Developmental skills for children include five main areas: Cognitive, Social and Emotional, Speech and Language, Fine Motor skills, and Gross Motor skills. Physical Therapists work with the whole child but will typically focus on Gross Motor skills and their physical development.
Physical development for children is best learned through an atmosphere of play. Every moment of play contributes to a child’s development. Play is beautifully linked to affect emotions and cognition in a continuous cycle of sensory input and motor output.
A child that has the opportunity to experience a variety of sensory inputs during their routines through Visual (seeing), Auditory (sounds/hearing), Olfactory (smells), Gustatory (taste), Tactile (touch), Vestibular (sense of head movement in space/balance), and Proprioception (sensations from muscles and joints of body) will enhance optimal learning and motor output (developing new physical skills).
Gross motor skills involve using the large muscles in the torso, arms and legs and begin in the first year of life including rolling, sitting, crawling, pulling to standing, cruising, and the progression to independent walking.
Why Are Developmental Skills Important?
These important milestones of infancy are crucial to strengthen muscles and prepare a toddler and child for higher level play skills such as running, jumping, climbing, kicking a ball, catching, and throwing.
Though there are age ranges for when babies and children should achieve certain milestones it is important to understand the importance of following the developmental sequence (and not so much how early they achieve a milestone) in order for them to have good foundations for continued learning throughout their lifetime.
I definitely think that babies and children have their unique personalities with different motivating play interests but its important to understand that infants and children are not “lazy”-if they seem so, there may be an underlying sensory-motor cause or problem.
How Does Pediatric Physical Therapy Help With Developmental Skills?
Pediatric physical therapists can help when motor delays happen for various reasons and provide skilled intervention to help them get back on track and help parents understand why movement matters.
There are “Red flags” of motor development at different ages/stages that a physical therapist is trained to identify and can evaluate to find the underlying reasons. They will work with the physician and parent to develop a plan of care that can provide appropriate treatment strategies and should always include parent education.
