Entering School: The Skill of Sitting

The big day arrives and your child is off to school. It is interesting how frequently we have children start formal education at age seven. They appear ready to learn at about that age- at least formally. They like to be part of a group. They look up to authority figures and absorb what authority figures have to say.

Children entering school must be able to balance their bodies comfortably. This involves an integration between their balance mechanism and their visual attention mechanism. You have seen this grow over the years so that they can sit and watch without being pulled into the action by what they are watching. The skill of sitting in a balanced posture, oriented to a learning situation and ready to absorb information, depends on the ability to balance the body while sitting and listening, reading and writing. This is the same reciprocal motor skill that the children have developed over the last seven years. It started with rolling over and progressed to creeping and walking and finally demonstrated itself when they could alternate their feet while walking down the stairs without help or demonstrated the ability to skip.

What the child really demonstrated is the reciprocal control of opposite actions of the nervous system and the muscles that position the body. They coordinate the left-side muscles with the right-side muscles, front with back, the visual cues of being upright with the postural cues of being upright. All of these coordinated movements are, we hope, skillfully developed so that unconscious effort needed to sustain coordination. If this is the case, then the child is posturally orientated to the task with minimal distraction. and is able to pay full attention to what is being presented.