Have you been thinking about your child's midline crossing troubles? Have you noticed any problems with bilateral skills in your child? Then definitely some of our questions must been storming your mind? So here we are with answers.....

What is the body’s mid-line? 

The body’s mid-line is an imaginary line down the centre of the body that divides the body into left and right.

What is crossing the body’s mid-line? 

Crossing the body’s mid-line is the ability to reach across the middle of the body with the arms and legs. This allows children to cross over their body to perform a task on the opposite side of their body. By the age of 3 or 4 to 8 years old, child should have mastered the bilateral skill (using both sides of the body together) called “crossing the midline”.

Crossing the body’s mid-line is an important developmental skill needed for many everyday tasks such as writing, reaching towards your foot to put on a shoe and sock with both hands and hitting a ball with a bat

 

Why is crossing the body’s mid-line important and what are the effects on children who don not cross the body's midline?

Crossing the midline of body is required for the appropriate development of various skills.

When a child spontaneously crosses the mid-line with the dominant hand, then the dominant hand gets the practice needed to develop good fine motor skills by repeated consistent hand dominance.

If a child avoids crossing the mid-line, then both hands tend to get equal practice at developing skills and the child’s true handedness may be delayed.

Children who have difficulty crossing midline may appear ambidextrous because they are often observed using both hands, but they actually have a hidden neuroprocessing issue. Both sides of their brains are not communicating, resulting in decreased coordination, decreased motor control of movements and difficulties achieving higher level skills. Often, these children end up with two unskilled hands

Difficulty crossing the mid-line also makes it difficult to visually track a moving object from one side to the other or track from left to right when reading, meaning reading can also be delayed.

While the child is moving his/her eyes from left to right across the page, the eyes will stop at midline to blink and refocus; however, when this happens, the child will very frequently lose his/her place on the line and become confused as to where they left off.

It also affects handwriting, as diagonal lines cross the midline, and the child may need to stop in the middle of the page to switch hands when writing from left to right. Many self care and daily living skills require crossing midline, example, perfecting the skill of putting socks or shoes on requires one hand to cross over to the other side of the body.

How can we say child has problems with crossing their body’s mid-line?

If a child has difficulties crossing the body mid-line they might:

These children generally have difficulty coordinating gross motor patterns (e.g. crawling, skipping, star-jumps) and can’t participate in sports that require good coordination (e.g. Basketball, baseball, netball, tennis). As it is expected for this age group that most self care skills are independent or requiring only minimal assistance, the child suffers from increased pressure and anxiety in a school age. 

We pause here, but we shall be back with more on this next week.... 

We will continue to update you more on bilateral skills and midline crossing disorders and bring to you more information on:

1.What other problems can occur when a child has crossing the body’s mid-line difficulties?

2.Do you know what activities can help improve crossing the body’s mid-line?

3.Why do we need therapy if child feels difficulties in crossing the body’s mid-line?

4.If left untreated what can difficulties crossing the body’s mid-line lead to?

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