less energy.
We are re-learning or building on learning… this takes energy.
We have put things together… this now takes less energy.

This ties into concepts of perception, scaffolding, and even co-regulation. Babies don’t yet have the range of experiences needed to make sense of things or the brain wiring to best support control of the body. Hard things and lack of understanding can turn into frustration, which can turn into a misuse of energy (tantrum).

As baby navigates new things, it builds their ability to understand the next thing, even more so if the experience was built to help them navigate it. This is most easily seen within movement development, and later in the outcomes of their emotional development.

Baby Biomechanics

To help round out the why of baby movement at this stage, it’s helpful to look at “Baby Biomechanics”. The term biomechanics combines the prefix bio (meaning “life”) with the field of mechanics (the study of actions) and focuses on how the internal forces produced by muscles interact with the external forces on the body.

It’s an important field in elite sport, but equally useful to understand how early life experiences contribute to movement potential.

What is important to understand is that there are technical models and there are efficient models. Technical models are what researchers would say are most optimal or “best”, but since humans have a diverse range in their ability to move biomechanically – the idea of “efficient” comes from how a technical model is applied most efficiently for an individual. Technical models are typically generalized, and efficient models are typically individualized.

In sprinting, for instance, sport science dictates technical models of ground contact times, arm swing, kick dynamics, angle of upper body tilt forward, etc. These are general “rules of thumb” that work on paper and in the lab. Efficient is simply the best/closest implementation of the technical model in any given moment. Efficient implementation is not only tied to the individual body shape/size, but also the goal of why the body would even move. For babies, there are “technical models” for crawling, but yet there is a wide range of how babies implement crawling and find their own efficiencies as they learn and build those patterns over time. Of course, deviating too far from a technical model in anything can cause some challenges – such as you lifting a heavy object with your back instead of better form/technique, which includes layers of nuance in lifting with legs, recruiting glute muscles, keeping core tight, etc.

This is what the entire field of human movement science aims to explore and better understand. As an example of approaches to human movement at this stage, here is a youtube playlist of experts in their field: a pediatrician dad showcasing some range of movements – and a physical therapist dad showing some ways to challenge vertical posture stability of supported standing. Note that if any of these videos create strange feelings within, dig in to where those feelings come from. That’s the brain trying to figure out if it’s worth the energy cost to learn.