Exercises you can do with your child

Doing motor exercises with your child can be a great activity for both dad and child. You get a lot of physical contact and it’s exciting to see how the child develops and is able to do more each time you do the exercises.

Here are 11 different exercises designed for different stages of development – the idea is not that your child should be able to do everything at the same time, but try the exercises and see which suit the stage your child has reached right now. You can try the more difficult exercises again later on.

It’s exciting when your child starts to move about on the floor, and can turn around to follow you or reach a toy that looks interesting. If you do this exercise together, you can train your child to turn on the floor:

Many parents feel it’s a milestone when their baby starts crawling. You can make it easier for your child to learn to crawl with different exercises. This one, for example, trains the arms to bear the child’s weight:

This is another exercise that helps the child to learn to crawl is this one, where the child trains to carry weight on both arms and knees:

When your child starts moving around on the floor, it’s usually easiest to move backwards. You can practise with this exercise:

To train the child to move forwards, it helps to have a supportive hand to push off – and something to encourage the child to move forwards:

This exercise trains the child’s balance and coordination, and it also trains the child to carry weight on their feet:

This exercise trains the child’s balance while sitting and changing positions. At the same time, it challenges the child’s fall reflexes to the side, which can also help when learning to crawl:

This exercise trains the muscle and joint senses, also known as body awareness. Body awareness is the child’s understanding and sensation of their own body and is active all the time, e.g. when sitting on a chair or lifting their feet over a step. This exercise also trains the child’s sense of balance as well as body awareness:

For this exercise, it is important that the child has some control over his/her head before starting the exercise. The exercise strengthens the muscles of the neck and throat, head control and sense of balance:

This exercise trains the child’s sense of spatial direction. You may have heard that we have receptors in the inner ear that help us recognise up, down, right and left. This is the skill we train when we practise spatial awareness. One way to do this is with this exercise:

When your child uses things to help stand up, you can start training the child to carry their weight on their legs. You can do that with this exercise, which also trains balance: