Understanding Muscle Tone in Children
Does your child seem unusually floppy when you pick them up, as if they can’t control their body? Or maybe the opposite is true–they’re too stiff and resistant to movement?
Once you understand muscle tone, it becomes much easier to support your child’s movement, strength, and confidence in everyday activities.
What Is Muscle Tone?
Even when we’re not actively moving, our muscles maintain a slight tension to help us sit upright, hold our head up, maintain balance, or quickly jump into action if need be. This natural tension of our muscles at rest is known as muscle tone.
Muscle tone is not the same as strength. A child can have low tone and still build strength, or have high tone and still feel weak in certain movements.
A Closer Look at Low Muscle Tone
When a child has low muscle tone, their muscles have less resistance to passive stretch at rest, requiring more effort to maintain posture and movement. Low muscle tone is what causes a sense of floppiness when your child is being held.
- Slouching when sitting
- Delayed motor milestones, such as crawling or walking
- A tendency to become fatigued easily during play
- Difficulty with coordination
Low tone is commonly seen in kids with genetic or metabolic conditions such as Down syndrome or developmental coordination disorder.
A Closer Look at High Muscle Tone
High muscle tone is the opposite of low muscle tone. A child’s muscles will have increased tension at rest, leading to stiffness and difficulty with smooth, coordinated movement. Instead of feeling floppy when you pick them up, they may feel stiff or rigid.
- A limited range of motion
- Awkward movement patterns
- Difficulty with coordinated movements and everyday tasks, such as walking with a natural gait or grasping objects
High tone is often associated with cerebral palsy, a condition that affects movement and posture. It can also develop after brain or spinal cord injuries.
How Pediatric Therapy Can Help
At Skills on the Hill Pediatric Therapy, we take a whole-child approach by combining physical, occupational, and speech therapy to support how children move, play, and participate in daily life. We work closely with kids and their families to develop care plans designed to address their specific needs and interests. Here are just a few of the areas we might focus on.
Building Strength and Stability
Kids with low muscle tone generally need to focus on improving their strength. Our pediatric physical therapists will use fun, play-based activities to help kids improve their posture, move with more control, and keep up with their peers during playtime.
Improving Flexibility and Movement
In contrast, kids with high muscle tone generally need to work on reducing stiffness and improving movement quality. We’ll guide them through gentle stretches and improve positioning during play to promote easier movement and better joint mobility.
Improving Daily Skills
Muscle tone differences can make daily skills more challenging, which is where our pediatric occupational therapists come in. They can address how muscle tone impacts fine motor skills, posture, and endurance so kids can more easily participate in the everyday tasks that matter most to them, whether it’s playing with action figures or getting dressed before school.
Enhancing Body Awareness and Coordination
We also help kids better understand how their bodies move so they can control them more easily. Fun activities like balance challenges, obstacle courses, or games that challenge timing and sequencing can help kids feel more confident in functional, everyday movements.
Using Adaptive Supports When Needed
Some children benefit from additional tools to support alignment and participation, such as braces to support unstable joints, supportive seating, or modified tools for writing or feeding. We’ll let you know which might work best for your child and guide you on their use.
Small Steps; Big Gains
Muscle tone is just one aspect of how a child moves and interacts with their environment. With the right support, children with both low and high tone can build strength, improve coordination, and gain confidence in their abilities.
If you have questions about your child’s movement or development, an evaluation at Skills on the Hill Pediatric Therapy can provide clarity and direction. Early support can make a meaningful difference in how children move, play, and grow. Schedule an appointment today to get started!
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Making Progress While School Is Out: Why Outpatient Therapy Matters During Breaks
When school is out for summer break, holidays, or other extended closures, routines often shift for families. While the break from school can be a great time to rest and recharge, it can also mean a pause in the structured support many children receive during the school year. That’s where outpatient therapy can play an important role.
Outpatient pediatric therapy provides consistent, individualized support to help children continue building important skills even when school-based services are unavailable. Whether your child receives speech, occupational, or physical therapy, maintaining progress during school breaks can help prevent setbacks and keep developmental goals moving forward.
Supporting Real-Life Skills
Unlike school-based therapy, which is designed to support educational access, outpatient therapy focuses on your child’s overall functional development. This means sessions can target real-life skills such as improving coordination for playground activities, strengthening fine motor skills for dressing and feeding, building communication confidence in social settings, or increasing physical strength and balance for everyday movement.
Taking Advantage of School Breaks
Summer is more than just a break from the classroom — it’s an opportunity to make focused progress on the goals that matter most. With academic demands and after-school commitments paused, children typically arrive at sessions with more energy and attention, and families have more bandwidth to carry strategies into daily routines at home. It’s also an ideal time to consider episodic care — a short, concentrated period of increased therapy frequency aimed at a specific skill or goal. Instead of working toward a target gradually over many months, episodic care creates focused “bursts” of progress that can move the needle quickly on goals like handwriting, articulation, coordination, feeding, or self-regulation. These are just a few examples — an episodic approach can be applied to a wide range of goals across OT, PT, and speech. After the episode, your child’s schedule can ease back into a maintenance cadence, ideally leaving them better positioned to start the new school year strong. Curious whether episodic care is the right fit for your child? Talk to your therapist or contact our team — we’re happy to help you think it through.
Staying Consistent Year-Round
At Skills on the Hill Pediatric Therapy, we’re here to help your child stay engaged, confident, and progressing year-round. Consistency is key when it comes to development, and continuing therapy during school breaks can provide the support needed to help your child return to the classroom ready to thrive.
If you’ve been considering additional therapy support during school breaks, our team is here to help guide the next steps.
Got an Old iPad? Help a Child Find Their Voice.
We’re building a Tech Lending Closet at Skills on the Hill — a collection of gently used tablets that we’ll loan to children waiting for insurance approval on their communication devices. For a child who relies on a tablet to communicate, that approval process can feel impossibly long. A loaner device can bridge the gap and keep their progress moving.
Give Your Old Tablet a Meaningful Second Life
Have an iPad or tablet collecting dust at home? We’d love to give it a second life supporting children who use communication devices to express themselves, connect with others, and continue making developmental progress while they wait for permanent equipment approval.
Before donating, please make sure your device is:
- Wiped / factory reset (all personal data removed)
- Find My iPhone/Device turned OFF
- Unlocked (no passcode or Apple ID lock)
Thank you for helping us help our kids communicate.
Know a School That Could Use Our Support?
Skills on the Hill is partnering with area schools, preschools, and daycares to provide developmental screenings for students and workshops for educators on strategies that help all learners access the curriculum.
Help Us Connect with Local Schools & Educators
We’re looking to grow these partnerships — and warm introductions from families like you are the best way in. If you have a great connection at your child’s school, whether that’s a director, principal, program coordinator, or learning specialist, we’d be grateful for an introduction.
Together, we can support educators with practical strategies and help more students access the tools they need to thrive both academically and socially.
Simply send us an email and we’ll take it from there.
Check Out our Storefront on Amazon!
At Skills on the Hill, we know that the right toys can make playtime both fun and developmentally meaningful for kids. That’s why we curated a special Amazon storefront full of therapist-recommended toys designed to support skills like fine motor development, cooperative play, language building, and more.
Simplay3 Two Sided Rock Around Wobble Disk and Climbing Dome for Toddlers and Kids
Looking for a fun way to keep kids active while supporting important developmental skills? The Simplay3 Rock Around Wobble Disk encourages movement, balance, coordination, and imaginative play all in one engaging toy.
One side features a wobble disk with molded grip handles that helps children strengthen core muscles while practicing balance and body awareness. Flip it over and it transforms into a climbing dome perfect for active play, jumping, and creative movement games.
This versatile toy is great for both indoor and outdoor use, making it easy to encourage active play year-round. Whether kids are rocking, climbing, spinning, or creating obstacle courses, they’re building coordination, stability, and confidence through movement.
Parents and therapists alike love that it promotes “green time” over screen time while supporting gross motor development in a playful, natural way. Plus, the durable one-piece construction is made in the USA and designed to stand up to years of energetic play.
Rainbow Fruit Kabobs
These colorful rainbow fruit kabobs are a fun hands-on snack kids can help build themselves. They encourage creativity, healthy eating, and fine motor skills while making snack time extra exciting.
Ingredients
- Strawberries
- Mandarin oranges
- Pineapple chunks
- Green grapes
- Blueberries
- Purple grapes
- Wooden skewers or kid-safe sticks
- Vanilla yogurt for dipping
Directions
Wash and prep all fruit into bite-sized pieces.
Let kids build their own rainbow patterns by adding fruit onto the skewers.
Arrange the finished kabobs on a plate and serve with vanilla yogurt for dipping.
Enjoy a colorful snack that’s fun to make, fun to eat, and packed with healthy ingredients.
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