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Home › Articles › Behavior › Baby's Gotta Move!

Baby's Gotta Move!

How Movement Affects Baby's Brain Development

By Rae Pica, Children's Movement Specialist

Pages:  1  2  3  4  

Besides the fact that they were built to do so, there are a great many reasons why infants need to move. The truth is, even though their movement capabilities are extremely limited when compared with even those of a toddler, movement experiences may be more important for infants than for children of any other age group. And it's not all about motor development either.

Bounce That Baby!
In the beginning, your baby relies on you for the majority of her movement experiences. As parents have done throughout the ages, you intuitively rock, jiggle, bounce and walk with your infant in your arms. You know that such motions soothe your little one. What you may not know is that this is due to the baby's highly developed vestibular system – the body's sense of movement and balance – that, along with touch, conveys sensation, soothing your child. But the motion and sensation also promote early brain development and even better visual alertness.

Movement, in fact, helps to create nerve cell networks and neural wiring in the brain and throughout the body – in infancy and throughout life. In infancy, you can literally see the relationship between a baby's motor development and the resultant learning. As baby moves from a lying to a sitting to a creeping and finally to a standing position, his perspective changes, as do his perceptions of the world and its possibilities. The more mobile he becomes, the more he increases his knowledge about himself and the people and things around him, acquiring information through his tactile (touch), kinesthetic (muscular), proprioceptive (body awareness) and vestibular (motion awareness) senses. With each new experience, new neural connections are made.


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