Gross motor skills and Fine motor skills
If your child is delayed (and there are good odds that she will be) then you’ll find yourself learning a lot of new vocabulary words in your search to figure out how to best help her catch up.
Gross motor skills involve control of posture, rolling over, pushing things around, grabbing big things and moving them somewhere else, crawling, standing with help, and even walking while you are holding them by the arms and helping. Basically, big muscles doing big movements.
Fine motor skills involve things like picking small objects up, self feeding, and speech. So, smaller muscles doing more refined movements. Picking up one Cheerio and getting it into their mouth is a good fine motor skill.
You will likely discover that your child will take leaps and bounds with gross motor skills for a while (a long while), then will progress with fine motor skills for a bit, and then go back to gross motor skills, then back to fine motor skills. It’s like their little brains can only really work on one skill area at a time. And that’s okay. Encourage play that helps both, but then let your child decide what to do.
Most babies catch up on the gross motor skills first. And these are the easiest for us to help them with. We can also help them with this without them getting frustrated, because it’s easier to keep it at the play level. Another big benefit, the games that help us to help them develope these skills are also usually good bonding games.
Some babies jump right into fine motor skills at some point while others need a lot of help with them. Lots more than they would have if they had learned them at the proper time.
It’s very important to understand that speech won’t happen until their fine motor skills have come a good ways. There are lots of games you can play to help them with their fine motor skills, but it’s important to not take it too fast or work on them for too long. You do not want them to get frustrated. Remember to keep it all a fun game. You may know it’s work, but your little one doesn’t have to.
And, as with everything else, if you think there is a problem then get a professional opinion about it, sooner rather than later. Early intervention is free – it can’t hurt to go through the testing if you have concerns. Sure, give it six months, and if you can see a lot of progress being made then great. But if you aren’t seeing a lot of progress then by all means make some phone calls. We have these little windows of opportunity in which to work on things, so don’t wait too long.