Extracurricular Physical Activities and the Condition of Being an Only Child as a Conditioning Factor in the Psychomotor Development of 5-Year-Old Children.

In early childhood education, there is a great interdependence among motor, affective, and cognitive development. A better understanding of psychomotor development and its variables by pediatricians and those who oversee educational tasks at this stage of development, such as teachers, psychologists, counselors, and parents themselves, can influence the design of educational intervention proposals. To that effect, the present study aims to analyze the influence of some family characteristics such as the condition of being an only child or having siblings and whether the child carries out extracurricular activities linked to physical activities and sports. To achieve this objective, a Checklist of Psychomotor Activities (CPA) assessment instrument was used based on the observation of a sample of 694 children aged 5 years who were enrolled in the second cycle of child education in the province of Albacete. The results show that those children who performed extracurricular activities related to physical activities and sports had a greater development of laterality and postural tonic control than those who did not attend this type of activities. At the same time, differences were found in the affective and relational levels and in the perceptual-motor aspects in favor of children who have siblings compared with children who are only children. There is no other research that addresses both issues in the same study, and this is a strength of the present study.

Physical, Perceptual, Socio-Relational, and Affective Skills of Five-Year-Old Children Born Preterm and Full-Term According to Their Body Mass Index.

The main purpose of this study was to compare the psychomotor development of five-year-old children born preterm and full term. The comparison included physical-motor, perceptual-motor, and socio-relational and affective skills. As low weight is one of the variables that most influences the psychomotor development of premature infants, a secondary aim was to analyze these skills according to their current body mass index (BMI). A prospective simple ex-post facto study was conducted. The sample consisted of 672 five-year-old children enrolled in the third year of early childhood education in the province of Albacete, Spain; 35 of them was born prematurely. Children were evaluated by their teachers using the Checklist of Psychomotor Activities (CPA). The results show that children born preterm had a lower development of their physical-motor skills. In the perceptual-motor field, premature children showed lower scores in the variables related to their body image and body schema, motor dissociation, and visual-motor coordination, as well as in socio-relational and affective aspects. However, the development in laterality, dynamic coordination, motor execution, tonic-postural control, and balance were not affected. These differences were not affected by the current weight, given that the analysis of the BMI indicated no differences in preterm children. This study demonstrated the need to establish protocols oriented to the prevention of the difficulties detected in children with psychomotor high-risk and the needs to reinforce the educational programs in this area to improve the integral development of children born preterm.