Gross Motor Skills and Fine Motor Skill
The development process can be broken up in to three-month intervals and divided into two categories: gross motor skills and fine motor skills. Gross motor skills are the term used to describe your baby’s ability to control different parts of her own body. Fine motor skills refer to your baby’s level of coordination of different body parts, such as picking up an object with her thumb and forefinger.
As we touched on above your baby’s development will begin at the head and work its way down. You can expect your baby to first develop control over the neck muscles before progressing to the torso, and then the leg muscles. You might notice now that your baby will be able to turn over and sit up independently and perhaps even crawl a about a little. You can now sit her on your knee and bounce her up and down gently – it’s a good way to promote her balance skills. At the age of eight months old you will find that she can probably now stand up using her own resources (although she may need to use chairs/upright objects to help her do this).
When it comes to actually walking, babies can usually expect to start this between the ages of nine to fifteen months of age. Most will start at about thirteen months. If you find that your baby is unable to walk but can do other things such as crawling, standing, or sitting upright, then do not worry as this is really quite normal. In fact some babies even miss the crawling stage completely and go on to walking (this may be very late – as much as seventeen months for example).
