Are you starting to find that you need to keep certain things out of the reach of your 3-6 month old baby? As she becomes more curious about her world and as her physical abilities grow, she will enjoy playing with her hands and exploring everything she can get those hands on!!¹ Every interesting new toy or object will be studied and tested by your baby through her sense of sight and touch. She will be able to do this because of her growing Initiative and Curiosity and Hand-Eye Coordination abilities.

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Vision is the process of understanding what is seen by a person’s eyes. It involves not only eye movements, focus, eye aiming (convergences), the ability to distinguish details (acuity), and eye teaming (binocularily), but also the control of hand-eye coordination.² Hand-eye coordination is your baby’s ability to use the visual information from her eyes to guide her hands so they can achieve a specific goal, such as touching your face or reaching for a toy.³

At 4 months of age, you may see your baby practicing “examining behaviors” with toys. Instead of just holding onto objects for no reason other than just gripping them, she will grab these items to study them with her eyes and mouth.⁴ She will also explore them using “rhythmic stereotypes,” or repetitive hand and finger movements.^5,6 Typical rhythmic stereotypes for young infants include banging, scratching, shaking, rubbing, poking, and passing objects from hand to hand.⁵ All of these hands-on exploration methods will help your infant gather sensory knowledge about the world around her, build her visual-tactile (eye-hand) connections, and develop her sensorimotor skills. The result is that by six months, she should be able to reach for objects smoothly and quickly and begin to feed herself finger foods.²

Now is the perfect time to start practicing your baby’s Hand-Eye Coordination skills because it will help her develop her other senses and abilities. A new study from the Indiana University – Bloomington found that hand-eye coordination is strongly related to young children’s learning abilities and social-communication skills.⁷ The research shows that infants learn more from watching the hands of their parents complete a task, such as eating, dressing, or opening a jar, than by watching their faces alone.⁸ By watching your hands in motion, your baby will begin to copy your actions, using her visual skills to help control her hand movements, marking the start of the brain wiring responsible for active body coordination, hand-eye coordination, and many other forms of learning.

This is a great time for you to note the way your baby uses her gaze and her hands, both jointly and separately. Call her attention to new objects and show her how they can be used.¹ Allow her to look at and explore anything that draws her interest (as long as it’s safe!). Don’t worry if she takes a little time to reach her mouth with objects, drops objects repeatedly, or misses objects on the first pass, as these are all common misses that are all part of her learning process. However, if you feel your baby is having difficulty with her hand-eye movements, talk to her care provider or pediatrician about your concerns, as Hand-Eye Coordination delays or disabilities may affect many of her daily activities as she grows, including dressing herself, feeding herself, writing, and playing sports.³

Play Tips:

Do you want to know how you can support your baby’s development of Hand-Eye Coordination skills at this age? It’s easy! Read on for some simple tips to incorporate into your daily play time together.

1. Catch your baby’s interest with novel toys and objects to play with.^1,4 Capture your baby’s attention by showing her new and interesting toys or objects, especially light-weight rattles and brightly, patterned noisemaker toys. Model the use of each object slowly before placing it on her lap. Encourage her to pick it up and play with it. Be sure to vary her toys as novelty is one of the keys to sparking your baby’s Initiative and Curiosity.⁹ Make sure that the toys and objects you give her are clean and safe to mouth and are not choking hazards.¹
2. Develop your baby’s motor skills and muscle strength.^3,10 In order to develop Hand-Eye Coordination skills, she not only needs to develop the abilities to focus on objects and understand depth perception, but she must also build enough physical motor skills and muscle strength to let her control her arms, hands, and fingers. Help your baby exercise these muscles by practicing finger-grasping during feedings, helping her turn pages when you read board books together, and doing tummy time, which will build her upper arm strength as she pushes and holds her upper body up.

(SPECIAL OFFER: Sign up for Playful Bee’s Bee Well developmental learning program to give your baby the best start in life. The first 10,000 children enroll for FREE! Sign up today.)

Developmental Milestones:

Has your baby achieved the following Hand-Eye Coordination developmental milestones yet? If yes, check off all the skill(s) she has already mastered to date using Playful Bee’s developmental milestones tracker. It’s absolutely FREE and easy to use, just click HERE!

• Uses hand-eye coordination to explore (e.g. seeing an object and picking it up).

Sources:

¹Maryland State Department of Education (2010). Healthy Beginnings: Supporting Development and Learning from Birth through Three Years of Age. Retrieved on March 3, 2014, from http://cte.jhu.edu/onlinecourses/HealthyBeginnings/HBFINAL.pdf.

²Laberge, Monique. Hand-Eye Coordination. Encyclopedia of Children’s Health. Retrieved on March 3, 2014, from http://www.healthofchildren.com/G-H/Hand-Eye-Coordination.html.

³North Shore Pediatric Therapy. Eye Hand Coordination. North Shore Pediatric Therapy. Retrieved on March 3, 2014, from http://nspt4kids.com/health-topics-conditions/eye-hand-coordination/.

⁴Connecticut Department of Social Services. Connecticut’s Guidelines for the Development of Infant and Toddler Early Learning. Retrieved on March 3, 2014, from http://www.ct.gov/dss/lib/dss/dss_early_learning_guidelines.pdf.

⁵Bushnell, Emily E. and Boudreau, J. Paul (1993). Motor Development and the Mind: The Potential Role of Motor Abilities as a Determinant of Aspects of Perceptual Development. Child Development: 64(4), 1005.

⁶Summers, Jeffrey J. (1992). Approaches to the Study of Motor Control and Learning. Amsterdam: North-Holland.

⁷Bergland, Christopher (2013). Hand-Eye Coordination Improves Cognitive and Social Skills. Psychology Today: The Athlete’s Way. Retrieved on March 3, 2014, from http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-athletes-way/201311/hand-eye-coordination-improves-cognitive-and-social-skills.

⁸Yu, Chen and Smith, Linda B. (2013). Joint Attention Without Gaze Following: Human Infants and the Parents Coordinate Visual Attention to Objects through Eye-Hand Coordination. PLoS ONE 8(11). Retrieved on March 16, 2014, from http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0079659.

⁹Stamm, Jill and Spencer, Paula (2007). Bright from the Start. New York, NY: Gotham Books.

¹⁰Nugent, Kevin and Morell, Abelardo (2011). Your Baby Is Speaking to You. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, New York.

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Playful Bee

Education Team at Playful Bee

Playful Bee is an e-Preschool that delivers inquiry-based preschool learning from the classroom to your home. Our preschool curriculum was created by our talented team of rock star teachers. With years of hands-on preschool and Kindergarten teaching experience, they've developed a high-quality preschool experience that is convenient-to-use and easy-to-teach by you, grandparents, or your nanny at home.

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