Motor Disability
Motor Disabilities: A child might have difficulty using large groups of muscles (gross motor disability). This child may be clumsy, stumble, have trouble with walking, running, climbing, etc. Other children will have difficulty getting groups of muscles to act as a team (fine motor disability). For example, to write, you have to get the information from your brain to the many muscles of your dominant hand. These muscles have to work in close coordination to produce written language. This child will have poor handwriting. The child may have a thought but has trouble writing it down on paper at the same rate.
If a child has difficulty in using large muscle groups, this is called a gross motor disability. Difficulty in performing tasks that require many muscles to work together in an integrated way is called a fine motor disability.
Gross motor disabilities can cause your child to be clumsy, to stumble, to fall, to bump into things, or to have trouble with generalized physical activities like running, climbing, or swimming.
The most common form of fine motor disability shows up when the child begins to write. The problem lies in an inability to get the many muscles in the dominant hand to work together as a team. Children and adolescents with this "written language" disability have slow and poor handwriting. A typical expression of this problem is, "My hand doesn't work as fast as my head is thinking."
Watch your own hand as you write something and notice the many detailed fine muscle activities that it takes to write legibly. Writing requires a constant flow of such activities. Now place your pen in your non-dominant hand and try to write. If you go very slowly, it is tedious but your handwriting is legible. If you go at a regular pace, however, your hand aches and your handwriting deteriorates immediately. Shape, size, spacing, positioning – everything about it looks awful no matter how hard you try. A child with fine motor disability goes through this all the time.
When a child has a visual perceptual problem, the brain, which has incorrectly recorded or processed information, will probably misinform the muscles during activities that require eye-hand coordination. This is referred to as a visual motor disability.
Associations
Abstraction DisabilityCopyright 2011 Special Dental Care: Sedation Dentistry Los Angeles. All Rights Reserved.
(626) 288-8008 | dr.amy@specialdentalcare.com
