Many self care and daily living skills require crossing midline. It also affects handwriting, as diagonal lines cross the midline, and the child may need to stop in the middle of the page to switch hands when writing from left to right. While the child is moving his/her eyes from left to right across the page, the eyes will stop at midline to blink and refocus however, when this happens, the child will very frequently lose his/her place on the line and become confused as to where they left off. Affects on children who do not develop the bilateral skill:įurthermore, when a child has difficulty crossing midline, it can affect his/her ability to read. Often, these children have not yet established a hand preference, sometimes using their left and sometimes using their right to draw, color, write, eat, and throw. Coordinating both sides of the body can be difficult for the child who avoids crossing midline. Both sides of the brain need to talk to each other for the “worker hand” and the “helper hand” to work together and compliment each other.
These skills require a type of coordination that comes from experience with “cross-lateral motion,” which is movement involving the left arm and right leg, or the right arm and left leg at the same time.Įstablishing a “worker hand” and a “helper hand” is a sign that the brain is maturating and lateralization is occurring, and is strongly correlated with the ability to cross the midline. Children who have difficultly crossing the body’s midline often have trouble with skills such as reading, writing, completing self care skills and participating in sports & physical activities. Crossing the midline of your body helps build pathways in the brain and is an important prerequisite skill required for the appropriate development of various motor and cognitive skills. We cross midline when we scratch an elbow, cross our ankles, and read left to right.
This is the ability to move one hand, foot, or eye into the space of the other hand, foot or eye. By the age of 3 or 4 years old, a child should have mastered the bilateral skill (using both sides of the body together) called “crossing the midline”.
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