What do you mean by motor skills?

Motor Skills means our muscles, which allow us to more and go go go!  From infancy onward, we are always working on our motor skills.  All of us learn how to use our larger muscles (gross motor) so we can hold our heads up, sit, stand, walk, run, play soccer, dance and more. We also use our smaller muscles (fine motor) to hold things master using our hands, our mouths, our other body parts.  Think about how important it is to have motor movements to be able to dress, feed, toilet, learn and interact with others.    

Believe it or not, motor skills are also important in learning to talk.  We already talked about the importance of speech but think about how many muscles we use to move our mouth and tongue in certain ways to speak.   

Delays in motor skills are primarily tested (and treated) by physical therapists for gross motor and occupational therapists for fine motor skills.  

Some children have delays in many areas and this is called global developmental delay.  Children with global developmental delay may have weaknesses in their language, cognitive and/or gross or fine motor skills. 

Click on these links to find more information about motor delays