Effects of Family-Oriented Psychomotor Program on Muscle and Motor Skills in Preschoolers With Down Syndrome

One of the most critical issues affecting children with Down syndrome is the development of gross and fine motor skills in early childhood. Furthermore, the family environment affects the development of motor skills functions in children with Down syndrome. Accordingly, experimental research supported a family-oriented approach in this respect. Therefore, family–centered interventional approaches have recently attracted the attention of experts. This approach tailors content into educational planning. Besides, its purpose is to involve family members in education and implementation. The main piece of this action plays a key role in ensuring the health and wellbeing of children. Accordingly, attention to health services has shifted from conventional child–centered to family–centered approaches. The current study aimed to review the effects of family–centered psychomotor programs. We also evaluated their effects on muscle strengthening and the development of motor skills in preschool children with Down syndrome.

This was a quasi–experimental study with a pretest–posttest and a control group design. The test group received ten 90–minute weekly sessions of a family–centered psychomotor program. The intervention program lasted one month and one week. The statistical population of the study was preschool children with Down syndrome from Tehran City, Iran, in 2013. Using the purposive random sampling method, 30 children with Down syndrome who met the inclusion criteria were selected. Next, they were randomly divided into two groups of 15 subjects. The inclusion criteria of the study were an Intelligence Quotient (IQ) of 50–70 (educable), the absence of orthopedic or neurological diseases, congenital anomaly, and cerebral palsy, no audiovisual impairments, and parental approval for participating in the study. The Gross Motor Function Measure (Russell et al., 1998) was used at pretest and posttest stages to assess motor skills in the study participants. The obtained data were analyzed using Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA).

The ANCOVA data suggested a significant difference in the mean scores of the skills of sleeping, crawling, sitting, and walking between the pretest and posttest steps. In other words, the presented family–centered psychomotor program affected sleeping, crawling, sitting, standing, and walking in the study subjects (p<0.001). Thus, these skills significantly improved in the study participants after the intervention.

The collected results indicated that children with Down syndrome whose families have received educational and counseling services have provided significant progress in developing motor skills.