Conversations in Castle Park: The Brain/Body Connection

By Dr. Annabelle Black Delfin

Recently, Castle Park reopened after a prolonged closure for remodeling. It was humming as I walked with my friend past the park. She commented on all of the activity. Families with children filled the new play areas. It was sunny and cold, but that didn’t stop the children from enthusiastically playing with each other and the new equipment. Everywhere children were running, climbing, chasing and sliding; engaging in gross motor movement.

Children Develop Through Movement

Gross motor movement involves the use of our large muscles in movement and physical activity. We know it is good for children to play outdoors, and gross motor movement is emphasized for benefits like a stronger cardiovascular system, increased muscle and bone strength, and a reduced risk of obesity. But the benefits of gross motor movement extend beyond general health to promoting cognitive development.

Child development is typically classified into domains: cognitive, language/ communication, social/emotional, and physical. The physical developmental domain is further divided into gross and fine motor development. Everyday movements that involve gross motor movement include walking, running, twisting, raising or waving arms. More advanced gross motor movements involve hand-eye and foot-eye coordination skills including throwing, catching, kicking a ball, swimming, tumbling, and activities such as dance or soccer. These are all things that most children find to be fun, often seeking and creating gross motor play on their own.

Brain/Body Connection: Practice Makes Perfect

As a child engages in movement, the brain, central nervous system, and muscles form a motor memory that becomes built into the neural architecture through repetition of the movement/s. The more a child repeats a movement, such as kicking a ball, the child’s neural networks are refined to perform this movement with automaticity, i.e. without much conscious thought. Learning and enacting complex movements will beneficially shape the way the brain develops, producing additional benefits in other areas of development.

Across town, at the Belisama Irish Dance studio, children are learning complex movements with multi-step directions. Studio director Celia Bassett knows from her formal training in early childhood development that when children undertake the learning of motor skills the benefit is holistic, “Irish dance is an especially wonderful language to use for this process because it is highly complex in terms of crossing right and left sides of the body and brain, memorizing complex patterns and steps, coordinating many parts of the body at once, and building upon some of the biggest and most critical gross motor movements”.

In young children, development is experienced as an ongoing process that is overlapping, simultaneous and mutually-influencing of growth and learning. Much of development depends on what a child is exposed to in the environment. The brain develops based on sensory information incoming from the senses, such as vision, but also based on internal information caused by intentional movement.

Building Strong Neural Networks

The frontal lobe of the brain contains the primary motor cortex and the premotor areas. The primary motor cortex generates the neural impulses that direct the enactment of movement. Simultaneously, the premotor areas initiate the planning and coordination of movements. When a child learns to kick a ball or a sequence of dance steps, for example, the motor cortex is actively mapping out the necessary movements, refining through repetition, the neural pathways to make these actions smoother, more coordinated and complex over time. Movements that cross the body’s midline stimulate both hemispheres of the brain and initiate new neural connections between the two.

Building strong neural networks in the frontal lobes of the brain lays a foundation for further development in the prefrontal cortex, which is known as the center for executive functions. Executive functions are high level cognitive skills that include planning (which involves abstract concepts of time and sequencing), self-regulation of emotions and impulses, and problem-solving, among other mental skills. This area of the brain takes many years to develop and exposure to specific experiences is shown to promote neural complexity. When children participate in movement, especially learning complex movements, this actually stimulates overall development in the frontal lobes. Learning sequenced, cross-body, complicated movements engages the motor cortex to execute the movements, but also engages the prefrontal cortex to plan, sequence, and work out the conditions necessary to do the movement.

Other physical systems benefit from motor movement. “Balance is another factor in Irish dance that takes special attention and time to develop and nurture,” explains Bassett. Before getting to the specific lessons of the day, her students do exercises to “wake up our breath and tactile systems for vestibular stimulation.” As developmental systems are interrelated, establishing and learning new motor skills can have a profound impact on development in cognitive areas. Learning motor skills causes the brain to involve higher mental functions such as planning, coordinating and problem-solving, all things that promote further development of executive functions.

Making It Fun and Building Social Skills

Exposure to instruction to learn an activity like soccer, martial arts, or dance involves working memory to remember multi-step directions while performing the activity, which, in turn, requires spatial reasoning, cognitive adaptability and inhibitory control, such as maintaining focus and resisting distractions. It is important that the activity is fun, and instruction is reinforcing. Bassett explains, “We explore concepts such as speed, level, place, energy, and more through use of fun songs and dances, obstacle courses and community building exercises.” Understanding these developmental benefits, Bassett added an infant/toddler creative movement class to her studio’s program. “By utilizing props like scarves, ribbons, bean bags, shakers and more we were able to help little children begin to expand their gross and fine motor movements through exploratory fun.”

Learning a fun activity among peers also plays a role in developing social and emotional skills in children. Skills such as taking turns, sharing, waiting, cooperating and communicating are inherent in physical activities with others. Bassett emphasizes the social/emotional benefit of learning in a group setting, whether a studio or team, is “building community through cooperation, healthy peer interactions and parent-child connections.” This can create a sense of connectedness and belonging in the child fostering feelings of confidence and accomplishment.

Santa Fe is Full of Opportunities

There are many activities in and around Santa Fe that families can do together with children to encourage gross motor skill development, such as hikes on the Dale Ball trails or biking at La Tierra. Another fun activity is to visit your neighborhood park, or parks in other parts of town. Even at home, create an obstacle course in your living room or play games like Red Light/Green Light or Simon Says to encourage different ways of moving and opportunities for practice. Santa Fe also offers many types of movement classes from martial arts for kids to golf camps to dance classes of all kinds. There are also many team sports opportunities, such as soccer and baseball, and individual sports, such as skiing and swimming. 

Providing opportunities for children to engage in gross motor movement, whether energetic free play or structured activities, supports development in many areas. Movement and physical activity supports overall health, but also fosters improved attention, focus and concentration, the ability to follow multi-step directions and the development of executive functions.

Dr. Annabelle Black Delfin is the director of research at the New Mexico Center of Excellence for Early Childhood Education at WNMU. She has been involved in education, youth services, and early childhood program development in Santa Fe for over thirty years. She is currently concluding a multi-year research project on children’s cognitive development and symbolic representation with Dr. Wenjie Wang. The pair have published numerous academic papers on this subject. Annabelle is also a mom of two Santa Fe kids and nana to one granddaughter.