What your baby (0 -12 months) needs for best possible motor development

This article is part of a collection inside The Possums Sleep Program called Deeper Dive, which explores the more complex scientific, historical and social contexts in which families and their babies or toddlers live and sleep. You don't need to read Deeper Dive articles to be helped by The Possums Sleep Program.

What does your baby need for healthy motor development in the first weeks and months of life?

You don't have to do exercises with your baby or have your baby receive bodywork treatments to support her best possible motor development.

However, if your baby was born prematurely, or has a neurological or medical condition, it's likely that your baby does require special support for motor development. Please continue talking with your baby's GP, paediatrician or paediatric physical therapist if this is the case.

Three areas of development interact together as your baby grows. These are

• The sensory input your baby experiences coming in from the environment

• Your baby's motor system

• Your baby's social communication experiences.

It's not really possible to say that one comes before the other. Instead, these systems stimulate each other, and co-evolve together to create flourishing cascades of development.

Healthy development of your baby's motor system happens without you having to worry about it, if you're

• Sensibly responding to your baby's cues or communications as best as you can

• Living a life with your baby which you both enjoy

• Out of the house, interacting with the world around you and other people a lot of the time.

You can find the eight steps of the holistic NDC or Possums approach to supporting baby's motor development here.

How do flat spots on the back of babies' heads relate to motor development?

If applied in the first six weeks of life, the steps that best support your baby's motor development are also the things most likely to help protect your baby from developing a flat spot on the back of his head, known as positional or deformational plagiocephaly. You can find out about preventing or treating flat spots on the back of babies' heads here.

You don't have to hurry your baby's motor development

Sometimes, families have heard that they should be trying to help their baby's motor system mature more quickly, for instance by

• Holding baby on their lap out from their body, hoping this will develop core stability and early sitting

• Encouraging baby to stand on their lap and bounce on her little legs without much support, hoping this will develop core stability, leg muscle strength and early walking.

But actually, our babies' motor and nervous systems lay down the neural pathways for well-integrated movement patterns in the context of good spinal and trunk support against our bodies. This means that you would have your baby

• Sit on your lap facing out to see, but with her back up against your tummy

• Bounce on his little legs with you holding much of his weight.

In this way, patterns of movement integrate across the different sides of the body when your baby's whole-body system of motor development is ready. When your baby shows signs of sitting on his own, then you might gradually experiment with removing support. When your baby shows signs of pulling herself up on the furniture or your legs, you might experiment with supporting her as she takes those wobbly first little steps.

It's best to let her skills develop in their own time, without trying to hurry them, though parents usually delight in the changes as they come along and support their little one as he experiments with what his little body can do.

Babies develop their motor skills at different rates and often don't reach milestones sequentially

Motor development—both within and across infants—is far messier and more complex than a simple sequence of age-normed milestones. Moreover, the skills selected for the milestone charts reflect the cultural and historical biases of the initial researchers and samples rather than anything fundamental about human development. In some cultures and time periods, for example, many infants do not crawl, or they crawl after they begin walking. Franchak & Adolph 2024 p.3

The milestones of sequential motor achievements widely used as standards for infant development (e.g. head control, rolling, sitting, crawling, walking) were developed from often small groups of Western infants and are not representative of the global majority. Instead, researchers tell us that motor development is

• Affected by the way families adapt to their own unique environment

• Affected by cultural practices

• Highly variable between babies

• Often not sequential in a way that fits Western developmental charts.

These differences between babies' motor development around the world do not result in poorer motor skills or development in later childhood or adulthood.

The things that support healthy motor development also support best possible baby sleep

Happily, the things that best support your baby's motor development are the same things which make sleep as easy as possible. This is because

• Days and evenings filled with rich sensory motor nourishment help your baby dial down

• Dialled down babies take sleep easily, without you having to worry, once you understand how your baby's two sleep regulators (the body clock and sleep pressure) work.

What does your baby need for healthy motor development in the second half of the first year of life?

By responding to your baby and meeting her needs for rich and changing sensory motor experience as she grows into the second half of the first year of her life, you'll be providing many diverse environments in which she wants to reach out, explore, and interact. Her biologically driven curiosity to explore the sensory world around her, and her biologically driven desire to be emotionally connected with you and others in interactions, give her the impetus to move. As she sits, crawls and then walks, your baby increasingly creates her own new opportunities for sensory experience, learning and social interactions.

Again, you don't have to do exercises to develop your baby's motor system as your baby grows. If you are using the 8 steps of the NDC whole-of-ecosystem approach which you can find here, you can let your baby's motor development be easy. You'll create a life that you enjoy - much of it outside the home - which will also be rich in sensory motor nourishment for your little one.

Recommended resources

What is sensory motor nourishment and why does it help with baby sleep?

Filling your baby's sensory tank

Why baby wearing makes life easier (not harder)

The holistic NDC or Possums 8-step approach to supporting baby's motor development

The NDC evolutionary perspective on positional plagiocephaly, motor development and sleep

About positional plagiocephaly and motor development

Selected references

Craighero L. An embodied approach to fetal and newborn perceptual and sensorimotor development. Brain and Cognition. 2024;179:106184.

Delafield-Butt JT, Freer Y, Perkins J, Skulina D, Schogler B, Lee DN. Prospective organization of neonatal arm movements: a motor foundation of embodied agency, disrupted in premature birth. Developmental Science. 2018;21:e12693.

Douglas PS. Pre-emptive intervention for Autism Spectrum Disorder: theoretical foundations and clinical translation. Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience. 2019;13(66):doi.org/10.3389/fnint.2019.00066.

Franchak JM, Adolph KE. An update of the development of motor behavior. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science. 2024;15:e1682. doi: 1610.1002/wcs.1682.

Hadders-Algra M. Early human motor development: from variation to the ability to vary and adapt. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews. 2018;90:411-427.

Hadders-Algra M. Early human brain development: starring the subplate. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews. 2018;92:276-290.

He M, Walle EA, Campos JJ. A cross-national investigation of the relationship between infant walking and language development. Infancy. 2015;20(3):283-305.

McGowan T, Delafield-Butt JT. Narrative as co-regulation: a review of embodied narrative in infant development. Infant Behavior and Development. 2022;68:101747.

Oudgenoeg-Paz O, Atun-Elny O, Van Schalk DM. Two cultural models on infant motor development: middle class parents in Israel and the Netherlands. Frontiers in Psychology. 2020;11(119).