Reflexes are supposed to integrate to support motor skills development. When they don’t, it can lead to struggles for your child. My name is Vicky, and I’m a speech-language pathologist and co-owner of Dynamic Therapy Specialists. Today, I want to talk to you about reflexes and how they impact motor development.
What Are Reflexes?
Reflexes are an involuntary, automatic response of the system meant to serve for protection and survival. Reflexes are what get us moving. They spur on motor development.
In early infancy, we have reflexes that will eventually lead us to be able to intentionally move and develop our motor skills. Without reflexes, we would not figure out how to move. We would not know that we could move.
How Reflexes Affect Motor Skills in Children
In order to help a child achieve their developmental milestones, we first need to look at their reflex integration, or their reflex development, in order to determine how we can support their overall motor development. When we try to teach a child a skill without looking at the foundation of their reflex development, we are inadvertently training a behavior that really should be coming from an automatic standpoint.
When you pick up a pencil to write, you should not be thinking about how hard you need to hold the pencil or how hard you need to press on your paper. You should pick the pencil up, and it should be an automatic response so that you can think about what you want to write.
When we are addressing handwriting from a traditional standpoint, we’re teaching the behaviors that we want instead of recognizing those foundational reflexes that support handwriting. And oftentimes, this leads children to use cognitive resources to do something that the brain should be doing automatically.
What Happens When Children Learn Skills Without the Foundation of Integrated Reflexes
Using the handwriting example above, when we teach the skill of handwriting without ensuring kids have the foundation of integrated reflexes, it can lead to challenges. We end up getting children who:
- Do not like to write
- Complain about their homework
- Cry about having to write
This causes parents to really struggle with getting kids to do schoolwork because we have trained handwriting versus supporting the reflex. Integrating that reflex means that the act of holding the pencil doesn’t become the primary focus for the brain, and instead the thinking part can become the primary focus of the brain.
How Our Therapists Support Reflex Integration
At our clinic here at DTS, our therapists are trained in reflexes. We understand how reflexes impact motor development and how to integrate them to support motor development. This means that, when we are seeing something like balance or handwriting or other gross motor challenges, we don’t go straight to training that behavior from the top down.
Instead, we support it from a foundational standpoint, looking at reflexes and how various reflexes integrate in order to support motor development. This allows children to enjoy bike riding, walk up and down steps, balance, hold a pencil, and organize their thoughts to engage in written expression. How? Because they won’t be focusing all their energy on how they’re holding the pencil, etc.
Reach Out to DTS for an Evaluation
At DTS, we have a team of occupational therapists who are able to look at motor development as well as reflex development in order to support the child’s overall functioning.
If you would like to learn more about motor development and reflex integration and how these two work together, please give our office a call at (225) 767-5032. We are more than happy to help you and to put together a plan for your child’s intervention.