We focus a great deal on the mental and emotional phases that our children go through, but physical development plays an important role in our children’s growing up too. Not every child develops at the same pace and while some physical phases appear on the chart at the doctor’s office (crawling, walking, climbing and skipping), others are unique to a specific child…
When I look back over my children’s growing up years, I can see there were some pretty quirky physical phases that they all went through—one of my daughters went through several months where she tried to watch herself run. She loved to run and she tried to “watch” herself by looking behind to see how fast she was going. Of course, this meant that she had a tendency to stumble or run into things. I would take her to a nearby track where she felt like she was speeding along and she could watch herself run with plenty of space. Like most childhood phases, one day it just stopped and she moved on to something else.
Another child went through a phase where all she wanted to do was jump off things. It didn’t matter what it was, if she could climb up onto it and jump off that is what she did. It took forever just to get down the street with her jumping off curbs and planters and anything else that she could get onto and off of with a bound.
Looking back, I can see how these physical phases played out not only in the child’s evolution and physical development, but I can also see how they were affected by and influenced personality and confidence. Our children need to experiment and develop their bodies in addition to their minds and their spirits. It is good for them to try out different physical tasks and push themselves to see all the things their bodies are capable of.