**Abstract**

Increasingly, child caregivers have been tasked with assuring that young children are academically prepared for school. As a result, many childcare settings are focusing exclusively on academic content. The narrow curricular focus has resulted in the exclusion of offering physical activity and structured motor skill lessons. Consequently, many children do not receive adequate physical activity to maintain a healthy weight and lack movement competence to actively engage in physical activity with peers or thrive in academic settings. Providing young children with structured movement opportunities, including body management concepts and movement, fundamental motor skill instruction, and directed opportunities to learn fine motor skills, is critical to movement competence. Finally, it is important for early childhood researchers, caregivers, educators, and policy makers to understand the relationship of movement competence in early childhood to later movement and academic success.

**Keywords:** early childhood movement competence, physical activity, obesity, fundamental motor skills, body management concepts, fine motor skills
