We love watching our little ones learn and grow. It can all happen in the blink of an eye and its always so exciting to watch them explore what their bodies can do. Over time health professionals have developed some key movements to assess and ensure your little love is growing and developing as best they can. These milestones are also used to identify those bubs that may need a little helping hand in their journey. Milestones that we look for are things such as sitting, rolling, crawling, pushing up onto hands in tummy time, standing, walking.
What some don’t know is that leading up to your baby learning how to sit, roll or crawl they are learning the “mini milestones”. These are movements that your bub will learn and practice before they are able to complete the full movement such as rolling. Every task we do in our day to day can be broken down into components. These components are what we call a “mini milestone”. For example, rolling is often a skill learnt at around 4-5 months. But what you may not notice is your baby practice the “mini milestones” leading up to rolling. Tasks such as turning their head from side to side, reaching their arm across their body, bringing their leg up and across their bodies. All of these are indicators that your baby is learning the necessary movements to perform a roll. Each milestone for your bubs can be broken down into components that your health care professional can look at to make sure your little one is doing the best they can be.
But here is the caveat, no one baby is the same! They all learn and develop at different times. That’s why any developmental milestone is used as a guideline. Mini milestones can give us a clue if your bub is having trouble with the whole move or if one component is causing trouble. If we can identify why they may be struggling this can help develop a treatment plan if you are concerned with your bub’s development.
The physiotherapists at Bump Fitness are trained in Paediatrics and how to identify these components. If you have concerns over your baby’s development, we can come to you and perform an infant wellness check to make sure everything is on track. The best thing, if we identify an area where they need an extra hand, we can give you an array of fun activities to do with bub. Activities targeted specifically to help them meet their milestones and enjoy all their day-to-day activities, making physiotherapy fun!
Bump Fitness are proud to offer Infant Wellness Checks. Adjusting to life outside of the uterus is a massive change for your little one. Each baby will rest in different positions in the uterus. These positions can influence how they move once earth side. Sometimes their position in utero can result in ‘muscle tightness’ outside of utero that may benefit from a physiotherapy assessment. Read more about these checks here and contact the team today! Physiotherapy Services & Womens Health – Bump Fitness
Until next time,
Courtney