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| 等 级：资深长老 |
| 经 验 值：2583 |
| 魅 力 值：349 |
| 龙 币：25238 |
| 积 分：8779.1 |
| 注册日期：2001-08-10 |
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Feet, Feet—Glorious Feet!
Feet, Feet—Glorious Feet!
--By Margaret Sasse,
Do not be in a hurry for your child to walk for it is not how early they walk but how much they learn before influence the development of their intelligence.
For this reason, it is important to allow nature to dictate the timing of your child’s first step. Do not provide walking aid or hold their hand for them to walk.
However, from the time your child is tottering up right alone, how well your little one masters this new skill, will be very dependent on their environment. The sooner this exciting new skill is mastered the sooner the hands and eyes can learn to work together to develop all sorts of exiting experiences.
It is important to encourage toddlers to walk, first on a fat smooth surface such as paths, parking areas etc, where there is no need to lift the feet too high, requiring less balance. At first you will notice that the hands are held up and the feet wide apart. With practise, balancing improves, and our toddler is free to explore their world from this upright position.
Pleasing Don’t Hurry
With today’s fast lifestyle, we are in anger of neglecting this natural skill of walking: children are constantly being told to hurry; it is easier and faster pick up or push our toddler in stroller or drive them to the shops; and how often do parents lift their child up over gutters and small obstacles?
Bare Feet Are Best
For this balancing act to happen smoothly, the toes must be free from impediments such as socks, booties and later shoes, whenever it is safe to do so, in order to gain the maximum sensations provided directly through the soles of their feet.
As infants begin to pull themselves up into standing position and walk sideways around the furniture, they need to be able to spread their toes and learn the difficult task of standing balance. Balance is a vital function if our feet especially if our eyes are giving one message to the brain and our feet another!
According to research by a Podiatrist, ’feet take an average of 5,000-8,000 steps each day. They take five or six times our body weight when we jump with them and two to three times our body weight when we run!’
The bones in young children’s feet rarely harden before seven years of age and are easily affected by ill-fitting shoes, socks and even booties. The longer you can put off buying shoes for your child the better, not only for your infant’s feet, but also your wallet!
Even ’jump suits’ can cause problems if they are too tight, babies do not really enjoy getting mouthfuls of fabric when the first find their toes in their mouth! This affects what they learn about their toes. In the course of normal development all infants and children need to feel and ‘see’ with BARE FEET.
In the early years it is important for infants/young children, to feel and thus learn about the different surfaces as this helps not only in fine motor coordination, but also essential body and space awareness and sense of balance. For coordination, a cornerstone of learning the eyes must ‘see’ what the feet ‘feel’. To quote information from the health commission of Victoria Australia in 2000, ’later activities of walking, running, jumping and climbing are all better down with bare feet.
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2005-03-01 19:20:11
