Normal ranges for proprioceptive tasks in 6-year-old children in Mangaung

Abstract

Children are regularly exposed to changing surroundings where they learn how to handle interactions with the environment by collecting information from their senses (Goodway, Ozmun & Gallahue 2019; Tarakci & Tarakci 2016). This interaction includes information received from sight, touch, hearing, smell, as well as the vestibular and proprioceptive senses (Tarakci & Tarakci 2016). Different sensory experiences are crucial to children’s motor development, as sensory information help them to learn how to coordinate large and small muscles (Tahir et al. 2019). Motor development during early childhood is exceptionally important as it forms the basis for other developmental domains such as academic skills used by children later in their lives (D’Hondt et al. 2010). A mature proprioceptive system is thus not only essential for effective motor control, muscle tone and voluntary movement execution (Holst-Wolf, Yeh & Konczak 2016) but also for academic success (Balakrishnan & Rao 2007).