Toddler Fine Motor Skills
Hello parents! Sometimes it seems easier to put your child in front of the TV or an iPad to watch their favorite show. I know as parents you try your hardest. Did you know by just letting children sit in front of devices they aren’t using practicing their fine motor skills? Toddler fine motor skills are important to your daily activities with your child.
Skills Develop Over Time
Fine motor skills begin to develop as early as 1 to 2 months of age. These skills continue developing through pre-school and elementary school. Fine motor skills help develop small muscles in the hands, fingers, and thumb.
Why Are These Skills Important?
Small muscle development in the hands, fingers, and thumb is important. Fine motor development in toddlers is important and helps children feed themselves, grasp their toys, button and zip their clothes, write and draw. Toddler children make the biggest leaps and bounds with their fine motor skills. Toddler fine motor skills need to be nurtured and practiced daily.
Parents, sure your toddler child is able to perform fine motor skills daily. We do not want your toddler child to fall behind with this developmental stage and have a challenging time. Toddlers not practicing fine motor skills could cause unnecessary stress for your child. Consequently the earlier you introduce fine motor activities to your toddler the more practice they will have to have success. The lack of using this skill could cause low self-esteem and their play options could become limited.
Accordingly, some ways you as parents can tell if your child has trouble with these skills is when children perform physical activities over doing sitting down ones. Additionally, with less development of fine motor skills children will ask their parents to fix a problem that involves this skill instead of them trying to do it themselves.
Toddler Fine Motor Skill Activities
Some examples and toddler fine motor skill activities to help your child’s development in fine motor skills:
- Coloring
- Finger painting
- Paintbrush painting
- Drawing
- Cutting
- Tracing
- Play-Doh activities
- Playing with slime
In conclusion, I know being a new parent or even an experienced parent can be tough, but sometimes the smallest activities will help better and make a nurturing environment for your child.
This blog was created by Tiasia Watson who is a current Child Development Associate (CDA) student with CDAClass.org.
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