This month Professor Pat Thomson, CLA’s Senior Evidence Associate, reports on a large-scale longitudinal study (focused on England and Wales) which asks an important question: do fine motor skills in the preschool years – the ability to draw, build with blocks, and fold paper – predict children’s later development? The findings are particularly interesting for early years Arts educators.
Fine Motor Skills in Early Childhood
Bowler et al. (2024), ‘Phenotypic and Genetic Associations Between Preschool Fine Motor Skills and Later Neurodevelopment, Psychopathology, and Educational Achievement’, Biological Psychiatry, 95, 849–858.
This large-scale longitudinal study asked a straightforward but important question: do fine motor skills in the preschool years viz. the ability to draw, build with blocks, and fold paper, predict children’s later development? The researchers followed over 9,600 children from the Twins Early Development Study (TEDS), a UK cohort representative of the population in England and Wales, assessing fine motor skills at ages two, three, and four. They then tracked the same children through to adolescence, examining outcomes that included neurodevelopmental traits such as autism and ADHD, mental health indicators such as anxiety and depression, and educational achievement at age sixteen. In a subset of participants, the study also examined genetic associations linked to ADHD, autism, schizophrenia, anxiety, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and years of education.
What the study found
The findings were consistent and, taken together, compelling. Crucially, stronger early fine motor skills were positively associated with educational achievement at age sixteen, with a notably larger effect size than most of the psychopathology associations.
Children with stronger fine motor skills in the preschool years also showed lower levels of autistic traits, ADHD, anxiety, depression, and behavioural problems across middle childhood, late childhood, and into adolescence. These associations were modest statistical effects, but they were remarkably consistent across different raters (parents, teachers, and children themselves) and across multiple time points.
What the findings do and do not mean
It is worth being clear about the limits of the evidence before considering its implications. The associations reported are correlational, not causal: the study cannot tell us that developing fine motor skills protects children from later difficulties, only that the two things tend to go together. Effect sizes are small, meaning that fine motor skills at age two or three do not reliably predict any individual child’s later trajectory — population-level statistical relationships of this kind do not translate straightforwardly into individual prediction. The authors also note that the twin sample, while population-representative, may not generalise perfectly to all children, and that some measures varied across time points.
However, the study does offer a longitudinal, multi-informant evidence that early fine motor competence is meaningfully entangled with developmental trajectories that matter for children’s lives. The researchers suggest that possible mechanisms include shared neural pathways between motor and cognitive development, the role of motor skills in enabling social experience, and executive functioning as a mediating variable. None of these explanations is yet confirmed; the study explicitly calls for future work on mechanisms.
Potential implications for arts educators
Arts educators — particularly those working in visual arts, craft, music, drama, and dance with young children — have long understood that the hands are not separate from the mind. This study adds a substantial empirical body of evidence that the development of fine motor control in the early years is associated with outcomes that reach well beyond the motor domain itself.
Perhaps the most significant implication is for how we think about and advocate for arts-rich provision in early childhood settings. Drawing, construction, collage, clay work, weaving, instrument playing, and the countless other fine motor-intensive activities that characterise good early arts education are not merely nice to have. This research suggests they may be part of a broader developmental scaffold that supports children across cognitive, social, emotional, and educational dimensions. For arts educators who are asked to justify their place in the curriculum, this kind of carefully framed longitudinal evidence strengthens the case.
The finding that fine motor associations with ADHD and autistic traits are somewhat stronger in middle childhood than in adolescence also resonates with existing thinking about early intervention. If the preschool and early primary years represent a period of heightened neuroplasticity, then the quality and richness of fine motor experiences during those years may matter particularly for children who are already showing signs of neurodevelopmental difference. Arts educators working alongside special educational needs colleagues in inclusion contexts might find this evidence useful in making the case for arts activities as genuinely developmental rather than merely supplementary.
The strong association between early fine motor skills and educational achievement at sixteen is also worth serious consideration. This does not mean that fine motor skills at age three cause academic success twelve years later; many other factors intervene, and socioeconomic status, while addressed in sensitivity analyses, remains a pervasive influence. But it does suggest that fine motor development sits within a broader cluster of capabilities and dispositions that tend to support learning over the long term. Arts educators have reason to take this seriously.
It is important not to overstate what the research shows. This research does not tell us that arts education prevents mental illness, that drawing lessons raise exam scores, or that fine motor activities should be prescribed as developmental medicine. The mechanisms are unknown, the effects are modest, and the pathway from population-level associations to classroom practice is never a direct one.
The research does suggest that early fine motor engagement is part of a developmental picture that matters, and that arts educators, who have always known this in their practice, now have more robust empirical company.
Studies like this one are relatively rare: longitudinal, large-scale, genetically informed, and willing to follow children from the drawing table at age two to GCSE outcomes at sixteen. The fact that fine motor skills assessed through parent-administered tasks — drawing, block building, folding — show associations of this breadth and duration is, at minimum, a reminder that what happens in the early years is not trivial preparation for ‘real’ learning but is itself consequential. Arts educators have been making this argument for a long time. It is good to have some data to back them up.
