Abstract:

Introduction:
The psychomotor development of children during the first two years of life is crucial for later adaptation in the school environment (MacDonald et al., 2017). As parents start observing potential developmental issues in their children as early as around 14 months of age (Chawarska et al., 2006), examining three areas of developmental functioning — adaptive behavior, motor skills, and communication — and their interrelationships is necessary to supplement information about the dynamic interplay of different parts of psychomotor development in the population-wide screening tool S-PMV10 (©Prof. K. Matulaya n.d. Fund, 2016). Furthermore, exploring the attainment of developmental milestones in early childhood can significantly guide both children and their families toward supportive care and intervention. The aim of this study is to examine the relationship between motor skills, adaptive behavior, and communication in early childhood. The intention is also to investigate the difficulty of developmental milestones,

Methodology:
The data for 5336 children were anonymously collected online through the pediatric portal "Health of a Child," which provides the method for Screening of Psychomotor Development (S-PMV10), (©Prof. K. Matulaya n.d. Fund, 2016) as part of the 10th preventive check-up in Slovakia. The average age of the children was M = 15.82 months; SD = 2.06 (min = 14; max = 26), with the sample consisting of 49% girls and 51% boys. The correlation between motor skills, adaptive behavior, and communication was examined using the Spearman's rank correlation coefficient and the percentage of fulfillment of developmental milestones was also explored.

Outcomes:
The individual areas of developmental functioning – motor skills, adaptive behavior, and communication – were statistically significantly correlated, with a moderately strong relationship found between adaptive behavior and communication. When exploring the difficulty of developmental milestones, we found that only 55% of children achieved the milestone of speaking a certain number of words.

Discussion and conclusion:
The strong correlation between adaptive behavior and communication is attributed to mastering motor skills, enabling children to independently engage in interactive communication with their environment through speech (Albert et al., 2021). Our findings also emphasize the importance of informing parents that speaking 10 or 20 words at 15 months is a particularly challenging developmental milestone that should be monitored by parents until their child joins kindergarten. A limitation of the study is that the S-PMV10 tool comprises only two items related to motor skills, which may have reduced the achieved variability in scores compared to other domains.

Acknowledgement:
The study was supported by the VEGA project: 1/0534/22: Psychometric properties and validity of the Screening of Psychomotor Development (S-PMV) as a monitoring method for early detection of developmental difficulties in children.

Keywords:

Psychomotor development, adaptive behavior, communication, motor skills.