Now that school is nearly started for the year, let’s chat about why good muscle control is important for your child to achieve their potential for the school year and life in general!

The skills we learn as babies and children set us up to learn even more complex tasks as adults. As the saying goes, “you need to learn to crawl before you can walk”. Even these tasks are built on by tasks that are learned from babyhood.

Everything that we learn from the day we are born is important to master before we can learn a more difficult task. Babies start with random movements of their arms and legs. When the muscles get stronger from that and the nervous system develops from the information created from these movements, they can then learn to move their body parts by choice. From this they can learn to roll then sit up then crawl. These are all stages of Gross Motor Skills developing.

From crawling babies become toddlers by learning to stand, walk, run and climb etc. Each skill builds on the last one. These are often learnt during play so that makes playing an important part of a child’s development. They often repeat skills over and over to allow them to perfect each one before they start to learn a new skill.

Once a child learns these skills they build the strength and control of the muscles whilst improving their Fine Motor Skills as well. It is also a skill that requires strong, healthy muscle control to be able to sit still and then learn at school.