Effects of Life Kinetic Training on Balance and Motor Coordination in Children With Developmental Coordination Disorder: A Randomized Controlled Trial.
Better balance and coordination in toddlers with DCD can directly lift compliance and daily living skills.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Babazadeh et al. (2025) ran a randomized trial with toddlers who have developmental coordination disorder.
Kids got Life Kinetic training, a set of games that challenge balance and motor timing.
The team wanted to know if better motor skills would spill over into everyday self-help and listening skills.
What they found
Children who gained gross motor skills also showed more adaptive behaviors and better compliance.
The motor gains worked like a bridge: as kids got older, the skill boost carried social benefits with it.
How this fits with other research
Jelsma et al. (2015) saw the downside first. Kids with DCD needed far more practice than peers to master a Wii Fit balance game.
Ruddock et al. (2015) added that online corrections stay slow and late in DCD. These bleak pictures set the stage for Leila’s upbeat result: targeted training can still close the gap.
Wang et al. (2026) pooled five exercise trials and found small but real gains in activity levels. Leila’s trial fits right in, showing the same small-win pattern but links it to daily life skills, not just fitness.
Why it matters
If a toddler won’t follow directions, check motor skills first. Adding 10-minute balance games to your session could unlock compliance and self-care gains. Start simple—beam walks, carpet-square hops—then layer in dual-task rules as balance improves.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Open each session with a five-balance-station warm-up; track if the child needs fewer prompts for the next table task.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: Children with disabilities often experience delays in one or more domains of development including motor skill delays. Delays in motor skill development may put children further behind their peers without disabilities in respect to aspects of early learning. AIMS: The purpose of this study was to examine how gross motor skills mediated the relationship of age and the observable child behaviors of compliance and adaptive behavior in a group of young children (2-4 years) with developmental disabilities around one time point. METHODS: Children with developmental disabilities (N = 113) were assessed on direct measures of motor skills and the child behaviors of compliance and adaptive behavior. Two independent simple mediation analyses were conducted using PROCESS, an ordinary least squares path analysis appropriate for small sample sizes. RESULTS: Age had a positive relationship with gross motor skills (a = .66, p < .001) when the outcome variable was adaptive behavior and age had a positive relationship with gross motor skills (a = .66, p < .001) when the outcome variable was compliance. CONCLUSIONS: Motor skill development may promote or hinder development in other childhood behaviors such as compliance and adaptive behavior.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2025 · doi:10.1177/0308022617735046