As your son or daughter begins pre-school or kindergarten,
teachers start to introduce fine motor skills with the intent of
them being mastered in the years ahead.
As your son or daughter begins pre-school or kindergarten, teachers start to introduce fine motor skills with the intent of them being mastered in the years ahead.
Those skills include holding a pencil, cutting, placing and pasting, tracing and coloring. Self help skills like buttoning, lacing, zipping and tying are also started at home or school.
These fine motor skills are followed up with finger tracing, pre-writing, and finally, writing. With repetition and practice these skills are eventually acquired by every child as their education progresses.
In youth sports, motor skills also play an important role in the development of a youth athlete. Yet these motor skills aren’t being established or formulated at a young age, therefore youngsters are entering or trying sports that, because of their lack of certain motor skills, won’t allow them to be successful.
Parents need to be aware of this and place there child in a sport that is motor skill appropriate. This doesn’t happen all the time and I see it all too often. Being realistic about your child’s ability is not easy and you badly want them to have fun with their friends.
I applaud parents who want to get their kids involved in youth sports whether it’s an individual activity or team oriented. At the same time, though, you must evaluate your child’s motor skills. Putting them in a situation that can set them up for failure only leads to low self esteem and a dislike for that particular sport or activity.
A recent survey by the National Youth Sports Association discovered that 49 percent of children didn’t have the basic skills necessary when they entered organized sports. This is interpreted simply as, those kids didn’t have the appropriate motor skills. The study further stated that a large portion of those kids quit sports by the age of 13.
Motor skills in youth sports are defined as having strength, speed, agility, endurance, coordination and flexibility. Obviously every young kid doesn’t possess these and in most cases they’re genetically determined. You can usually see who has them and who must attain them.
However, that doesn’t mean your youngster won’t acquire them sometime in the future. Each child develops at their own pace and by guiding them correctly they will catch up with everyone else. Maybe not at a championship caliber, but they will catch up. Much like fine motor skills in the classroom.
So the question remains as to how a child acquires these sports motor skills.
Can you remember years ago when your parents told you to just go out and play. Well, they were on to something even though they didn’t have modern technology at their disposal.
You may have also heard from noted experts that recess is the most important period of the day. Once again, we’re onto something, and I tend to agree.
During recess or playing in the neighborhood kids unknowingly are developing sports motor skills by just dodging a ball or climbing on a play structure.
Sports motor skills are categorized as hopping, jumping, skipping, kicking, throwing, catching or striking.
Breaking them down further they fall into locomotion motor skills (running, climbing, walking, leaping), manipulation motor skills (throwing, kicking, catching, bouncing) and stability motor skills (rolling, dodging, bending, twisting).
Get your kids outdoors so they can ride their bikes, climb their tree houses, play dodge ball, play catch with a beach ball, play tag, throw a ball or run a race. Have a little more fun by tossing an egg back and forth or a water balloon.
Don’t succumb to falling into the pitfall as a parent who paddles in one river and misses the experience of the other river, meaning, develop as many motor skills as possible, not just ones that apply to a certain sport.
Allowing kids to develop these motor skills at a young age will enable them to apply sport specific fundamental skills in the future, thus letting them perform that particular sport in a manner that will help them attain success.
Like fine motor skills, sports motor skills require plenty of daily repetition so a proper foundation can be built which will lead to better form and technique in a specific sport.
This, in time, will turn into a fun atmosphere on the playing field for you and your little athlete.
Rich Taylor is the CEO and head instructor of California Pitching Academy and a scout for the New York Mets. Reach him at rj********@***oo.com.
