Neurodevelopmental Bathtub

Drawing and Handwriting: Draw Your World and StartWrite

When my child was very young, we never taught him how to draw anything.  We figured that it was best that he teach himself how to draw -- or not.  Now that he's 10, he draws all the time. He's quite good, and he's now starting to learn things from books and people.

His handwriting, however, is another story.  My child's handwriting is probably the hardest thing for him in school!

 Even though he's a bit old for the series, I still really like the "Draw Your World" series, written by a grade-school teacher and used by many homeschoolers.  The series is for younger kids, though. It starts off with a series of drawing books.  First you draw a picture, then you write about it. I'm not wild about the stylized ways of drawing for younger children, but I do like the interweaving of drawing and handwriting practice.

Here's a sample lesson. 

But the thing that I really like is the StartWrite software that they sell in conjunction with the books. Check out the description.  Doesn't it sound cool?

 

 

So How is This Blog Going to Work, Anyway?

I am not incredibly fond of blogs.  As a professional writer, my latest words do not automatically cancel out and "better" my previous words.  Sometimes I will dash something out, and other posts will take days.  Some of my best, funniest writing went into blog posts about three years ago, so now they're dead.

Blogs are annoying.

For the record, I am working with a group of people on a website.  This website will present a taxonomy of the information that we know.  A taxonomy is wonderful, because it's a structured presentation of information.  And believe me, if you are going through something with your child, talking with various doctors, your insurance company, various therapists and so forth, what you desperately want - desperately NEED - is some sort of taxonomy.

As part of this effort, I'm clearing out some of my data files, and I'll be putting some information onto this blog.

I happen to have a different perspective than many bloggers. I'm interested in consumer education, and in the landscape of brain development for parents.  Every parent out there with a special-needs child (or even just a child with a small hiccup in brain development) is a consumer.  Many of us are constantly shopping for different therapies that can help our children.  It's amazing how many organizations will offer you a week-long course for, say, $3,000.  We did that.  We thought, naively, that everything would get better after that week and we'd be finished, but the practitioner just moved us from her (at $300 an hour), to someone less junior (at $150 an hour.)  I think we were expected to do that for years, twice a week.

In truth, a growing kid is really complex. Every part of them is growing, sometimes at different levels.  Only the extremely lucky can spend one week and be -- woohoo! Totally "NT" (neurotypical) and normally-achieving.

But that doesn't mean that the various therapies don't offer benefit.

I'm interested in how parents determine what slices of the "treatment pie" to develop first and what to focus on at any given time.

I'm interested in how to handle the big, messy bundle that is a child who is having trouble.  

And I'm very interested in how to set things up so that in the future fewer parents need to walk through the ridiculous, unhelpful labyrinth that is the existing educational/medical support system.

So here's what I'll do.  I will take pieces of my data and put it into this blog.  I am forming a picture as I do this, so every post on this blog will not necessarily be dripping wisdom.

Please feel free to comment and add whatever you wish.  

 

Knowing When Your Kid Needs Help

In Kindergarten, a somewhat busybody mom in our class told me that I should have my child looked at by an OT.  At the time, I was mostly concerned with his social skills, so I shrugged it off.  After all, this same parent had gotten pretty much hysterical at the idea of feeding pizza to the children, so obviously, she was a little ... rigid, right?  Plus I had no idea what an OT did.  I asked the teachers about it.  Sure, he had troubles with scissors, but nobody made a big deal about it.  Not a single teacher said "your child definitely needs to be able to have these skills by this age. If he doesn't, then you need to get cracking."

Looking back, I realize that through the age of 7:

• I cut all of my son's food because he couldn't hold a knife and fork well (and it was faster),
• I got him easy-to-clip jeans because he couldn't do buttons, and
• I got him velcro shoes because he he couldn't tie his shoes.    

Each of those things had snuck up on me, bit by bit.  They weren't a big deal.  

Wrong.

These things are a big deal. If your child cannot do all of those things by age 6, you need to start working on some form of OT or movement therapy.  There, I said it.

You don't have to hire a professional if you don't want to.  You don't have to go crazy.  But seriously, start paying attention.

Furthermore, if your child is 100% avoiding all form of letters and reading when they are five, you should start actively working with them.  It turns out that, no matter how crunchy you are and no matter how much you fervently ascribe to "nonacademic" Kindergartens, your kid shouldn't be running and hiding from letters at that age. Period.

As one wise doctor told me: "Children like to please their parents. They like to accomplish things, learn how to do things.  If they are 100% avoiding something, it's probably because it's difficult.  And much of this stuff shouldn't be all that difficult."

But back to our situation.

When I think back to how our child was in preschool and Kindergarten, I still roll my eyes when I think of all of the "seasoned professionals" saying things like "I have never seen a child like this." I still don't get it.  Why aren't our educators better trained to suss out things like this and to help parents work with their kids while they can easily?  (That would be at age four, NOT age ten.)  And I'm sorry, but what possible good is the comment "I have never seen a child like this?"

Seriously, sometimes I have wanted to slap various professionals and explain that it's really NOT about them.  And no, if a four year old is having meltdowns, it doesn't mean that the teacher should take it personally (or that the child is a "bad seed.")

I went for literally years before I had any idea of what was going on with my child or what do do. 

When he was four, my son was hyperactive in groups, didn't make much eye contact (which I never noticed), and had social issues.  When I think back, I wish that there was a clear path that we could have taken.  Our pediatrician thought he was fine.  The neuropsychiatrist I took him to at four thought he was fine.  The teacher did not think he was fine but didn't know why and was no help.

And we, his parents, hopped from one idiot to another.

I finally brought  my child in for an OT evaluation when he was 7.5, in first grade and the OT found sixteen things "wrong."  My child was 12th percentile in some things and 85th percentile in others.  I asked her why.  She had no idea.  

I asked her what a pattern like this meant. She had no idea.

I asked her who could tell me.  She had no idea.

Seriously crazy-making.

Incidentally, the day that my child went in to get tested by the occupational therapist was the day that he won the sports award for his class.  He was fastest, and could jump both furthest and highest.  He's a beautiful, athletic, immensely creative child.  Not great with scissors, but hey.  Oh, and he's utterly charming.  It took some research before I could figure out how he could be both utterly charming with new friends and strangers, and also have such problems dealing with his peers in groups.  

There is no pretty summary to this topic, other than to say that, in hindsight, I wish that I would have had my child tested by someone who could test his movements and everything else, at around age four.  And I wish I would have known how to find that person.  And what type of doctor I needed to look for.

I can write lots of meaty posts excerpting developmental milestones and some day I might.  For now, here is an excellent website listing developmental milestones.

 

A Product of Special Education

Yesterday I went to a lovely little indoor gym where children can play. They jump on things, run through hanging rubber rods, go down slides and through rollers. They love it. and it's great for building proprioception.

The gym was put together by a mom and trainer who wants to teach fitness to children.  As I chatted with her husband about how various movements can help in brain development, and how easy it is to incorporate those, a young woman sitting nearby began first to listen, then to join in.

After the husband left to run some errands, the young lady began to talk with me.  She is in her early twenties and lovely.  Black hair, fair skin, easy smile.  Seems bright and interesting. She's going to nursing school.

Then she told me that she's a product of special education classes.  She said that she'd never been in a regular classroom until college.  Furthermore, she said ruefully, she has no short-term memory and she cannot understand or remember things that she reads.  

So I ran down a list. What, exactly, does it take to understand something?  She is in nursing school, and explained that because she is "disabled" she can have her book scanned and turned into text, but that it's just read robotically, and she cannot remember the dry information when it's read mechanically.  If people read to her, she says, she understands it.  She has very poor reading skills, hated reading in class, and has trouble with comprehension and vocabulary.

But she's bright.

I asked her how she ended up in special education.  Her parents are Portugese, she told me, and when the school contacted them and explained special education, they thought that it was something good. She said that she got A's the entire way through school and that the aides would read to her, but that she only learned half of what the other kids learned, so she had to re-take some classes in college.  She said that if you're in special education classes the whole way through middle school you just stay in them through college.

1. She has no understanding of how to help herself comprehend reading better.

2. She has no idea of how to improve her short-term memory.

Do you know people like that?  I do. In my adult life, I have met people who speak and think perfectly well, but just cannot function in the written world. 

In this young woman's case, I suggested that she barter her babysitting time for having someone read her books to her.  Why not?  If she was an entrepreneur starting a company, she'd do whatever she needed to in order to get things done.   Why not treat getting information into your brain like an exercise in productivity?

There have got to be relatively simple techniques that anybody -- the local babysitter -- can use in order to help their brains work better.  I have to work with a recalcitrant young boy who would rather squirm and play dragon than sit and try to memorize ANYTHING.  That's hard.  You bribe, you threaten, you dole out the training in 10 minute increments.  All I can think of is that this young woman actively wants to think better.  She's motivated. And she has skills.  Wow!  What an opportunity!

We'll be reviewing books on memory/brain development, as well as some of the online programs on this website. In addition to the high-cost programs, we'll be looking for lower-cost ways to help yourself and your child. Stay tuned.

 

Cool Game: Equilibrio Teaches Spatial Reasoning

Some people claim that if you're dyslexic you are possessed of wonderful gifts. You see things as though you are floating over your own head, looking down! You can immediately visualize things and know how they go together.  Right.   Well, we haven't met that particular version of dyslexic in our household.

Don't get me wrong. Our kid is creative, awesome, smart, and fun, but both he and his mother could really use some help in doing spatial stuff.  So I'm happy to have found this game.  Check it out: Equilibrio is actually a game that teaches "construction, geometry, logical analysis, perspectives, design, and spatial logic."  And it sounds fun, too.

It comes with 18 blocks, a book giving you harder and harder building assignments. You can also get the add-on books: Architecto, which translates 2D into 3D designs, and Clicko, which works with perspective, depth, and geometric forms. 

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So here's the deal:  I am playing with embedded Amazon alliance links here.  Why? Because I will be referring tons of books and other products to you, and this is one way to track what I refer.  Plus, I could *really* use the 3.7 cents I'll make if you buy things from me!  (joke)

Therapy: The Gray Area Between Medicine and Education

There is a group of children in our country right now who have developmental lags,  hiccups, and disorders.  They are diagnosed with things like ADD or ADHD, social problems, hypersensitivities, dyslexia, dyspraxia, auditory issues, problems with balance, proprioception (the brain knowing where the body is in space), problems with eating, sleeping, and more.  Some of them are just having a really hard time learning to read or write.  One estimate says that up to 17% of children in our country suffer from one of these issues.

With the exception of ADHD, which has a nice welcoming pharmaceutical industry to help out, most of these problems don't have cut-and-dried treatments.  If your pediatrician diagnoses one of these disorders, they don't treat it.   Insurance companies will sometimes pay for OT (occupational therapy), which is seen as one of the very few "medical therapies," but often they will not, so you're on your own. Furthermore, if a doctor diagnoses a child as having sensory integration issues, often an insurance company will claim that these issues are "educational" issues, so the insurance company shouldn't be liable for them.

The Health Care Industry
Right now, doctors and health care organizations are tightening their belts.  Thirty years ago, a visit to your pediatrician took significantly longer than it does now.  Read the description of what should be checked for when your child is three (the table and the text right below it).  Is your child getting a comprehensive exam during their yearly checkup? If they do, you're lucky. Mine didn't.

And of course education is getting pinched.

The Educational System

• Today's educational system is held to Federally-controlled standards. If schools don't perform, their funding is yanked.  
• We are requiring our children, at younger and younger ages, to "be academic." Yesterday's first grade is now today's kindergarten;
• educational budgets are plummeting; and
• The number of preschoolers in urban areas has zoomed since 2000. In our area, every school is being frantically expanded. 

Let's say that your child is having some sort of problem.  Unless that problem is a spectrum disorder or  ADHD, you might find your doctors and your school all pointing at one another in a "that's not my job, it's theirs" circle.

Who pays? Your kid.  And it's your job to figure out what to do.

More children than ever before are falling into the gray area of therapy, or the even darker-gray area of "needs therapy but it's too expensive."  In the silicon valley two years ago, every OT I spoke with had a year-long waiting list.  

But let's look at the process here:  

If you're a parent whose child has something -- anything -- wrong in the early years, neither the medical profession nor the schools tells you about the path to health/normalcy/doing better.  You might be sent to OT, but nobody tells you why or what the OT does to "set your child right."  Oddly enough, occupational therapy isn't transparent.  It should be.  

Why isn't there a standardized process for identifying and addressing various problems?  And why is no education offered to parents and teachers about what constitutes "medicate-able" versus "therapy-treated" problems?  (And let's not even begin talking about the elephant in the room: big pharma and their very-close connections to doctors.)

Therapy is an area ripe for mistreatment, poor performance, and ripping off parents.  Occupational therapists in our area charge $150 an hour, and often they do things like let a child swing in a swing, tumble around, walk on a balance beam, and pinch things with their fingers.   Why don't we teach parents more about why these actions are good for developing brains?  What's the big secret?

If many practices used in OT are really just improved ways of stimulating our childrens' brain development and maturation, then it stands to reason that, in the 21st century, we should update our parenting and teaching skills to start using some of the "therapeutic" techniques that we currently have to wait for our insurance companies to dole out.

Why isn't this happening from the top down?

Square Peg Preschoolers. What Do you Do First?

I have blogged for years about my personal culture shock from moving to the suburbs.   For the first three years in my suburb, I pretty much only spoke with people I hired.  The people in my particular WASPy enclave are very reserved, and the children are inexplicably taught to shun early.  All true.

But there's something else.

My son had noticeable social issues, from a very young age, and we had absolutely no idea how to deal with them.   Sound familiar?  It's not just autistic children who miss social cues. ADD and ADHD children do also.  And children with sensory problems do as well.  In our case, my child never had any identifiable things going on. No tantrums. No behavioral problems.  But things were a lot harder for him than other kids.  He didn't understand social rules.

Basically any parent whose child has a developmental hiccup or problem goes through the "ring of fire."  The ring of fire is early childhood experience when your child doesn't fit in.  It's excruciating.  You have to watch your child fail and have difficulties, and you also have to contend with negative judgment from your fellow parents.  

I once read an article that said that women who were "close to perfection" were tougher on their bodies and more risk for being anorexic than women who were heavier.  Ironic.  The same is true for children who seem totally mainstream... but aren't.  Instead of obviously fitting into a separate category, many children fit right into the mainstream culture -- where they will crash and burn if not given help.

In our case, our child had very slight issues, but they resulted in hyperactivity and lack of focus during group activities, a child who was quick to anger, slow to follow social cues, and one who inexplicably, and from an early age, knew that something was wrong but not what to do about it.

I can tell you that now.  But six years ago, I just thought that it was the suburbs.

Social skills are amazingly important, no matter where you live.  

Are they physical? Or are they just caused by bad parenting?  That's a tough one.  Here are some suggestions.

Look for patterns, and if your child has a pattern of behaviors that other children don't have, and if it's much harder for your child than other kids, start asking for help.  You can ask your pediatrician, but I'd also suggest looking at Yahoogroups for groups of parents talking about the same types of symptoms and problems.  Join the groups and read what they other parents are doing.  You'll learn more from other parents than from many professionals.

Change how you parent your child.  When my child was four, I had to start parenting him in a totally different way.  Gone were the laissez-faire "honey, could you you put that down?" requests.  I began to do the following:

• If anything went wrong, I would kneel down, look him in the eye, and talk with him.
• If I told him to do something and he didn't do it, there were immediate - and consistent - consequences.  He would have to sit on a chair in the front hallway with no toys, out of reach of anything - for about three minutes.  Then he would have to come to me and apologize, naming what he had done. Then it was totally over.
• I pre-thought every situation that I could and told him my expectations.  Sometimes I would tell him the consequences if he didn't do it, and sometimes I would tell him the reward if he did do it.
• I no longer ever "asked" him to do anything. I told him, using the imperative.  I learned to use very direct speech.
• I worked hard to give him kudos and congratulations for the (many) things that he did well. Before I changed how I parented to be more structured, I had slipped into getting on his case a lot.  With the new techniques, I was more structured,: it was crystal clear what was expected of him at all times, and he got praised when he was a good boy.  

There's an interesting story called Before you do Plastic Surgery on Huffington Post today.  Essentially, it says that before doing something drastic, make sure that you're eating right, sleeping right, have lost any weight that you need to lose, and are exercising.  Duh.  

Parenting is as much of a variable as anything else.  So even while you do other things to help your child, make sure that you take a good look at your parenting (perhaps even asking advice from people who watch you parent, hard as that may be.)  You may find that many issues get significantly better  when you change your parenting environment to suit your child's brain.

 

What's Wrong with My Kid?

My friend reports that her child is having trouble in Kindergarten and might have some sensory issues. She's kicking herself for not noticing.

I know the feeling.  When my child was in first grade, his writing was all on top of itself and at the middle of a sentence, would start heading up, toward the top of the page.  Up until then, we had just been working on some fairly quirky social patterns, using the vaunted "let them grow up" approach.  Now all of a sudden my child was feeling like a failure in school.

We finally said "OK, time isn't healing the quirky stuff" and took him in to a wonderful doctor, who gave him a movement exam (Note: this is par for the course if you live in Europe. Every child gets one before they start Kindergarten.  We hear that GOOD doctors give those also, but unfortunately, our child's pediatrician spent my son's first five years experiencing a middle-age crisis.  He went from being normal looking to getting more and more "hip" until he was greeting us dressed in drapey rayon shirts with loud prints.  And then he retired. )

We discovered that my son couldn't stand on one foot at 7.5  And what parent  measures THAT?  He couldn't remember letters if they were covered up.  He is left-eyed and right handed and the two sides of his brain weren't talking with one another. His brain didn't know where his body was in space. To this day, if you make him close his eyes and touch a spot on his left arm, if he tries to touch that same spot on his right arm he will be a good two inches away.  We knew that he had a hard time socially, but were blown away to realize that he had real physical problems caused by stutters in brain development.

Nobody talks about this stuff.  This type of thing is not in the public brain.  Neurologists don't even measure and monitor movement when they give our children exams.  I took my child in for a neurological exam when he was four years old and was basically told to send him to Boy Scouts for social integration.  Had the doctor, in his four thousand-dollar examination, given my child some rudimentary movement exams, my son might be absolutely fine today.  

If you're going through this typeof thing with your child, don't bother wasting time by kicking yourself.  Because if you parented as though you were afraid of nascent developmental problems, you would raise a neurotic little weirdo, destined to hate you for life.  And of course, the brighter your kid is, the more he or she hides or compensates for weaknesses.  Right?

If there's something going on with your child and people are having trouble putting their fingers on it, settle in and start reading.   We've had a hard trip, and we've had to pay some absolute idiots for stunningly stupid observations and advice, but we kept our heads, did our research, and have learned to project-manage helping out kid.  

It's time for me to write about this, so stay tuned.

 

Hello World

Hello there.   I' m a writer, but for the past two and a half years, I've been researching and trying different neurodevelopmental techniques as a way to help my kid.  Now I'm trying to write it out.

I have huge amounts of  notes and links. Countless books. Tons of contacts. And I've been trying to figure out how to start writing about this topic.  Add to it, of course, that it's tremendously sleazy to spill internal struggles belonging to your children on the internet because they'll have enough reasons to hate you already when they're grown, and it's a nice quandary.  Of course blogging itself is tantamount to, as they say, pissing in the wind, unless you have a personal brand (right?), or at the very least, a direction in which you're heading.  So I've been waiting for a direction to come to me.  Perhaps wreathed in Christmas lights, over the vegetable counter.  But it hasn't happened.

Until this week. 

My child has had some sensory issues, dyslexia, ADHD, social issues, some processing issues, some memory issues, and -- not the easiest time of it.  But here's the thing:  he's NOT a big-time autistic or highly disabled child.  He's just a kid who, back in the dark ages, might have had an incredibly miserable time of it, hated school, hated himself, and headed off into some direction just large enough for one. 

Nowadays, we can work with our children who would simply fail miserably, so they don't.  Our square peg kids can have time to let their unusual brains grow, and to learn whatever you need to learn when you're in grammar school and older - hopefully without the trauma.

This blog talks about my adventures as a "would have loved to have been neglectful but is now right there working my butt off to help my kid" mother as I splash in the warm bathwater of today's neurodevelopmental world.

The information that I'm finding as I research, how to help my kid, what's available, and what we *should* be doing is just too fascinating to keep to myself.  

 It's a golden age of new knowledge about how the brain works.  There are new ways of teaching that are incredibly effective.  We know more about dyslexia and ADD (and stuff like that) than ever before.  We are discovering that the brain is far more plastic than we ever thought -- you can work to heal it and help it grow as you never could before.

This stuff needs to be out there.