The KMP was developed by Judith Kestenberg, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who has been writing since the 1940's about movement patterns, especially rhythmical patterns, present from in utero on.   Working within a psychoanalytic framework, Kestenberg was influenced by contemporaries such as Anna Freud, Winnicott, Hartmann, Erikson, and Mahler; she initially thought of body rhythms as markers of psychosexual stages of development, and of the earliest manifestations of individual expression. Kestenberg was trained as a neurologist and psychoanalyst in pre-war Vienna, where she researched the relationship between eye movements and ego control.   Following an invitation by Paul Schilder to come to New York in 1937, she started working with Schilder at Bellevue Hospital, and with Greenacre and LaMar at the Payne Whitney clinic.   Her first longitudinal study was based on infant research she had conducted in Vienna with Margaret Mahler resulting in two coauthored papers. During the years of her study at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, Kestenberg worked closely with Hartman.   By the 1940's, she was investigating the motor precursors of defense mechanisms in mother/child interaction.

By 1953, she had started to develop the KMP with a desire to find a notation system of non-verbal behavior that would provide information regarding drives, affect, defenses, and ego functioning from a non-verbal perspective, thereby capturing the relational aspects of parent-child interaction.   She based the KMP on an existing movement analysis system, initially used for the notation of dance: the Laban Effort/Shape notation system, or Laban Movement Analysis (LMA; Laban & Lawrence, 1947; Laban, 1960, 1966).   With the help of Warren Lamb (1965), a Laban scholar, Kestenberg then modified the system to capture more subtle movements and the use of muscle tension in the expression of affect.   While visiting Anna Freud's Hampstead Nursery, Kestenberg used the system to observe infants, notated and interpreted their movement patterns, and compared her assessments with Freud's.   Later she worked in the Child Development Center in New York, the Long Island Jewish Hospital, at Down State University and New York University Hospitals, before finally establishing her own Center for Children and Parents in Sand Point, Long Island in 1962.

The original Sand Point group consisted of people who were Kestenberg's collaborators in authoring and initially framing the KMP. This group included Hershey Marcus, Jay Berlowe, Arnhilt Buelte, Martha Soodak, and Esther Robbins.