In our previous blog The essentials of crossing the midline: All you need to know All you need to know, we gave you a detailed insight about critical questions associated with this particular baby milestone. Here, we have addressed the elephant in the room-what can parents do to fine tune and aid their child’s midline shift early on in life?
Let’s quickly address this with our handy tips:
- Baby massage and exercise
Elders often emphasize on morning oil massage sessions before bathing a baby. You must have seen 'dai maas' doing so!! Well there are reasons (though not scientifically explained by them)...
After you are done massaging the body of your baby, especially the limbs to ‘make them stronger’, gently try the across exercises. Hold both his hands and legs at a time and stretch them across his body or alternatively a hand or leg combined across. Such exercises teach him the field of his movement and he learns to cross the midline eventually. Your baby’s uncontrolled giggles and laughter during such sessions are your brownies.
- Let’s play a game!
Start early at about 2 years of age, games that are a lot more than mere words. Like touching your nose with your left hand, touch your left foot with your right hand.
If you’re happy and you know it
Touch your feet…
A great sing along action rhyme
3. Dancing is good for your baby
The movements in a dance allows the child to throw his hands and legs in many directions enabling it to cross the midline. Just turn on the music and enjoy his moves!
- Grab on!
Place an object of interest in the path of your toddler’s movement (crawling, kneeling etc) and see it use its dominant hand to grab it. To increase the difficulty level, you can place the object far across in the opposite direction and let it use both of his hands to grab it. When a child spontaneously crosses the mid-line with the dominant hand, then the dominant hand gets the practice needed to develop good fine motor skills by repeated consistent hand dominance. Also, such activities promote bilateral integration i.e. using both sides of the body simultaneously.
Once they are confident with their walks, you can also try crossing one foot over the other while walking sideways activities or reaching for bean bags, balls, stuffed animals, or other objects across midline and then throwing at a target. The list goes on.
- Walk in the box
A very simple activity where you can ask your 4-5 year old to walk one step in the tile box of the floor and not touch the boundaries. This allows trunk control and bilateral leg integration
- Give him the ruled notebook
We all have been there back in time when we were given those 4 line ruled notebooks to learn writing. Get such a notebook and make dots on it. Ask your toddler to trace those dots left to right. Give it full freedom to chase the dots and cross the midline as it moves left to right holding a pencil in his dominant hand.
- Let’s Pop Rules
You can prepare soap bubbles and ask him to Pop bubbles with only one hand (they will have to reach across their body to pop the bubbles floating on the opposite side). Fun indeed!
- Let them make some noise
Get your child a mini percussion instrument (a drum, a table) to play with, placed at their mid-line. Let them have fun whilst banging and making sounds using both hands simultaneously.
- Play hula hoop
Get a small ring or hula hoop and let your child spin it around itself and twist. Trunk rotation encourages the physical movement of crossing the body’s midline.
- Pretend car play
Give your toddler a plate and begin pretending to drive a car. Make it use both hands to steer the plate wheel and cross both arms while turning the “steering wheel”.
There are many other activities than what are stated above to encourage your child’s midline shift. Establishing a “worker hand” and a “helper hand” is a sign that the brain is maturing and lateralization is occurring, and is strongly correlated with the ability to cross the midline. Both sides of the brain need to talk to each other for the “worker hand” and the “helper hand” to work together and complement each other. Coordinating both sides of the body can be difficult for the child who avoids crossing midline.
Hence, as a parent, your objective should be clear. Before your child hits school, your goal should be to help them establish hand dominance, hold and move a pencil, maintain continuity in looking left to right, able to kick and hit the ball and do activities that require the coordination between all limbs and the trunk simultaneously.
We wish you luck in shaping your child up!