Static balance in children with hand–eye co‐ordination problems

OBJECTIVE: The aim of the present study was to examine static balance on one leg in 10-year-old children with and without hand-eye co-ordination problems (HECP) in an attempt to come closer to an understanding of developmental co-ordination disorder in children. METHOD: The children were compared on three different balance tasks with the right and/or left leg together with a systematic manipulation of vision. RESULTS: The results showed that when the scores for both legs were combined, the control group, in general, had superior performance in all conditions. Separate preferred and non-preferred leg analyses demonstrated that the differences between the HECP group and control group could be accounted for by lowered performances when the non-preferred leg was used in only one static balance task, stork stand with vision. In the two other balance tasks, balance on beam and one-board balance, the HECP group displayed significantly worse performance than the control group irrespective of the use of the preferred or non-preferred leg. CONCLUSIONS: Explanation related to the development of the hemispheres controlling the preferred and non-preferred leg is invoked to account for the poor performance in the HECP group.