Hi Reader

Dad Joke: What do you call cheese that isn’t yours? Nacho cheese

Picture this…

You ask a mum who is new to your clinic whether her baby can roll. She says “yes” and proceeds to show you.

She lies him on his back, grips one arm and pulls it gently across. A leg follows, there’s a little bit of rotation through the pelvis and…there we go!

The baby has rolled. Except he hasn’t really, has he?...She rolled him.

And he is now lying there looking at up you both as if to say “well that was fun”, with no intention of repeating it himself.

I think we sometimes get a little caught up in the idea that development is something we can teach. If we show a baby how to roll, sit or crawl enough times, eventually they will copy us and the movement will become part of their system.

But babies do not learn movement like choreography. They don’t watch us, take little notes and then have a go themselves later. Instead, development emerges when children have enough capacity to solve the movement problem in front of them.

To roll, this chap needs to coordinate a shift in weight with movement through the trunk, pelvis and limbs, while managing the changing sensory information as his body moves through space.

He also needs a reason to go somewhere. A parent, a toy, the television remote…something worth making the effort for.

Don’t get me wrong, guiding a baby through rolling can be useful. It can introduce the movement and help the baby experience parts of the task they may not yet have discovered. But there is a difference between supporting the child’s exploration and completing the entire movement for them.

Maybe the question is not: “How do I teach this baby to roll?”

Maybe it is: “What is stopping rolling from emerging?”

Does the baby have enough rotation? Can they shift their weight? Can they separate movement of the pelvis from the ribcage? Are they regulated enough to explore? Is the task just too difficult?

If you gave me a 300kg weight to bench press every day, but you spotted me through the whole motion, at the end of the day, when you’re not there, I’m still not going to be able to lift it…you have to change the conditions to fit my capacity.

So how would we change conditions for rolling?

Instead of starting with him completely flat and hauling him across by the arm, we begin slightly closer to side-lying so there is less body weight to move against gravity. Place mum’s face or an interesting toy just beyond the midline to give him a reason to turn, help him find contact with the surface through a foot if that makes the movement easier and provide a small cue at the pelvis to begin the weight shift.

Then stop…and wait.

Let him work out how to use his head, trunk and limbs to finish the movement. As his capacity improves, gradually reduce the starting angle and the amount of help you provide.

You haven’t rolled the baby. But you have moved the starting line a little closer and allowed his nervous system to solve the rest of the problem. You matched his capacity and met him where he was at.

And manual input fits in well here. We improve comfort, make more movement available and change the sensory information coming into the system to allow that capacity to increase.

We have created a better opportunity for development to happen.

You cannot teach development, but you can create the conditions in which it can emerge. When those conditions are present…the nervous system can organise itself. When it can’t…compensation replaces coordination.

Chat Soon

Mike

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info@connectedpaediatrics.com
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Connected Paediatrics – Dr Mike Marinus is a registered paediatric chiropractor treating babies and children and helping chiropractors learn effective paediatric techniques that they can use in their practice