FINE MOTOR DEVELOPMENT IS ASSOCIATED WITH COGNITIVE, SOCIAL-EMOTIONAL AND LANGUAGE COMPETENCIES

Fine motor skills are needed in most everyday activities, such as dressing, eating, and playing. These skills can be achieved by the maturation of the central nervous system and specific motor experiences.

As babies’ brains and nervous systems continue to develop, babies begin to coordinate, combine, and integrate sensory input. This is what researchers call intermodal perception. A baby’s hard-wired need to explore and learn is ready to be satisfied when voluntary movements gradually replace reflexes and are coupled with increasing muscle strength and sensory perception capacity.

Implementation of age appropriate materials for fine motor development should include sensory integration activities. Tactile sensorial activities and practical life activities such as household chores should be considered so as to enhance and encourage maturation of finger dexterity, wrist stability, pincer grasp, palmer grasp and hand arches.

A study on 34 children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) revealed the effectiveness of sensory integration programme in motor skills.

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4. Karim, A. E. A., & Mohammed, A. H. (2015). Effectiveness of sensory integration programme in motor skills in children with autism. Egyptian Journal of Medical Human Genetics, 16(4), 375-380.

The 40 to 65-month-olds were assessed pre and post-treatment using the Peabody Developmental Motor Scale (PDMS-2) and found significant improvement in gross and fine motor skills. The programme helps the children to be more independent and able to function with minimal help in everyday routines. As young children use practical life materials such as pouring water in a glass, sweeping the floor, or buttoning a shirt, the muscles in the hand, wrist and fingers become stronger, thus developing their fine motor ability.

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5. Montessori, M. (1965). Dr. Montessori's own handbook. New York, NY: Schocken Books.

Preschool and home environments should adopt a balanced approach that maintain the importance of fine motor development. An experiment was undertaken to test the effect of Montessori practical life activities on kindergarten children's fine motor development and hand dominance over an eight-month period.

Participants were 50 5-year-old children in four Montessori schools and 50 5-year-old children in a kindergarten programme in a high-performing suburban elementary school. Children were pre and post-tested on the Flag Posting Test, an individually administered test of fine motor skill requiring children to place tiny flags mounted on pins into preset pinholes. Students in the Montessori treatment group demonstrated significantly higher accuracy, speed, and consistent use of the dominant hand on the post-test, adjusted for pre-test differences and gender. Montessori practical life activities involving eye-hand coordination and fine motor skills can be integrated into programmes.

Feeding and eating, albeit a simple part of everyday activities, offer opportunities to instil crucial fine motor skills in children from a young age. Researchers monitored infant’s gross, fine and oral motor development patterns related to feeding. 98 mothers were interviewed when their children were between 2 to 24 months.

Selected developmental feeding behaviours were monitored using in-home interviews conducted by trained interviewers. At each interview, mothers reported children’s age when behaviours first occurred, and took quantitative measurements of their height, weight, body mass index (BMI), body circumferences (waist, hip, and limbs), and skinfold thickness. Mean ages for self-feeding fine motor skills showed children reaching for a spoon when hungry (5 to 6 months), using fingers to rake food toward self (8 to 11 months) and using fingers to self-feed soft foods (13 to 16 months). Findings suggest that infants develop at their own rates and a wide age range for achieving these behaviours should be considered for infant feeding practices.

Infants’ hand preference (lateralised hand-use) is still developing when reaching or grasping objects in their first year of life. Even though most of the children reveal their hand preference by 3 years old, some children’s hand dominance will only become well-integrated at 8 or 9 years of age.

Observing children’s hand preference during their first three years could inform the development of functions, such as manual control (handedness) or speech production which may be influenced by one cerebral hemisphere than the other.

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8. Michel, G. F. (1983). Development of hand-use preference during infancy. In Young, G., Segalowitz, S., Corter, C., & Trehub, S. (Eds.), Manual specialization and the developing brain (pp. 33–70). New York, NY: Academic Press.

9. Michel, G. F. (1988). A neuropsychological perspective on infant sensorimotor development. In Lipsitt, L. P., & Rovee-Collier, C. K. (Eds.), Advances in infancy research (Vol. 5, pp. 1–37). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Lateralised hand-use for acquiring objects refers to the use of one hand more than the other hand (when using only one hand and not engaging in bimanual movements).

Researchers examined 275 infants monthly from 6 to 14 months.

Multilevel modelling revealed that change in lateralised hand-use is unrelated to developmental transitions in infant posture. The development of symmetric hand-use changes significantly with the development of postural skills. Findings suggested that an infant using a consistent hand preference for reaching and acquisition is more lateralised than another infant frequently alternating between the hands. Researchers also found that preschool children who used the same hand to perform a task scored higher on a general test of development than children who switched hands to complete tasks.

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11. Kastner-Koller, U., Deimann, P., & Bruckner, J. (2007). Assessing handedness in pre-schoolers: Construction and initial validation of a hand preference test for 4–6-year-olds. Psychology Science, 49(3), 239–254.

Interestingly, toddlers’ consistent hand preference has effects on language outcomes during preschool years. A study found links between consistency in toddler handedness for fine motor skill role-differentiated bimanual manipulation (RDBM) and language development at 2 and 3 years of age.

RDBM refers to the coordinated movement of both hands that requires differentiation between actions of the hands.

The current study investigated whether consistency in handedness from 18 to 24 months for RDBM predicts receptive and expressive language abilities assessed using the Preschool Language Scales 5th edition (PLS-5) at 5 years old. At 5 years of age, children with a right-mild left handedness trajectory as toddlers scored significantly higher on receptive and expressive language abilities compared to children with a left-moderate right-hand preference. Children with a right-mild left-hand preference for RDBM also scored significantly higher on receptive language abilities compared to children with a right–moderate left RDBM hand preference. Children with left-moderate right and children with a right-moderate left-hand preference for RDBM as toddlers did not differ in receptive or expressive language abilities at 5 years. At a younger age, handedness can impact receptive or expressive language abilities, however, this was not significant for children at 5 years of age.

Children who demonstrate better fine motor skills tend to display higher cognitive competencies. Researchers sought to determine whether information obtained from measures of motor performance taken from 0 to 4 years of age predicted motor and cognitive performance of children once they reached school age.

Participants included 33 children aged from 6 years to 11 years and 6 months, who had been assessed at ages 4 months to 4 years using the ages and stages questionnaires (ASQ). At school age, both motor and cognitive ability were assessed using the McCarron Assessment of Neuromuscular Development (MAND) and the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Version IV (WISC-IV). Results indicated that children who demonstrated higher fine motor performance scored at least three of four cognitive domains at school age. Even though this could be due to the low-risk nature of the sample, the findings add to recent investigations into the relationship between early motor development and later cognitive function and support the need for ongoing research into a potential correlation.

Children with better fine motor skills also seem to do better in academic performance. Researchers studied the relationship between fine motor skills and mathematics achievement.

They examined whether fine motor skills were related to the initial scores and growth rate of mathematics achievement in American kindergartners and first graders. Participants were 244 East Asian American and 9,816 European American children from the US‐based Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS‐K). Results showed that East Asian American children possessed more advanced mathematics achievement and fine motor skills. The development of fine motor skills significantly predicted mathematics achievement over time, and further, it significantly mediated the relationship between ethnic group status and mathematics achievement.

Besides fine motor skills, executive function (EF) seems to be another important factor for academic achievement. A study examined the contribution of executive function (EF) and multiple aspects of fine motor skills to achievement on six standardised assessments in a sample of middle‐socioeconomic status kindergarteners.

3 and 4-year‐olds’ fine and gross motor skills were assessed in a home visit before kindergarten, EF was measured at fall of kindergarten, and Woodcock-Johnson III Tests of Academic Achievement were administered at fall and spring. Higher levels of both EF and fine motor skills predicted higher academic achievement at kindergarten entry, as well as improvement from fall to spring.

Conversely, children with fine motor challenges in early childhood will probably face problems in social and academic competencies. Using Bruininks-Oseretsky Test of Motor Proficiency (2nd Edition), researchers found that the ADHD group had a significantly lower total motor composite score than that of the control group.

Standard scores of four motor-area composites such as fine manual control, manual coordination, body coordination, and strength and agility were significantly lower in the ADHD group than those in the control group. Among the subtests, scores on fine motor precision, fine motor integration, manual dexterity, bilateral coordination, balance, running speed and agility, and strength were significantly lower in the ADHD group than those in the controls, whereas upper-limb coordination was not significantly different between the groups.

Therefore, the above studies have identified additional reasons to encourage fine motor development in young children, asserting a link between fine motor development and subsequent academic achievement. Researchers investigated connections between motor development and academic achievement of children longitudinally from fall of kindergarten until spring of fifth grade.

This study expanded upon another research

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18. Duncan, G. J., Dowsett, C. J., Claessens, A., Magnuson, K., Huston, A. C., Klebanov, P., Pagani, L. S. (2007). School readiness and later achievement. Developmental Psychology, 43(1), 428–1446.

that had identified how early math skills and attention correlated with later achievement in math and reading.

Researchers found that gross motor skills lacked a connection to academic achievement, but fine motor skills were found to enhance cognitive skills later in the elementary years. According to their analyses, emphasis in the younger grades should be on developing children’s foundational skills such as fine motor development and attention over math and science concepts.

Fine motor skills can be used as an important factor along with other effective factors in improving social skills of children. In a study, researchers found significant correlation between social quotient and total score of fine motor skills variable in 85 children.

To test fine motor skills of the examined participants, only their fine motor composite scores were collected. Findings indicated that there is a significant association between fine motor skills with respect to visual-motor skills of hands and social competence and maturity in children. Children with motor problems seem to avoid physical activities thereby causing obesity, social communication disorders, low self-esteem, and poor academic performance.