Autism and Motor Skills

In addition to the three main difficulties of social interaction, repetitivebehaviors, and communication challenges, autistic children often find problems with their coordination, posture, and motor planning. Recent studies have revealed that difficulties in movement are common to autistic children, and kids with weaker motor skills, suffer from greater communicative skill deficits.Autistic children have varying levels of difficultieswhile processing sensory information, along with difficulty to use skilful attention. Both add to the challenges that autistic children face while picking up motor skills.What's required to learn motor skills?Learning motor skills depends upon the brain's ability to forge a connection between various parts of the brain involved to control bodily movements. It includes the ability to pick up sensory information from the environment and the body to predict what may happen next, and to plan actions and adapt them as required.Neuro-typical children can easily make these brain connections in the course of daily experience. They are eager to take up new challenges, explore various ways to achieve their goals, and expect mastering new skills with practice. They get the "I can do" sense of efficacy.Children with autism often have to resort to apps to encourage physical activity for learning motor skills. This is because there's a difference in the way an autistic child's brain forms new connections. They often need additional practice to learn a new skill.Difficulties faced by autistic children while learning motor skills*.Avoiding tasks and challenges that call for physical effort; associated with being fearful or cautious of the work. Apps to encourage physical activity can greatly help.*.Getting upset in case of mistakes or inability to execute a task in the first attempt.*.Difficulty to integrate past experience and sensory information for planning and monitoring actions.*.Poor working memory, attention and persistence in case of repeated failures.*.Poor prediction capability.*.Poor use of visual information.*.Balance response usually slow and not adapted to the task.Annie practicing pouring waterEven apparently simple acts like picking up a bowl of water and pouring it into a container requires a level of integration of information fromseveral sources that include the environment, body sensors, and past experience with identical action, for carrying out the task.Past experience is important to plan the action*.Positive emotional response: Pouring water is a familiar task. I'm confident you can do this.*.Negative emotional response: You may have tried it before and found difficult.*.You may spill the water and make a mess. I'm anxious about it.*.The weight of the bowl needs to be gauged to determine the strength required to lift it.Information required to plan the actionVisual: The position of the beaker, its shape and size.Body: Where my hand is now.Transformation: Movements needed for moving the hand from the current position to the end.Autistic children can tackle such situations with apps to encourage physical activity. But they have to be introduced at a proper time, so that it'sneither too early, nor too late.Someapps for autistic childrenhelp to pick up motor skills. They are proving to be usefulclassroom teaching aidsfor special needs childrenArticle Source:http://EzineArticles.com/expert/Kevin_Carter/2278166