Showing posts with label Therapy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Therapy. Show all posts

My child does not speak...
Friday, October 8, 2010

Child development is amazing. All the developmental milestones are fixed but flexible. Many a time child does not follow the sequence and time but most of the children follow the predictable developmental sequence. Parents always keep a track of their child development. However, many a times the parents miss the track and most common is the speech and communication delay. There are many myths and mis-believes are associated with the speech development. Many say the girls speak earlier than boys or someone spoke late in the family so the child is granted to speak late. Here we forget to face the reality. It may happen the child may catch the pace of development but what would happen if it does not catch the pace? In that ignorance we lose the critical period of child development.

There are few red flag sign like

  • Not speaking or uttering specific words at 15 month
  • Not responding to his/her name
  • Not understanding the simple commands
  • No social communication

Either one or all symptoms are present….the only mantra that’s works is an immediate evaluation

Evaluation may point to

  • Developmental delay
  • Autism
  • Hearing loss
  • Speech and language disorder
  • Other less known conditions (deprivation/abuse, cerebral palsy, central auditory processing disorder, Landau-Kleffner Syndrome, selective mutism)


Early detection and evaluation may assess the risk factors. Early intervention may provide the opportunity for the child to improve significantly. Early intervention is must for all children who are deviated from their normal development.

Posted byNeeti at 11:33 PM 0 comments  

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Early Intervention
Sunday, July 25, 2010


Early intervention is a program to identify & evaluate as early as possible those infants and toddlers (0-3years) whose healthy development are compromised and provide for appropriate intervention to improve child and family development.

Who is eligible for Early Intervention?

  1. If the child is not reaching age-appropriate milestones in one or more areas of development.
  2. Is diagnosed with a physical, emotional or cognitive condition that may result in a development delay.
  3. Is at risk for development delay due to various biological and/or environmental factors

Why intervene Early?

There are three primary reasons for intervening early with an exceptional child.

  1. To enhance the child’s development.
  2. To provide support and assistance to the family
  3. To maximize the child’s and family’s benefit to society.

Principles of Early Intervention

The primary goal of Early Intervention is to support families in promoting the child’s optimal development & to facilitate the child’s participation in family & community activities.

The focus of Early Intervention is to encourage the active participation of families in the therapeutic process by imbedding intervention strategies into family routines. It is the parents who provide the real early intervention by creatively adopting their child care methods to facilitate the development of the child, while balancing the needs of the rest of the facility.

Early intervention requires a collaborative relationship between families and providers with equal participation by all those involved in the process. An ongoing parent professional dialogue is needed to develop, implement, monitor and modify therapeutic activities.

Intervention must be linked to specific goals that are family-centered, functional & measurable. Intervention strategies should focus on facilitating social interaction, exploration & autonomy.

Family centered:

  1. Support parents in meeting their responsibilities to nurture
  2. enhance the children’s development.
  3. Intervention should be integrated into a comprehensive plan that encourages trandisciplinary activities & avoids unnecessary duplication of services. The plan should be built around family routines, with written home-activity programs to encourage family participation in therapeutic activities on daily basis.
  4. Intervention should be monitored periodically, to assure that the strategies implemented are successful in achieving outcomes.
  5. Children and their families in the early intervention system deserve to have services of the highest quality possible. High standards will be set for the training & credentiality of administrative & intervention staff training, supervision & technology will be focused to achieve excellence.

Posted byNeeti at 9:23 PM 0 comments  

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Movement therapy...
Thursday, October 29, 2009

While every child with autism is a unique individual with his or her own particular personality, set of behaviors and degree of severity of delay, there is a fundamental pattern that is part of the autism spectrum. Most of the children with ASD or other childhood disabilities have movement or motor problems. Sometimes motor problems or difficulties are neglected because of other prominent problems like speech delay and social isolation.

Researches have proved that persistence of primitive reflexes and fixed motor patterns may be responsible for learning difficulties in children with ASD, ADHD and other disabilities. So, movement therapy, reflex inhibition or rhythmic movements or motor repatterning therapy can help child to learn better from his environment.

Most of us don’t know that sitting still is a tough and actually a complex brain mechanism requiring certain developmental processes in proper function. If functions are not proper, then to sit is something like sleeping. So, to be active and alert the child must move. For those children who have poor initiation or whose arousal level is too high they need movement therapy even in the class room. For example, doing an activity on the therapy ball or on the water bed.

Somebody correctly said “what we call thinking is [actually] the internalization of movement. Cognition and movement are really the same.”

Posted byNeeti at 11:46 PM 1 comments  

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Primitive reflexes and their inhibition with therapy
Sunday, September 20, 2009

Every one is born with the set of some primitive reflexes which are known for the survival of the child. These primitive reflexes help the child to protect, to assist feeding and for survival. During a developmental screening the child is checked for these primitive reflexes. Presence of primitive reflex indicates the functioning of Central Nervous System before 1 yr of development. After first year of development these reflexes should be integrated to develop more sophisticated set of reflexes called Postural reflexes. Hence the primitive reflexes form the platform for more specific and sophisticated functions like speech, intelligence and cognition.

Absence of primitive reflexes before one year or prolonged persistence indicates the problem with the nervous system or brain functioning. It not only affects the motor, speech and social functions but also affects overall learning. Inhibition of primitive reflexes leads to lateralisation of brain which as physically be seen as hand dominance, speech, interest in maths or music, writing and reading.

Some times due to some reasons the child behaves odd. Inspite of average intelligent and normal physical development he struggles to pass the exams, poor hand writing, aggressive, hyperactivity, inability to concentrate, poor listening skills, clumsy are few common features.

According to the theory of Neurodevelopment, any missed developmental sequence may develop a physical, psychological and behaviourally problem. The treatment is recapitulation, which means the child has to go through all the developmental stages which guide the normal development. Abnormal reflexes are to be inhibited with special skills and physical exercises to guide the normal development. Most common reflexes which are to be integrated, ATNR, STNR, Moro’s, Grasp reflex and TLR.

Children with Autism, Cerebral Palsy, ADHD, Developmental Delay and other behaviour and psychological like emotional unstable, poor handwriting and confusion, dyslexia and poor reading habits may need reflex inhibition therapy.

Posted byNeeti at 6:29 PM 2 comments  

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