What Are Fine Motor Skills and Why You Should Help Your Child Develop Them
Fine motor skills are tasks that utilize the small muscles of the body like those in the fingers. Fine motor skills are especially important to develop in young children because without them, the performance of common daily tasks—like buttoning, zipping, and turning pages—can become a source of frustration and angst, ultimately damaging the child’s self-concept and setting the stage for problems later on.
More than that, neurological research suggests a strong connection between the development of fine motor skills and cognition. According to brain development expert Joan Lessen-Firestone, Ph.D., “Newly available neuroimaging techniques have provided a…complex explanation for the relationship between fine motor skills and academic success. We used to think that cognitive pursuits activated only the cognitive areas of the brain and motor activities activated only the motor areas of the brain. Neuroimaging techniques have helped us understand much more about the strong neural connections between cognitive and motor areas, and to actually see how certain motor tasks activate both motor and cognitive areas of a child’s brain. So when we move and develop our bodies, we are also improving our minds. Fortunately, there are many easy and enjoyable ways to provide additional opportunities for children to actively develop their fine motor skills at home.”
Some of those ways include encouraging your child to:
- knead dough in the kitchen, or play-doh in the rec room
- squeeze water from a sponge, or wring it from a washcloth
- color with markers and crayons, or cut with age-appropriate scissors, and
- experiment with age-appropriate, small objects like interlocking blocks, pegs, shape sorters, and tinker toys
As you prepare to buy for your developing child this Christmas, we encourage you to keep their developmental needs in mind. While high tech toys may be popular, they may not be the most beneficial. Toys that encourage little ones to engage their own creativity and develop strong motor skills can pay big dividends—for a lifetime.
