Despite the barrage of mixed messages us parents are inundated with today, there are a couple of themes that never seem to change; being the advantages to your children of physical activity and the benefits of developing gross motor skills at a young age.

Physical activity

It is widely considered that attitudes towards physical activity are established at an early age. Parents therefore have a prime responsibility to encourage their children to engage in active play and prevent problems associated with childhood obesity.

Academic & Social Performance

The best way to ensure children can achieve academically with less effort is to hone motor skills in early childhood. Dr. Jean Piaget, a Swiss child psychologist and biologist, recognised that for children, sensory-motor intelligence represents the foundation for and integration of a child’s later ability to abstract, generalise, analyse, and synthesise natural and social phenomenon. In other words, a child’s ability to understand the world around him and communicate with others is based on early, adequate sensory and motor-skill development and integration, as well as stable emotional development.

A strong and well developed posture and movement (Gross motor skills) form the basis for developing age-appropriate speech, language and behaviour. Which inturn form the foundation for later movement skills, such as drawing or writing and as adults when performing complex and high-precision motor activities like those of surgeons, airplane pilots, violinists, figure skaters, etc.

A well-trained and developed sense of balance and coordinated movement are also fundamental skills in developing attention spans, in concentrating and remaining focused for a long time when learning and communicating.

About the author

Live Play Create are an Australian company dedicated to creating quality memories for today’s busy parents and their adventure hungry kids. We honour the days when it was normal to end up covered in dirt and stay outside for hours …..when play things were treasured, not just used a few times and discarded………. when toys didn’t “over entertain” and not allow for imagination.

All of the team at Live Play Create are parents also and we understand the pressures, which is why we just love Wooden Bike known as the Tike so much.

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Tags: concentration, parenting, TIKE

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010 at 10:00 am and is filed under Children and Parenting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.