Now available! Web-based training on Children’s Sitting Development – from passive to active sitting is completed and serves as a “golden standard” for the upcoming course on how children with neurological injuries learn to sit. You can find the link to the course here.

The web course on normal sitting development serves as the basis for the next training on how to teach children with disabilities to sit. Learn to Move aims to convey expectations of development opportunities based on knowledge derived from research and experience. Web course two on sitting with disabilities is expected to be completed in the fall of 2024 and will focus on learning to sit with both low and high muscle tone.

Children with neurological challenges can learn to solve tasks such as balance and motor skills in the same way as typically developing children. The motor development is the “answer key,” but there are many ways to get there, and the child needs support to pay attention to their body and understand the goal of training and learning. It is exciting and interesting to break down motor skills into small details to find the right task to start with.

The research that Learn to Move has been involved in primarily focuses on sitting in children with cerebral palsy and also around the orthopedic aid “sitting shell.”

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Children and adolescents with cerebral palsy have good opportunities to learn body control while sitting. If they are given the opportunity to sit just like us, with good pelvic position, straight back, straight neck, eyes in horizontal position, and with the center of gravity of the upper body in front of the hips, then children over time can learn good postural control and hand use. .Children may need good hip belts, dynamic leg separators, and a seat that provides conditions for a good pelvic position, i.e., a neutral or slightly forward-tipped pelvis, but not a backward-tipped pelvis. The seat should be flat or forward-tilted, not backward-tilted. How children with cerebral palsy learn to sit in a functional sitting position is described in the thesis “On factors of importance for sitting in children with cerebral palsy” by Ulla Myhr, presented in Gothenburg in 1994. The research followed a total of 80 children in Norrbotten and Uppsala, who were filmed and followed for five years. The five-year follow-up was presented at the World Congress of Physiotherapy in Washington DC in 1995 and showed that children who were given a good sitting position developed positively and improved, while those who continued to sit in positions that contributed to increased spasticity experienced increased problems such as hip dislocation and scoliosis.

Here’s the dramatic change in control one minute into the video – when the child is provided with conditions to sit upright by having the upper body above the support surface, instead of behind the hips. You can watch the video a bit further down on the page.

For those interested in learning more about functional sitting, here are two articles to download.

Article 1

Improvement of functional sitting position in children with cerebral palsy

Article 2

Five year follow-up of functional sitting position in children with cerebral palsy