A baby of 5.5 months of age should be moving their head on their own and they should be starting to move their body more by reaching, wriggling and rolling.
Your baby at 5.5 months is also much better at using their eyes to guide their hands.
He or she can also reach out for objects with one hand, grab things and put them in his or her mouth or move them from hand to hand.
Babies will grip onto your fingers because of a natural reflex known as the grasp reflex.
When you put your finger in your babies palm and stroke it, the baby will curl their tiny fingers around yours .
This instinct to grasp is a reflex, which means that your baby has no control over it, and it can be very strong.
This reflex will have gone by the time he or she's around five months or six months of age.
It is theorized that the grasping reflex evolved as it is essential to survival in species, usually primates, where the young are carried in the fur.
The infant's ability to grasp onto a mother's fur allows the mother to keep the infant with her while foraging for food or moving from one place to another.
Babies have a tight grip because it is a bodily reflex known as the Palmar Grasp Reflex (or simply the grasp reflex), which is typically observed in infants.
You can elicit the grasp reflex by stroking your finger, or any other object, in a baby's palms.
The palmar grasp reflex allows a newborn to clench an object when pressure and touch are applied to the palm; however, this is not volitional in nature.
The first readily recognizable fine motor skill that is crucial to normal development is unfisting.