As infants develop and explore their new world, they are constantly acquiring new skills. The templates for each new discovery are based in pre-existing "primitive" reflexes. These automatic movement patterns provide the building blocks for learning to make more complex movements.
They may manage to sit up, but bypass crawling with scooting around on their bottom.
They may learn to walk with hand-holding, before they are ready to balance independently.
They may prefer to "W-sit," rather than explore cross-legged sitting which enables body rotation.
These bypasses have implications on this child's visual and visual-motor development!
Dr. Samantha Slotnick incorporates the assessment of six Primitive Reflexes, the building blocks of visual-motor development, into her optometric evaluation.
Children of any age (even adults!) are given the opportunity to re-visit missed learning stages with home-based activities which foster visual-motor development. This directly enables more efficient use of the visual system in gathering and processing information, for learning in an intense, sustained academic environment.