If You're Happy and You Know it Clap Your Hands...

I don't know of any person who at some time has NOT sung If You're Happy and You Know It. The song brings a smile to a child's face and gives the opportunity to practice clapping the hands together. But why is this important??

At birth we notice babies arms flail out to the sides. We use swaddles to bring them close to the body, which helps them relax and sleep. Babies have several infant reflexes that dictate arm movement based on head position or other factors. These reflexes integrate (or go away) at a certain age normally. Neurological factors can prevent integration and this is where problems occur.

Arm position out to the sides is not functional... unless you are balancing on a tight rope or trying to fly. We must bring our hands together to use them functionally. This is called bringing the hands to the midline (ex. clapping). When our hands are in the midline we can see them and we can see things we are holding in our hands. When we bring our hands together we can hold larger or heavier objects that we can't manage with one hand... like holding our own bottle to feed ourselves. We can bring our hands to the midline to put food or other items in our mouth to explore them. Almost all functional fine motor tasks are done with 2 hands together in midline - EX. holding a piece of paper to cut it with scissors; holding a book to read it; typing on a computer; blow drying your hair. You get the gist!

So now let's take it a step further. Let's cross the midline or bring the right arms across the body to reach the left side or vice versa. This increases our area of focus or helps us scan our environment. It uses the obliques muscles of the trunk to help us rotate. It causes us to move off our base of support and begin to gain mobility. Some examples of when we cross midline are rolling over; moving from sitting to hands and knees to crawl; reading - we start at the left margin and read across to the right margin; we look both ways before we cross the street. Its a very high level skill but you can see that if we don't cross the midline we can literally become stuck in one spot.

We can start bringing our baby's focus to midline very early by doing tummy time. In tummy time we bring our arms together and put weight on them. This brings the hands into our eyesight for the first time which is so fascinating for a baby. In weight bearing during tummy time those little fisted hands (caused by a reflex) start to open and babies begin to try to reach for toys. Toys can be used to help baby reach to midline and across.

So keep singing If You're Happy and You Know It and physically bring those hands into the clapping position. It's fun for them and it helps develop so many skills.

PS - You can also use Patty Cake for all these activities!