Robert Malina (1982) suggests that we divide the wide range of motor skills into three rough groups: locomotor patterns, such as walking, running, jumping, hopping, and skipping; nonlocomotor patterns, such as pushing, pulling, and bending; and manipulative skills, such as grasping, throwing, catching, kicking, and other actions involving receiving and moving objects.
In the first eighteen months of life, babies seem pleased to repeat their limited repertoire of motor skills again and again. They kick, rock, bounce, bang, rub, scratch, and sway repeatedly and rhythmically. Such repeated patterns become particularly prominent at about 6 or 7 months of age, although you can see some such behavior even in the first week, particularly in finger movements and leg kicking. These repeated movements do not seem to be totally voluntary or coordinated, but they also do not appear to be random. For instance, Esther Thelen (1981) has observed that kicking movements peak just before the baby begins to crawl, as if the rhythmic kicking were a part of the preparation for crawling.
Thelen’s observation reminds us that the baby’s new motor skills do not spring forth full blown. Each emerges from the coordination of a wide range of component abilities, perceptual as well as motor (Thelen, 1989; Thelen & Ulrich, 1991). Using a spoon to feed yourself, for example, requires development of muscles in the hand and wrist, bone development in the wrist, eye-hand coordination skills that allow you to readjust the aim of the spoon as you move it toward your mouth, and coordination of all these with properly timed mouth opening (Connolly & Dalgleish, 1989).
Most of us are unaware of the complex developmental processes when we watch an infant. What we are stuck with is the daily change in the baby’s behavior and skill.
—Bee, pp. 94–95
Step 2: Read “Motor Development,” adapted from the textbook Lifespan Development, 2/e.