What's Going on in There? by Lise Eliot

Author:Lise Eliot [Eliot, Lise]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-57538-8
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-12-13T05:00:00+00:00

Role of the Environment Clearly, motor pathways take a lot of time to establish themselves, and there is little question that the pace of neuromuscular maturation sets important limits on when various motor skills emerge. But it is not the whole story. While early researchers were focused on the broad similarities among babies, recent investigators have focused more on their subtle idiosyncrasies and found that motor development is not wholly a matter of waiting for the right neural circuits to wire up according to some genetic blueprint. Many other factors also play a role, including the pace of sensory development, physical growth, strength, nutrition, motivation, emotional well-being, and yes, even consistent daily practice.

We saw in Chapter 1 that babies reared under conditions of extreme neglect are stunted in virtually every aspect of their development, including their motor skills. It’s not too surprising that neglected babies would suffer in terms of emotional and cognitive development, but their motor delay—many children could not even sit up by one year or walk by two years—show that factors other than neural maturation are involved. An encouraging, loving, and stimulating environment is also essential.

Another example is blind babies, whose sequence of skill acquisition differs notably from that of sighted infants; they roll over before they can raise their chest from a prone position (reversing the sequence of sighted infants) and are delayed in crawling and walking but not in sitting. Unable to see interesting people or objects, blind babies are simply less motivated to develop their locomotor skills. They are also slower to begin reaching for objects, since they are neither motivated to explore them, nor can they use visual cues to guide their hand movements.

The recent trend of putting young babies to sleep on their backs also appears to be having an effect on their motor skill acquisition. This posture, which has proven advantageous in reducing the number of SIDS fatalities, does not permit babies to exercise their arm and neck muscles as much as tummy-lying, a posture that requires them to push up in order to look around and see the world. In one recent study, pediatricians found that babies who slept on their backs were significantly slower to roll over, sit, crawl, and pull to stand than babies who slept on their stomachs. Fortunately, the delay was modest—still within the normal range for each milestone—and does not justify abandoning back-sleeping as the preferred posture for preventing SIDS. Nonetheless, parents should keep in mind the advantages of upper-body exercise in the early months and attempt to give their babies as much “tummy time” as possible during their waking hours.

Each of these examples shows that the sequence of skill acquisition is not perfectly uniform—not “locked in the genes,” as it were, but to a considerable degree dependent on the form of experience in early life. In fact, contrary to the claims of early researchers, who studied a large but fairly homogenous population of babies, there are also small but consistent differences in the developmental schedule of infants from different cultures.

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