Playing with Tissue Paper!

Mattie at 15 months, hates using his fingers to hold, pick up, or grasp things - especially when these things are small (no matter how attractive they are).  He refuses to use his hands to feed himself, nor does he like to hold his toys and play with them for a long time.  He usually just brushes all of them away with a swaying motion or grasps them and throws them away making them all drop and scatter everywhere.  Our OT tells us not to be worried as Mattie may still be in a stage where he's fascinated with the objects dropping or falling.  Our OT calls this "object permanence" or "cause and effect" where he's learning to see what happens if he let's go of the object, or if the object will continue to be there when he lets it go.  At the same time, Mattie at this stage is still developing his grasp, especially  his pincer grasp or his ability to pick up small objects (objects like raisins or peas).  While regular kids master this skill at around 9-12 months, Mattie will master this skill a little bit later.  I guess this has a lot to do with his low muscle tone.  With low muscle tone, fine motor skills such as skills using his hands and fingers are affected.  The development of Mattie's hand and finger muscles are delayed and they need to be strengthened as well.

With an effort to help Mattie enhance his hand skills, I try to give him some activities to encourage him to use his hands and fingers.  One of the activities which I think was a huge success was playing with tissue paper and pulling them out of the box!

For some reason, Mattie has this fascination with tissue paper.  Maybe it was the tissue's texture or maybe it was the awe of pulling something out of the box! Picture yourself in your baby's eyes, won't you think that it's like magic that something can come out of a box every time to tried to pull?  And so the never ending game of pulling tissue papers out of the box!  For Mattie, it was just fun and playing but for me, it was Mattie exercising his hand skills!

 

Learning how to hold things will enable Mattie to play and discover more about his surroundings.   Being able to grasp things is also his first step on the road to feeding himself! And guess what, as an added bonus, coincidentally Mattie learned how to feed himself with a cracker after a week of this tissue pulling exercise!  (See my next post: I Love Crackers!)


Mattie's Mom