The Incredible Importance Of Your Child’s Vestibular System and How Forest School Can Help It’s Development.

Today, I’m looking at the even more fabled 7th and potentially most fascinating sense that I teased you with, when I looked at the proprioceptive system.

Vesti-What Now?

So what is the 7th sense? It’s known as the Vestibular or balance sense. Knowing more about this sense will immediately explain to you why your child is drawn to certain activities, particularly those ever present at Forest School.

Children love to swing. They love to twist the ropes of the swing and then spin as fast as they can. They will roll down hills over and over again. They love to play rough and tumble, hang upside down on monkey bars, dance, do somersaults, play leap frog and wheelbarrow race. As a parent you;ve seen and know this, but Until now you’ve probably wondered how you managed to be landed with a child that is part chimp, but allow me to explain with the help of the Vestibular system.

This Sense Is Huge For Your Child!

The Vestibular sense and processing of this information in your child’s brain is all about movement and balance of the body. Your child’s vestibular system is key to the relationship between their body, gravity and the physical world around them. Simply, it lets them know where their body is in space, whether they’re moving or still, how they’re moving, how fast and in what direction.

It’s not a system we hear an awful lot about though and it often gets taken for granted, yet it plays such an important role. This sense is so wildly important it is the first fully functioning sensory system to develop and begins in ‘baby’ at just two months after conception! Unreal, right.

It gets even better when I say that the sense is then completely formed around five months after conception and movement in the womb will contribute to its development!

The vestibular processing system forms part of the central nervous system and is crucial for developing balance and co-ordination. It’s a foundation for developing our sensory systems such as vision, touch, sound and proprioception and it’s what allows us to trust our movements and tolerate motion.

The vestibular processing system is connected with the cerebellum, which is part of the brain that controls movement, co-ordination, balance, equilibrium and muscle tone. This is the link that brings visual information into the mix to enable eye movement reflexes. We need this to track moving objects, stabilize our gaze and differentiate between objects.

This is particularly impactful for your child during the school day for activities such as reading, maintaining attention when looking between alternate resources, playing and adjusting visual attention while moving.

As children grow and develop, it’s essential that they have plenty of opportunities to exercise and maintain a healthy vestibular processing system.

So How Does It Work?

The vestibular system itself centres in your child’s ear. Key parts of the ear and the tiny hairs that line the ear canal detect fluid movement, so they can provide us with information as to where our head is in space.

All this information along with your child’s other senses work together to keep them balanced and in control whatever position they’re in. Obviously this system is not fully developed in a child and is the main reason they need to keep practising it’s usage to develop.

The more your child is out of an upright position, the more the fluid will move over the hairs, and the stronger the vestibular sense will become. Your child needs to put their bodies in all different positions and move them in all different directions in order to get that fluid moving and develop the sense.

What does this look like in practice?

Children with a strong vestibular sense are more coordinated and better balanced.

Children who haven’t fully developed their vestibular sense tend to be clumsy and run into things. They may not have a good understanding of personal space. A child who suffers with problems associated with vestibular processing can find many aspects of everyday life very challenging.

Their reaction to movement may be either hypo-responsive — where they crave movement, or hyper-responsive — where they are fearful of any changes in gravity and position, or both.

Children on the autistic spectrum often experience difficulties with vestibular processing, in particular balance and body connectivity. They tend to struggle to understand the inter-connectivity of their body parts and how this relates to the space around them.

This means that they are often at a higher risk of having an accident or injury such as misjudging the distance between steps, or how far away an object is as they are walking towards it.

It is therefore vitally important that children are able to practice these skills on all different types of terrain so that their movements is not always in a straight line or up and down.

How Forest School Can Help.

Naturally, the Forest School environment is perfect for this;
Forest School provides your child with a range of self chosen play opportunities that engage them and their vestibular processing system. Children are given the space, time and opportunity to test it out and innately, meaning naturally, work on it.

Running on the uneven and challenging forest floor, rolling down hills, balancing on logs, trees and rope, swinging on tree swings, hanging upside down from branches, building a fort, partaking in rough and tumble play or lying underneath a canopy are all examples of the ways children work on their vestubular system at Forest School without even being told too.

Of course the children will have no idea that they’re doing this. As far as they’re concerned, their just playing — and so it should be! But it’s exactly the kind of play and learning holistically that will enable them to better attend to, and cope with, everyday functional tasks and all only provided at Forest School.

Movement during the day and throughout childhood is crucial. The importance here therefore is monumental. Childhood is the key time that the vestibular sense develops and it’s not happening while they sit still.

Their brain needs to be stimulated by movement. Comparing and contrasting body and head movement between a child who is outside in a nature and a child who is inside in front of a television screen, clearly displays why there can be such vast developmental differences between children.

I know what I’d do.

You’re Just One Session Away.