ABSTRACT
To accomplish the important task of upright locomotion, humans adopt one of five distinctive gait forms or skills: walking, running, galloping, hopping and skipping. The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the development of these skills in children aged 4 to 12 years. One might reasonably ask, to what end? There are already many chapters and textbooks in which evidence-based developmental changes in the quality/process and performance/product of these skills across childhood are described (e.g. Branta et al., 1984; Gabbard, 1996; Haywood and Getchell, 2001; Payne and Isaacs, 1991; Roberton and Halverson; 1984). There are also chapters in which the discussion and analysis of locomotion is less descriptive and focuses on how these changes occur (e.g. Clark and Whitall, 1989a; Whitall, 1995). Why devote another chapter to this topic? In addition, although the rationale for understanding the development of walking, and to a lesser extent running, is self-evident, the other locomotor skills seem of little relevance to the study of motor behaviour (as indicated by the dearth of studies on them). Why discuss these other locomotor skills? Both of these questions can be easily answered. First, there are principles of (motor) development that can be illustrated with an analysis of previous locomotor studies of this age span and that complement rather than repeat previous writings. Second, there are several, albeit non-obvious, reasons why studying all the locomotor skills is important and, indeed, to be strongly encouraged. This chapter focuses primarily on discussing principles of motor development in ten sections, with the theme emerging that locomotor co-ordination has been studied more extensively than locomotor control. The three remaining sections address the importance of studying locomotor development and the specific need for research on locomotor control to provide a more complete understanding of how locomotor skills continue to develop over childhood.
