Gross Motor Function Classification System

We do not want to be putting excessive forces on skin or joints to obtain a somewhat arbitrary position.

To be honest, in the population I usually serve, which is the medically complex, typically cerebral palsy, GMFCS levels three through five, I'm usually accommodating postures and positions.

And of course, you're always assessing on a joint by joint basis.

you may be correcting one joint and accommodating another, typically addressing proximal joints before distal.

Yeah.

Well, starting with if you're trying to decide what activity to do for your client, they start with identifying what the ch- what the child's Gross Motor Function Classification system is.

Are you familiar with the GMFCS?

Yeah, a little bit.

We introduce this when we talk about, um, cerebral palsy in our pediatric conditions content.

Okay, apparently I'm the only one that found it confusing [laughs] 'cause you've got it right.

[laughs]

And what they were highlighting, which I thought was so helpful, is that if you're dealing with a client who has a GMFCS level of one to three, then postural control interventions are the right approach.

Then there's a process that we go through to try and look at what are the chances of this little one having cerebral palsy.

And then if we do have a diagnosis of cerebral palsy, you know, the walking question can be answered more clearly actually because if a child does have cerebral palsy there is something called the GMFCS the gross motor function classification scale and basically what that does is for children with cerebral palsy it classifies them according to levels so we can say this child has cerebral palsy level one or level two three four or five and the child with the level five cerebral palsy is the most affected the most parts of their body have been affected by it and one is the least affected.

And we look at them from zero to two years old, from two to four, from four to six.

And so we go through ages.