Fine Motor Skills Health Article

Definition

Fine motor skills encompass the abilities required to control the smaller muscles of the body for writing, playing an instrument, artistic expression, and craft work.

The muscles required to perform fine motor skills are generally found in the hands, feet, and head.

Description

Fine motor skill involves deliberate and controlled movements requiring both muscle development and maturation of the central nervous system. Although newborn infants can move their hands and arms, these motions are reflexes that a baby cannot consciously start or stop. The development of fine motor skills is crucial to an infant's ability to experience and learn about the world and thus plays a central role in the development of intelligence. Like gross motor skills, fine motor skills develop in an orderly progression, but at an uneven pace characterized by both rapid spurts and, at times, frustrating but harmless delays. In most cases, difficulty with acquiring certain fine motor skills is temporary and does not indicate a serious problem. However, medical help should be sought for children who are significantly behind their peers in multiple aspects of fine motor development; or if they regress, losing previously acquired skills.

Function

Fine motor skills develop over a long period of time, primarily during childhood. However, athletes, musicians, jewelry makers, physicians, machinists, and others who engage in activities requiring high degrees of manual dexterity and control may spend decades improving their level of muscle coordination and fine motor skills.

Infancy

The hands of newborn infants are closed most of the time and, like the rest of their bodies, are not well controlled. If its palm is touched, an infant will make a very tight fist, but this is an unconscious action called the Darwinian reflex, and it disappears within two to three months. Similarly, an infant will grasp at an object placed in the hand, but without any conscious awareness of the act. At some point, hand muscles will relax, and an infant will drop an object, equally unaware that it has fallen. Babies may begin flailing at objects that interest them by two weeks of age but cannot grasp them. By eight weeks, they begin to discover and play with their hands, at first solely by touch, and then, at about three months, by sight as well. At this age, however, the deliberate grasp remains largely undeveloped.

Hand-eye coordination begins to develop between the ages of two and four months, inaugurating a period of trial-and-error practice at sighting objects and grabbing at them. At four or five months, most infants can grasp an

object that is within reach, looking only at the object and not at their hands. Referred to as "top-level reaching," this achievement is considered an important milestone in fine motor development. At the age of six months, infants can typically hold on to a small block for a brief period, and many have started banging objects. Although their grasp is still clumsy, they have acquired a fascination with grabbing small objects and trying to put them in their mouths. At first, babies will indiscriminately try to grasp things that cannot be grasped, such as pictures in a book, as well as those that can, such as a rattle or ball. During the latter half of the first year, they begin exploring and testing objects before grabbing, touching them with an entire hand and eventually poking them with an index finger.

One of the most significant fine motor accomplishments is the pincer grip, which typically appears between the ages of 12 and 15 months. Initially, an infant can only hold an object, such as a rattle, in the palm, wrapping fingers (including the thumb) around it from one side—an awkward position called the palmar grasp, which makes it difficult to hold on to and manipulate the object. By the age of eight to ten months, a finger grasp begins, but objects can only be gripped with all four fingers pushing against the thumb, which still makes it awkward to grab small objects. The development of the pincer grip, the ability to hold objects between the thumb and index finger, gives infants a more sophisticated ability to grasp and manipulate objects, and also to drop them deliberately. By about the age of one, an infant can drop an object into a receptacle, compare objects held in both hands, stack objects, and nest them within each other.