Having kids can be regarded as one of the greatest reasons for unbridled happiness. Whether you’re disciplining, educating, or quite simply guiding your child at every step, it’s safe to say that being a parent is an experience of a lifetime. While you’re completely right to want the best of everything for your bundle of joy, it’s also important that you do your best as a parent so your child stands the best chance of being great at whatever he or she does.
One such important aspect of your child’s development that you’ll directly influence is the process of acquiring motor skills.
To put things into perspective, your child’s growth and sense of independence is directly related to the mastering of these motor skills. That’s not all! Having good motor control can even help your children develop their cognitive abilities to a great extent.
What are Motor Skills?
For any person or child, motor skills can be broadly classified in to – gross motor skills and fine motor skills. While the former relates to movements involving large muscles such as your legs and arms, the latter relates to movements involving smaller muscle groups such as those in your hands and wrists.
Truth is that mastering both these categories of motor skills is crucial to your child’s overall development. For starters, we’ll just focus on what fine motor skills are all about, how they’re important for your child’s development, and what you can do to improve your child’s fine motor skills.
Why are Fine Motor Skills Important?
When you consider everyday activities — self-care and academic tasks — that your kids engage in, it’s vital that they do it to the best of their abilities. From doing up buttons and using cutlery to sketching and writing, fine motor skills are absolutely essential for performing such everyday tasks. More importantly, fine motor skill efficiency has the potential to significantly influence the quality of the task being performed, its outcome, as well as the speed at which it’s performed as it requires a number of independent skills to work together simultaneously.
If your child doesn’t have the ability to complete these daily tasks, his or her self-esteem can take a major hit. Additionally, your children’s academic performance may get compromised and they may also be unable to develop any kind of independence when it comes to life skills.
How can You Help Your Kids Develop Their Fine Motor Skills
Hand-eye coordination, bilateral integration, object manipulation, and body awareness are just some of the vital aspects necessary to develop fine motor skills. Fortunately, there are a number of fun ways that you can use to enhance your child’s fine motor skill efficiency. Here’s a list of them:
- Using play-dough
- Finger painting activities
- Squeezing out a sponge
- Cutting out paper dolls
- Playing string games
- Making bathroom murals with cardboard
- Coloring activities with broken crayons
By spending time on these simple activities, not only will your kids develop their fine motor skills, they’ll have plenty of fun doing them!
Be the first to comment on "Ways To Improve Your Child’s Fine Motor Skills"