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Movement and Brain Development
Tummy Time and Crawling
During the first year, the baby is growing new cells throughout his whole body, including the brain, muscles and skeletal system. Tummy time and crawling affect development of baby’s brain organization and his ability to learn. For baby’s body tummy time and crawling affect core strength, motor development and coordination. The baby’s developmental tasks in the first year are organized through the sequence of developmental patterns and reflexes that begin in utero and continue through his first year of life. The developmental patterns and reflexes are baseline neurological and motor hook-ups that are elicited mostly when a baby is on his tummy.
Long term, research shows that early developmental patterns, including creeping and crawling, underlie children’s abilities in reading, writing and to have good attention in the classroom. In a highly successful K-8 program, children are overcoming reading delays of up to two years by doing developmental movement patterns daily along with other perceptual organizing activities. This research-based program working with school children indicates the value of tummy time, crawling and other developmental movement patterns for attention and learning.
Evolution’s design
These developmental movement patterns evolved with us as we evolved as humans. The developmental movement patterns are wired to be elicited while baby is on his tummy. It’s simply our evolutionary design to come up off the earth with our bellies down as we push and reach upwards through our limbs. These fundamental activities underlie efficient organization of the human brain, mind and body.
Bonding and Individuation
The baby first bonds with his mother, in utero, then in his mother’s arms. Emotional bonding takes place through touch and direct physical contact. After bonding with mom and dad, babies bond with the earth. Bonding and tummy time are so important to the survival of humans that we have built-in neurological reflexes to help babies connect with caregivers and the earth.
Bonding is organized through the baby’s body and mind by the tonic labyrinthine reflex. In this early reflex elicited through holding or lying down, babies are magnetized toward the surface of support, either a caregiver or the earth. (Bainbridge-Cohen, 1993).
In bonding we experience a deep connection and satisfaction in relationship, first with a loving caregiver and then with the earth. Bonding allows the baby to feel fully supported by the earth as an incremental step of separation from parents and for individuation of the child. This primary experience of being supported as an individual is a baseline for crawling, then for taking our standing in the world at 12-14 months. These body-mind movements deeply affect baby’s emotional and psychological development.
Speaking from the view of the baby, in bonding with mom, dad, primary caretakers and with the earth, I know where I am, in a safe place. I receive support and I go towards support. I can feel myself through sensing my movement towards mother and the earth, and I know myself in this sensing.
Babies who are not well bonded with the earth don’t feel safe in the gravitational field. Babies habituated to being on their back or sitting will often be disoriented when on their tummies. Babies needs to feel comfortable on their tummies and sides as well as their backs. Comfort in all three dimensions of the body is a foundation for experiencing internal connections within the body. Comfort in the three dimensions is developed through movement activities on the tummy, sides and back. When a child doesn’t feel his own internal connections, this further reduces safety, and increases stress. Many babies and children who skip tummy time and crawling have difficulty with emotional regulation and develop habituated tension in their backs. This can show up as inability to handle frustration, clumsiness, inflexibility, bumping into or pushing others and other behaviors.
Brain development and movement patterns
Brain and nervous system development takes place incrementally. Baby’s brain is growing and maturing as he does his developmental movement patterns. Beginning with deep structures of the brain communicating through the nerves to and from the organs, the baby learns to self regulate his organ functions of heart beat, breathing and digestion in the first few moment and the first months. Through movement he experiences and knows himself in the peripheral nervous system, shaping organization of the spinal cord, low brain and mid brain. As baby comes into the developmental movement patterns on his tummy, his movement patterns lay down neurological pathways step by step through the low brain, mid brain and high brain. The better organized the lower brain is, the more free the high brain is to do its specialty of higher cognitive function. The foundational work baby does in the first year establishes his brain organization as a baseline for broader choice throughout life.
Brain development
The developmental movement patterns and reflexes of babies organize specific structures of their brains and nervous systems in the first year. Developmental movement patterns are elicited while baby is on his tummy. We then gradually work our way up to crawling and then standing, pushing up from our tummies and through our arms and legs. These earliest movement activities organize the baseline of neural growth and brain pathways as well as motor coordination.
Brain development in the first year takes place through an abundant proliferation of new nerve cells, the reflexes hooking up the brain and the body, and the contact and movement required to elicit the reflexes. The reflexes are so fundamental to brain and body development that they have been called the alphabet of movement (Cohen). With the reflexes as the ABCs, the developmental movement patterns are the words and sentences of movement we see in creeping, crawling, standing and walking.
Why is movement so important to brain development? Why particularly are the developmental movement patterns and reflexes essential to brain development? We can look to studies on academic achievement to see the impact of these earliest movement patterns on cognitive function of the brain.
Pre-academic readiness skills
Brain research applied in educational settings demonstrates that the developmental movement patterns are integral to brain organization and learning. Palmer's applied research in school programs has found that developmental movement patterns are foundational for learning readiness, increasing children's attention, learning and retention. Palmer's brain based research incorporates kinesthetic, vestibular and perceptual stimulation for children from preschol and kindergarten through eighth grade. Daily developmental movement activities build pre-academic skills that enable school age children with academic delays to organize their attention and to organize their brains, nervous systems, and bodies for improved reading gains ranging from 6 months to 2 years in grade level scores. (Palmer, New Visions School)
To understand why these developmental movements and reflexes are so important, let’s take a walk backwards from cognitive function to baby movements. First, many children who have difficulties in reading and writing did not creep or crawl. (Palmer) This is not to say that all children who skip creeping and crawling will fail at reading, as children are masters of compensation. But many children are challenged developmentally and academically. And what are the consequences of able children having to compensate in order to self-organize rather than develop their brains with ease in the optimal sequence provided by nature?
Complex cognitive activities like reading, writing, science and creative work require the development of the neurological pathways between the right and left halves of the brain. The reflexes and developmental patterns involved in creeping and crawling are essential in developing pathways within each side of the lower brain, then in connecting the right and left cerebral hemispheres through the corpus collosum.
Generally, children with learning problems have more immature reflexes. (Goddard). An example of the links between the early baby reflex movements and academic performance are the problems created by immature neck reflexes and attention deficit (ADD).
Head-lifting from tummy-lying is essential for maturation of the neck reflexes. Children who do not develop neck strength have difficulty in crawling and in integrating the symmetrical tonic neck reflex. (Palmer) Studies at the University of Indianapolis find that ADD children are able to better organize their attention after they have fully integrated the symmetrical tonic neck reflex, only one of many reflexes elicited on the tummy. (O’Dell & Cook).
Current brain research has shown us that learning retention is far higher for experiential, kinesthetic and movement learning than in other modes of learning. Experiential learning retention is 90%; far more than other modes of learning. (Diamond)
Why is this? Brain development takes place through activation of the neural pathways. For babies and all of us, movement is a primary stimulant and the first way of knowing and learning. (Lamberts) Nervous system development is sequential and bottom-up, starting in spinal cord, then through the low brain, the mid brain and up to the high brain. Lower parts of the brain require movement to develop. While on the floor, babies do the early spinal patterns of the developmental movement sequence that develop the spinal cord, low and mid brains. As babies move up from the floor, they move up in the brain. Gaps in lower brain development create weak foundations and require more effort on the part of the child.
An example of the low and mid brain providing the foundation for high brain cognition is learning to typewrite. At first typing is an attention consuming, hunt and peck activity. Initially we have to use the high brain to awkwardly piece together the puzzle of where the keys are and which finger to use letter by letter. When we use our high brain to learn an activity, the cerebral cortex is occupied with just figuring out how to do the motor organization of the hands. When we know how to type easily, then we can sit at the keyboard and compose freely. Our low and mid brain directs the finger movements while the high brain is free to think.
In school when children are struggling with the physical act of writing, they simply cannot think about a whole sentence or write a story. Instead, the neurons of the high brain are busy organizing body movements for hand-eye coordination. So the high brain that specializes in thinking is diverted to figuring out motor function instead of developing ideas.
Babies have to experience movement before they can initiate movement. (Cohen) Consider a baby who is attracted to a toy. The baby has a big desire, or an intention, to get the toy. At first he doesn’t know how to get it. His desire is expressed in movements, as he swipes at the toy. These swipes are experiments on the baby’s part of how do I get organized to get the toy? After he has experimented through movement, he gradually learns how to organize himself to touch and grab the toy. Then he can consciously direct his movement.
Babies are putting together a gigantic three dimensional puzzle of themselves and their world. For many people babies movements appear disorganized, including some widely regarded child development experts. (White) However, this is a misunderstanding. Babies are working with movement fragments, or micro-movements.
As baby shifts from first sensing a movement to being able to intend a movement, the child can then direct that micro-movement. Baby ventures into another threshold of experience.
Gradually closely associated micro-movements come together as movement elements. Just as we learn to make a curve and a line, then to put them together into the letter d or p, the baby learns about curved pathways and straight pathways of movement through his limbs. Then bigger fragments link up into gestures (free limbs) or mobilizing the core (limbs as levers). So we see developmental leaps after what seems like plateaus. During plateaus a lot is going on; the child is mastering elements of movement by playing continuously with them. The baby is developing his own giant three dimensional puzzle of self organization.
The developmental movement patterns are crucial in the first year of life because this is when the relation of the perceptual process (the way one takes in the world; seeing, kinesthetically sensing, smelling, tasting, hearing) and the motor process (the way one moves or acts in the world) is established. This is the baseline for how babies will be processing activity, either in receiving or expressing, throughout their whole lives. The importance of working with babies during the first year is that we can set up a broader baseline, offering more choices in not only how to see events or problems, but how to act on them. (Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen)
The developmental movements of tummy time and crawling are integral in developing the organization of vision. Vision, our most complex sense, is not fully organized when we are born. Through stages of movement activity, visual organization is developed. Many school age children with learning and behavioral problems lack sufficient visual organization to be able to track with faces, reading and writing.
Developmental movement patterns and reflexes
The natural sequenced activities supporting optimal brain organization has been given to us through evolution in the developmental movement patterns and reflexes of babies. With the specific hook-ups of the reflexes and their expression through the developmental movement patterns we can see the development of a baby’s nervous system and brain at every stage.
The reflexes are automatic responses of the nervous system for specific periods of time during infancy. For example, the rooting reflex engages head turning for nursing and the neck strength development that leads to head lifting in first six months. During the early months, the baby has to turn its head reflexively if the cheek is stroked. If used and fully expressed through movement, the reflex is integrated after six months.
An integrated reflex no longer requires a preprogrammed response. Integrated reflexes provide support for movement in the original pathway but also allow choice of other neuro-motor connections, therefore other movements. In the example of the rooting reflex, the nerve pathway from cheek to neck muscle is still there after six months, but baby no longer has to turn its head at a touch on the cheek. This would be dysfunctional, so normally the reflexes are integrated by the nervous system on a specific, sequenced timetable. Reflexes that are not fully expressed through movement continue as immature, non-integrated activities that inhibit later brain and motor function. The lack of organization at the lower brain level results in poor function at the higher brain level.
Nature’s design for babies is to explore and play within the sequence of developmental patterns. Since developmental movement patterns and reflexes are elicited on the tummy, babies need tummy time to do their major first year project of self-organization of the body, brain and mind. Fully engaging in these developmental moves and reflexes gives baby the broadest baseline of choice for action as she matures. Babies need opportunities to practice their developmental movements. Some babies need help in fully expressing and integrating their reflexes. Tummy time play and crawling are essential stages for optimal development of the child.
Sources
Cohen, Bonnie Bainbridge. Sensing, Feeling and Action. Contact Editions,
Northampton, MA. 1993.
Palmer, Lyelle and DeBoer, Bob. Stimulating Maturity through Accelerated Readiness Training. New Visions School, Minneapolis, MN 1976.
Hannaford, Carla. Smart Moves: Why all learning is not in your head. Great Ocean Publishers, Arlington, VA. 1995.
Dennison, Paul. Brain Gym Journal. December, 1997.
Palmer, op cit.
Palmer, op cit.
O’Dell, Nancy and Cook, P.A. Stopping Hyperactivity. Avery Publishing Group, Garden City, NY. 1997
Goddard, Susan. A Teacher’s Guide into the Child’s Mind. Fernbridge Press, Oregon.
Lamberts, Martha, cited at Miriam Diamond’s Magic Trees of the Mind.
Diamond, Miriam. Magic Trees of the Mind. Penguin Putnam Books. New York, NY. 1998.
Catherine Burns, RSMT, CST, provides developmental movement therapy and craniosacral therapy to children from newborn through school age
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