Pincer grasp
Also called pincer grip, pincer, pincer grip foods, inferior pincer grasp, superior pincer grasp
The pincer grasp is the way a baby picks up something small between the thumb and pointer finger. It's also called the pincer grip, after the two jaws of a pair of pincers.
How it's said
My 9 month old has most definitely mastered her pincer grip, yay.
DS didn't pincer properly until he was 10 months.
Secondly, how do you get your baby to eat pincer grip finger foods?
Who says it
Not to be confused with
- In a palmar grasp the fingers squeeze an object against the palm. In a pincer grasp the thumb and pointer finger do the holding, which lets a baby pick up much smaller things.
Where it came from
Pincers are the two-jawed gripping tool, and the word reached English through Old French from pincier, to pinch. Child development researchers borrowed it for a baby's thumb-and-finger grip: Arnold Gesell's 1940 book The First Five Years of Life, from the Yale Clinic of Child Development, says a 40-week-old "can pick up a crumb with precise pincer prehension."
Researchers now split it in two. The Lancaster Glossary of Child Development describes an inferior pincer grasp, with the thumb pressing a thing against the extended pointer finger, and a superior pincer grasp, thumb pad to finger pad, which comes later.