Motor Development in Infants and Toddlers: Karen Adolph



Motor Development in Infants and Toddlers: Karen Adolph

1. How did you become interested in child development?

I got into child development when I was an undergraduate. There was a laboratory nursery school connected with my college, at Sarah Lawrence College. And -- and so I began working there as part of my work-study program to work my way through school. And on the first day, I saw a little group of 3-year-olds doing pretend play dress up, and that got me. So [Chuckle] -- yeah, I had never even babysat before that and never thought I would be interested in children, and then I saw them, and they were really interesting.

2. What is your current area of research?

My area of research is called "motor development." And that means movement, goal-directed movements usually. So things like reaching and sitting and crawling and walking and all of those spontaneous movements that are not goal directed, like, for instance, little flails and kicks and waves and rocks and so on, and movements that are maybe not for a goal. So it's not, you know, reaching to pick something up but exploratory movements that generate information for infants’ perceptional systems.

3. Why is it inaccurate to view motor development as an organized progression of stages?

There was a long-standing belief in motor development that motor development was sort of like physical development; you know, that babies are going to get bigger, and they're going to get stronger, and their hair and teeth are going to grow in, and, you know, and then they'll hit puberty, and so there's these sort of, you know, stages of very organized progressions. And people assume the same thing about motor development. First, they're going to lift their head, and then they'll roll over, and then they can crawl, and then they can cruise and walk and so on. And it turns out that that's not -- that's not -- that's not true. That's not strictly true. So in some cultures, most of the infants don't crawl at all. They skip crawling, or they crawl after they begin walking. And there's nothing obligatory about crawling for example. Sitting and walking, those are things that everybody is going need to do as an adult or as a big kid, and so that's pretty universal. But cruising and crawling and rolling and some of these other skills, there's -- it's not a lockstep progression where -- where infants have to do the skills or they have to do them in a particular order. And -- and there's no evidence that there's any long-term deficiencies or decrements for having achieved skills in different orders. And even in our culture, individual infants achieve their motor milestones at, you know, a huge range of ages and in a quite varied sort of order. So, you know, ten children are going to be ten individual paths. It's not like physical development.

4. How does locomotion promote other aspects of development?

People have always supposed -- I mean, well, the great developmental theorists have always supposed that independent mobility -- so locomotion, being able to move your body from one place to another -- well it's got to have, you know, big, important impacts on really the whole range of psychological phenomena. Social development -- you're independent, you can, like, leave your mother and go somewhere else. In cognitive development now you can go find out about surfaces and places and objects and experience them on your own. And, of course, perceptional development because you can create, you know, optic flow by moving your body, and that's a very different kind of visual information than when your body is being moved by someone else. And, then, just physically, you know, moving in new ways changes, you know, biomechanically, changes things about your body. And -- and now there's very good evidence that all of that is true. That, in fact, the development of independent mobility is linked with improvements across that wide range of domains.

5. Describe the relationship between vision and locomotor development.

So children who are blind, congenitally blind, they achieve their locomotor milestones later, months later and sometimes even, you know, a year later or something than infants who are -- have normal vision. And, I mean, probably the reason for that is that they can't see a goal to move toward, and so, you know, just the -- the -- the sort of spontaneous impetus and motivation to move, so much of that is visual. And they have -- they're missing that.

6. What research findings are most surprising to you?

The most surprising finding so far was when we -- I did a longitudinal study in graduate school, and my plan was to track infants from the beginning of crawling until after they began walking. And I just thought they would get better and better and better and better, and then when the first handful of infants finished crawling and turned into walkers, they behaved just as [Chuckle] -- you know, they made just as many mistakes as they had made when they first began crawling. So the task in this case: Infants were at the top of steep and shallow slopes, and they had to decide if they could descend the slope by crawling. And so when they first began crawling, the infants were just trying any slope, and -- [Chuckle] and we had to rescue them, you know, so they're not plunging head first over the edge of this -- edge of this big slope. And then every week of crawling -- crawling experience, they behaved more and more adaptively. And then these same kids, they were, like, perfect, you know, they never made mistakes. Seriously, they were -- they were within a couple of degrees of accuracy, so they were really like at adult levels of accuracy. And, then, now they can walk, and we stand them up, and now they're facing the same slopes, same experimenters, same everything, only now they're upright, and they're just walking off the edge of the slopes again. I was so surprised. I remember running and telling my graduate advisor, Esther Thelen, like, "You've got to see this." [Laughter] You know, we're all standing around [Laughter] watching these babies walk over the edge of the slopes. So it was very surprising. There was nothing in the literature that would have suggested that we should see that.

7. What are the implications of your research findings for caregivers who want to keep infants safe from falling?

You know, the first implication of the kind of work that we do for parents who want to keep their infants safe from falling, is that they -- they shouldn't -- shouldn't assume that their infants are competent for dealing with potentially risky situations. So the edge of the bed or the changing table or the flight of stairs or even a playground slide, especially when infants first begin crawling and walking, they're likely to try them. But on the other hand, infants need to gain experiences. And so it's sort of this delicate balancing act between, you know, for parents being kind of like a cheerleader and encouraging their infants to try new things but yet ensuring their safety, you know. And then kind of lifeguard, like, no, no, no, you're not ready to do the stairs. And infants change very, very quickly, and, then, as we've seen, they kind of cycle through different periods of expertise. So when a baby first begins sitting, they don't know the limits of their ability, and if you sit them on the edge of a table like this, they're likely to just lean over and fall right off. But, then, an experienced sitter, who might only be eight or nine months old, knows exactly what they can do, and you could probably leave them on the kitchen counter and walk away and they'll still be there a half hour later safe and sound. But if that infant's in a crawling position, they're likely to crawl right over the edge. And then the same thing, you know, weeks later; now the baby's an experienced crawler and will behave in a really safe way, but then they start cruising, and then they're going to cruise into -- into dangers; and then same thing when they're walking. So there's -- there's separate learning curves, and that makes it really difficult for parents to track it. And so, you know, really the advice is better safe than sorry. They should really watch their infants and expect that they might put themselves into harm's way.

8. What types of experiences are most important for young children’s locomotor development?

One thing that we've -- that we've discovered is that in the -- the natural, everyday environment, infants are accumulating just vast amounts of experience. So the average, you know, toddler, like a 14-month-old toddler, is walking the distance of 39 football fields every day. But how they do that and where the, you know, the context in which they accumulate those kinds of experiences can be really different. So an infant in New York City, like where I live, they're likely not to have walked even on concrete when they're 14 months old; they're in their Maclaren strollers being strolled. [Laughter] But an infant in Pittsburgh, where I used to live, they have lots of experience running on grass, etc. It turns out it doesn't matter if you've, you know, have walked on sand or walked on grass or, you know, carpet or linoleum, tile or whatever; infants just need a wide -- a wide array of different, varied kinds of experiences, and they'll get that if you, you know, in almost any natural environment, and -- and then be free to gain as much experiences as they want to.

9. Where do you see your research heading in the future?

Currently, one of the areas we're really interested in is what children know about -- about their bodies and their body's dimensions, and how that changes. And whether there's differences in children, really of any age, so infants all the way through, you know, young adults and beyond. But, you know, so if the -- the child is really over weight or has an eating disorder, really underweight, you know, do they -- when they're planning their actions, are they perceiving their body as it really is, or do they have a sort of a misperception where they see themself as slimmer or fatter than, you know, than they really are?

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