Physical development - ‘Feeling of Me’

Let’s redefine the word sensible, as in ‘Children! Be sensible!’, or ‘Mason, that’s not very sensible, is it?’ You can hear the tone from the occasions when it was said to you as a child perhaps, or when you have said it to children. My body is tightening with discomfort right now, flooded by uncomfortable memories of both.

Sensible has come to mean something like ‘in an orderly fashion’ or with the subtext ‘as the adult in the room would like you to’. It speaks of constraint and containment and might often be used when voices get loud or bodies exuberant – especially the latter.

But the word actually means: ‘Open and alive to sensation. Able to notice the feelings in your body and act upon them.’ It is almost the complete opposite of the way we have come to use it.

However, young children know its real meaning. They spend lots of time being sensible and trying to become more sensible, because being open and alive to the sensations in their body – ‘the feeling of me’ – is a vital part of their physical development.

There are four streams of sensation (body senses) children need to get to know:

• touch
• proprioception
• vestibular sense
• interoception.
  
  

TOUCH AS SENSE OF SELF

We have more than half a million sensors which constantly monitor what and how we touch and are touched. Babies and children have to learn to read this information accurately. If everything goes well, they will grow up feeling right in their own skin, safe in their body – in touch. If it doesn’t go well, the smallest bump or touch can undermine their confidence in a second. They may struggle to feel at ease in their body or confident in themselves, because touch, more than any other of our senses, gives us our sense of reality, our sense of self.

Babies and children learn to read touch information by creating movement play that is full of it – it’s a whole-bodied thing. They roll, wriggle, lean, slide and jiggle on the floor. They loll and lounge; hold their hands under the outside tap for ages. They rub their hands up and down the carpet at story time; fiddle or stroke your leg while you read.

PROPRIOCEPTION

If I say to you, take your attention to the bottom of your feet, or the back of your neck, you can do that easily. If I invite you to scratch your nose, you can, because you have a consistent, moment-by-moment felt map of your body to draw on, which also helps you to feel that your body belongs to you.

The map-making sensory receptors are located in our muscles, joints and tendons and, at the outset, they need lots of sensation to learn their job. So babies and children push, pull, stretch, hang from anything convenient, tussle with their mates and go splat on the mat in order to build that body map so strongly it will be secure even when they are not moving and there is very little information for the receptors to work with.

If this goes well they will feel a permanent, easy, well-co-ordinated connection with their body. If it doesn’t, they may often need to move simply to hold on to their sense of body, especially when life gets busy or stressful. If they have to be still, it may take so much effort to hang on to that map that they can’t do anything else – like hear the story you are reading. No wonder children work so hard at this.

VESTIBULAR SENSE

It sounds ludicrously simple, but knowing where the ground is beneath us and the sky above is a constant piece of work we do to manage our body and feel safe as we move. Developing this so securely that it happens in the background, rather than having to concentrate on it, is a vital part of early physical development.

Children have to learn to process the constant stream of information coming from their vestibular system. It tells them which way is up, how fast they are moving and how to make adjustments to stay upright. Making use of this information takes lots of body work – tipping, tilting, leaning, swinging, rolling, spinning, going upside down, hanging backwards – and lots and lots of toppling.

If things go well, children will feel confident to try anything in their body because they feel safe in it. If not, they may feel slightly unstable all the time, physically and emotionally; ungrounded and even lost in space.

All the spinning, swinging, tipping, tilting and toppling they do is vital development work.

INTEROCEPTION

The flow of information from the inside of our body is called interoception. Receptors pull in information about basic functions such as heart rate and breathing; basic calls to action such as need-to-wee, thirsty, tired; and about emotional states. When you feel happy, sad, anxious or ill, it starts as sensations in your body which, over time, you learn to read.

Babies and young children create and wallow in physical experiences that build their interoception – full-bodied, wholehearted physical explorations that reach right to their insides. They bump and bounce; they lie and loll and listen in; they create emotion-rich movement play and wallow in it – teetering at the top of the big slide, listening to the collywobbles inside, for instance. Most of all, they take time to get interested in – and notice – the sensation inside their body.

If things go well, children will know how they feel and be able to take good care of themselves. If they don’t, it will be much harder to self regulate. Interoception is the foundation of self-regulation.

SENSATION-DRIVEN MOVEMENT

So alongside their delight in developing motor control, babies and young children show utter commitment to building these four senses, which means lots of sensation-driven movement play.

If we view sensation-driven movement only through a motor development lens, it is easy to think of it as silly, a distraction from real learning. But when we understand more about sensory development, suddenly it is a vital foundation. The challenge is to support children as they seek opportunities to build their four core body senses.

CASE STUDY: Heathlands Pre-school, Ipswich

Early years practitioner Tammy Flores and the team at Heathlands took Developmental Movement Play (DMP) training with JABADAO. She followed up the training recently with its online course ‘The Feeling of Me’, which looks at children’s sensory development around the four core body senses.

‘We had a child that joined our setting who struggled to interact with other children in the playroom. He would push, pull and poke at others,’ she reflects.

‘He used to find circle times especially tricky. I noticed that he would be constantly moving in some way. He would rub his hands back and forth on the carpet, kick out with his feet – some kind of movement all the time.

‘Before my training in DMP, my thinking was that sitting and looking meant you are listening and engaged. “Sitting nicely”, “Hands on your knees”, “Legs crossed” would have been things we commonly said at circle times, but learning about DMP made us rethink how we viewed movement, from “You shouldn’t be doing that” to “Why are you doing that?”

‘We created a permanent indoor Movement Play Area and this child would frequently choose to spend time there. After a few weeks he renamed it “The Rolling Area” and sometimes chose to be there with an adult while circle times were happening. On one occasion, he began to role-play the story. In that moment he demonstrated to me that just because he wasn’t sitting, didn’t mean he wasn’t listening. He was engaged. He was aware, taking in everything and listening to the story in a way that his body needed in that moment.

‘Having the Movement Play Area helped with all areas of his development, especially connecting with other children. We started off working with him one-to-one. He would frequently create high-impact games within the area. Lots of jumping and diving games with a crash and splat element in them!

‘After a few weeks he was able to play with others; he had made his first real connection with another child in the movement area.

‘Before the training I didn’t look at sensory needs in the same way. I’d be thinking, how are we going to help him manage his behaviour? I never made the link with what he was actually trying to communicate with a sensory need he was trying to satisfy. Now we see where a child is in their body much more.

‘The new EYFS guidance requires practitioners to be observant, good educators and really understand child development. It’s much more about practitioners understanding why children do what they do and how we might support their learning and development. Using a DMP approach is going to really help us with this. It’s what it’s all about really – knowing and seeing more.’

FURTHER INFORMATION

• Penny Greenland founded Jabadao in 1985. Learn more about sensory and motor development with JABADAO’s online resources, www.jabadao.org