People who work with children should be able to make an appropriate environment analysis where children move. By doing this, they could positively interfere and modify constraints, so that the detection (and creation) of affordances for action could occur easily. Taking this for granted, these children could, then, engage into motor problems resolution, looking for the best solutions for each dilemma that they are confronted with. In this paper, we reflect about educators, parents and coaches role on the promotion of children’ motor development and, therefore, in the future motor performance optimization throu gh constraints and affordances manipulation, with examples that stress and point out the importance of this pedagogic, methodologic and training procedure.
According to a development ecological perspective, constraints, which are seen as factors that have the potential to influence behavioural changes, shape or guide systems’ self-organization, being a shoal of fishes moving in an orderly manner or a child dealing with a new motor task. Constraints relate with degrees of freedom [
Thus, and according to Newell [
Another important aspect is that, despite many affordances can be easily detectable even for who does not have much experience in performing related tasks, it will be up to educators and teachers, especially those who work with children of lower age, but not only, to play an important role. In fact, every physical education teacher or professional coach idealize and design tasks where they play with constraints which get manipulated, affordances that children understand and motor solutions that they find more or less directly. In future sports practice, this will be very helpful, since sports, usually, require players to engage into problems resolution, situation that will, most probably, be well solved if they got acquainted, since early development, dealing with changing environments and direct perception of multimodal stimuli.
Let’s pick ramps as an example. In abstract, they allow people to go down standing, sitting, rolling, etc. With the various attempts that children perform, they get to know the way that most fits their motor development stage, that is, despite the fact that, in the first few trials, some try to descend standing, by falling, they, before long, realize that the best way (more safe and effective) to overcome that obstacle will be to go down sitting, dragging, bending their knees (in order to lower gravity centre) or sliding like in a playground slide. When, finally, this understanding becomes stable, we might say, according to theories mentioned before, that the child learned how to act in that particular situation (attending multiple factors: slope of the ramp, smoothness of the surface, children ability to balance, etc.). This change in the category of action used by them (from standing to sitting) will, in practice, constitute their learning. Interestingly, later, its development and accumulated experience will lead a return, now appropriately, to the use of the category of action that, at first, was dysfunctional: to descend standing in an upright position. Norman [
Interestingly, in future sports practice, especially on those where two players or teams oppose each other, counter-information will be of great efficacy. In most of the cases, this counter-information will be based, precisely, on sending a wrong message to the opponents, leading them to think, for instance, that there is an affordance for their passage on a certain part of the pitch when, in fact, everything is prepared to, when they attempt that passage, close the path. This is the case of the information a goalkeeper gives to the striker, on a penalty-kick, when he moves himself to the right place of the goal. Striker, if not prepared, can be induced to kick the ball to the left side of the goalkeeper when, in fact, that is precisely what goalkeeper wants, being ready to make an explosive lower limbs muscle contraction that will lead him to that side. As can be easily understood, in sport, as important as becoming able to detect affordances and overcome and adjust to constraints, is being able to constraint opponents’ actions, forcing them to perform with less chances of success and using fake affordances.
Returning to educators (in general) and their role in this game of constraints and affordances, we believe it is essential that they be able to handle these constraints and to highlight affordances, so that children, by themselves, are able to find the best solutions. The great goal is adaptive behaviour to emerge from the dynamic interaction between the individual and his involvement [
It is interesting to note that small changes can lead to new affordances or, at least, their detection, giving rise, in this way, to new possibilities of action [
However, and despite being possible, early on, to verify that children are able to detect the affordances for large part of the actions in which they are involved, there are, as pointed out by Barreiros [
First of all, this should not be considered a traditional, nor even a pilot-study experimental approach. It is meant, primarily, to illustrate previous reflection. Keeping this in mind, we used two situations. One (
As can be seen, this 17 months’ boy clearly adapted his behavior and categories of action to the constraints he found, being them natural (
Having in mind the main issue of our reflection, we think it is reasonable to say that educators, parents, coaches and all those who, in one way or another, have responsibilities in the (motor) development of children, should be very attentive and available to detect, handle and make constraints and affordances more detectable, in order to help children to find the best functional coordinative solutions, educating and training them to lead their own development in future.
It’s worth to remark that, whether or not we decide to act, not acting is, already, a way of influencing, positively or negatively, the motor development of children. Sometimes, of course, it’s wise to let them play with no adult interference, knowing that, anyway, constraints and affordances will always be there. However, knowing the importance constraints and affordances have on their development, it would represent a reckless conduct not no manipulate environment and tasks features so that they represent a more powerful, challenging, and richer stimulus to children.
As it can be easily understood, in sport, as important as becoming able to detect affordances and overcome and adjust to constraints is being able to constraint opponents’ actions, forcing them to perform with less chances of success and trusting on fake affordances. This is something that should begin being done in early years. Children, young boys and girls and, later on, adolescents and adults, all will benefit from being exposed to different stimuli and difficulty levels, facilitating their self-knowing, their capabilities of action and, therefore, promoting a better adjustment on sports practice, where, usually, we have very fast changing conditions, forcing players to quick regulations and decision taking.
Following this reflection article, empirical work should be done to strength the knowledge of how children adapt their motor behavior when constraints are manipulated under certain and different conditions.
This work is financed by national funds through FCT-Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P., within the framework of the project UID/CED/04748/2016.
Matos, R. (2017) Promoting Motor Development and Future Motor Performance Optimization through Constraints and Affordances Manipulation. Open Access Library Journal, 4: e4048. https://doi.org/10.4236/oalib.1104048