Join Mom Crew and Dr. Karen Adolph of NYU's BabyChildTeen research cohort for a fascinating talk on baby’s gross motor development.
Even before birth, babies learn to move. Perhaps less obvious is how – how do infants learn to control their eyes, head, limbs, and body? Reciprocally, the emergence of new motor skills during infancy enables new opportunities for learning. Indeed, each new motor ability – from basic head control to sitting, standing, crawling, and walking – provides new access to the environment, new ways to explore objects, and new ways to interact with people.
This workshop on infant motor development will present evidence-based strategies for promoting postural control—the foundation for all later skills—and for encouraging fine and gross motor skills in babies. We will discuss individual differences in motor pathways, and we will address the myths inherent in standard milestone charts, which falsely present motor development as a universal, orderly, sequential, step-like process. We will also discuss timing of motor milestones, and how the age of emergence of motor skills is related to caregivers’ childrearing practices.
This a free event, but RSVPs are required by 12pm on Thursday, April 16. I’ll send out an email to everyone who signs up ahead of time with instructions for joining via Zoom from your computer, tablet or phone.
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KAREN ADOLPH is the Julius Silver Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Applied Psychology at New York University and a world-renowned expert on infant motor development. She uses observable motor behaviors to study developmental processes in infants and children. She is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science and Past-President of the International Congress on Infant Studies. She has received numerous awards, including the American Psychological Foundation Fantz Memorial and American Psychological Association Boyd McCandless awards. She chaired the NIH MFSR study section and currently serves on boards of the McDonnell Foundation, Developmental Psychobiology, and Motor Learning and Development. She has published 170+ articles and chapters. Her research has been continually funded by NIH/NSF since 1991. Most recently, she was featured as an expert on infant crawling in Netflix's Babies docuseries.