How to help struggling children:
There are many ways to help struggling children, as presented in Vol. 2, 4, 5, & 7 of It's Not Rocket Surgery! I recommend hiring a private tutor – or the home-bound tutor from your school district – rather than subjecting your child to the humiliation of remedial classes. In your area, there are many good therapists for behavioral and/or learning difficulties. Do some research online to find the best choices. Or ask your doctor for referrals. I would personally suggest a behavioral therapist who is a Board Certified Behavior Analyst (BCBA). More ideas further below.
However, there is something even easier that parents can do beforehand to prevent speech and dyslexia problems: turn off the TV for a while and teach phonics early. Teaching phonics the right way (starting before the child is 2 years old - if possible) will help your child’s brain hear the individual sounds and then put them together properly. The brain neurons will learn to distinguish the different sounds and decode the words, mapping them in the proper cortex. Sight-reading cannot do this. Phonics can help clear up speech problems as well. The child learns them slowly at first, then speeds up with practice over time.
Again, wouldn’t it be much better to prevent dyslexia (and possibly autism & ADHD) by starting phonics early at home rather than having to try to fix it later? Wouldn’t it be better to help a savant be well-rounded in all areas of intelligence from the beginning? Proactive, purposeful parents may never realize how much damage they spared their child. The worst thing possible would be to wait until school age and let the schools do the teaching. The best ‘window of opportunity’ would be lost.
Besides commercial tutors like Sylvan Learning Center or Kumon, there are also:
The Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential: by Dr. Glenn Doman, http://www.iahp.org, or for his products, http://www.gentlerevolution.com.
Scientific Learning: by Dr. Michael Merzenich, who was featured in, The Brain That Changes Itself, by Dr. Norman Doidge, chapter 3. www.scilearn.com or www.brainsparklearning.com. Or call TOLL FREE 888-358-0212 ext. 1239.
In the previous chapters of It’s Not Rocket Surgery!, we discussed the roles of infant sensory overload, brain temporal lobe timing, hearing (auditory) processing difficulties, and speech difficulties, in contributing to dyslexia. Now we will discuss how these problems affect reading.
Did you know that according to Dr. Glenn Doman of The Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential, brain-damaged children can be healed? His definition of brain-damage also includes dyslexia, ADHD, and autism. Dr. Doman has shown that the same methods that heal brain damage can increase IQ in normal children, too. His methods include using flashcards with young children to teach ‘Bits’ of Intelligence®.
Dr. Doman, who has done this with brain-damaged babies and children before the age of 5, claims that parents could teach and do things to stimulate the child's brain and build brain cells. Parents have taken their brain-damaged children to Philadelphia to get help where Dr. Doman has his clinic. Some children even had missing parts of their brains because of surgery, and they built new brain cells through stimulation to that part of the brain.
It sounds impossible, but it works. Dr. Doman has helped many children. He said that after age five the brain stops growing; if you treated a child before age five the brain could be stimulated. However, Dr. Michael Merzenich contends that the brain is still plastic or changeable even into adulthood, but there are ‘windows of opportunity’ where the brain growth is optimum, such as before age five. There is always hope, and specific things parents can do to help.
In a Copenhagen study, young children who were not as good as their peers at saying multi-syllabic words such as ‘crocodile,’ had trouble with literacy later. It’s a hearing-processing problem in the brain. And look-say reading makes it much worse, inducing dyslexia.
A really great book called "The Brain that Changes Itself" by Dr. Norman Doidge, M.D., describes Dr. Merzenich's work in detail in chapter 3. It's a must-read and an eye-opener to how learning happens and how the brain nerves map themselves in our brain "real estate."
Dr. Merzenich developed software to help map children’s brains into the best they can be. He formed the company Scientific Learning and offers the best there is to helping children learn better and faster. One excellent remedial program that rewires the brain is his Fast ForWord® for schools, from Scientific Learning Co. His BrainPro® and BrainSpark® are for home use. These computer programs exercise every basic brain function involved in language, from decoding sounds to comprehension. It’s a cerebral cross-training and re-training of neurons.
Dr. Merzenich's breakthrough brain-mapping discoveries help a myriad of brain functioning. His method helps repair speech and reading problems, autism, and social awkwardness, plus it sparks giftedness, showing that brain mapping can change for the better.
These brain exercises help dyslexic children improve their ability to distinguish short and long sounds. They also teach children to identify confusing consonant-vowel combinations at increasingly faster speeds. Another exercise helps them hear faster frequency-glides. Yet another helps them to remember and match sounds.
The fast parts of speech have been slowed down by computer so that language-impaired children can hear them and develop clear brain maps for them. Then gradually they are sped up. Each time the child is rewarded, his brain secretes dopamine and acetylcholine, which help consolidate the brain map changes he has just made. These exercises can rewire the dyslexic brain in only eight to twelve weeks.
The average child who took this program moved ahead 1.8 years of language development in six weeks. A Stanford group did brain scans of children before and after Fast ForWord. The first scans showed that dyslexic children use different parts of their brains for reading than normal children do. After the program, their brain scans showed that their brains had begun to normalize and show patterns that were similar to children who have no reading problems, with increased activity in the proper cortex.††
Also, try linking learning to music. Brite Music is wonderful for children, http://www.britemusic.com. The brain’s ability to change is validated in “The Music Never Stopped”, a movie based on the incredible true story, The Last Hippie, by Dr. Oliver Sacks, M.D. (of Awakenings). It’s about a young man with devastating amnesia who reconnects with his memories, and his family, through the music of the 1960s, and chronicles the journey of a father and son adjusting to cerebral trauma and a lifetime of missed opportunities. http://themusicneverstopped-movie.com/story
“In 1967 prodigal son, Gabriel Sawyer, runs away from home. Nearly twenty years later, Henry is shocked to learn that his estranged son requires major surgery to remove a previously neglected brain tumor.
“After the operation, the extent of Gabriel's condition is made clear: the tumor damaged the part of his brain that facilitates the creation of new memories. For Gabriel, past, present, and future become indistinguishable. Determined not to let their son slip away from them again, Henry and wife, Helen, vow to connect with Gabriel, who is barely able to communicate effectively.
“Unhappy with Gabriel's lack of progress, Henry does his own research on brain injuries, which leads him to Dr. Dianne Daly. She is a music therapist who has used her methods to make significant progress with victims of brain tumors.
“As Diane works with Gabriel, she realizes that he is most responsive to the music of the Rock and Roll era - The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and particularly the Grateful Dead. Even though he is unaware that the era of his music has long passed, the effect is remarkable, and he begins to be able to have conversations and express himself. Although Henry loathes rock and roll, he is determined to forge new memories and salvage his relationship with his son.
“While his own health fails, Henry begins his own pilgrimage through the bands of the sixties. With the songs that animate his son's soul, he is able [to help his son create new memories, previously impossible for Gabriel, and] to form an unusual but emotionally vibrant bond with the child he thought he had lost.”
††But what about parents who can’t afford to, or don’t want to, send their children away for eight to twelve weeks for this break-through, computer-based remediation? Scientific learning has home-based computer solutions such as BrainSpark and BrainPro as well. They are a great, albeit pricey, remedy.
If your child has some brain or body chemistry issues, look for holistic and nutritional solutions, first. Therapists in Canada strongly prefer this route and have several solution ideas.
I am not against using medications where needed, and several of my children have benefitted from medical help for bipolar, ADHD, anxiety, and depression struggles. However, use them carefully, keeping the side-effects to a minimum. I also work to find help that doesn’t numb-out my child or remove his/her core personality.
Better nutrition can help diabetes, high blood pressure, depression, anxiety, etc., in adults, but sometimes they still need medical help. Likewise, we often can’t change our genetic, body and brain chemistry with just nutrition and/or talking therapy. If something can help my children get along better in society, or feel more successful in school, I may use it. But be careful; meds can do the opposite, too. The goal is to do what’s best for my child rather than to make my life easier.
Web MD, http://www.webmd.com/bipolar-disorder/guide/nondrug-treatments, has several non-drug solutions for bipolar disorder and others. Types of psychotherapy used to treat bipolar disorder include:
· Behavioral therapy
· Cognitive therapy
· Interpersonal therapy
· Social rhythm therapy
· Support groups
· Education – benefit from learning about the disorder
· Also, taking these steps may help you cope with a disorder:
o Establish routines
o Identify symptoms
o Adapt
o Maintain a regular sleep pattern
o Do not use alcohol or drugs
For more information, check out the WebMD website for this and other disorders.
If s/he beyond-doubt needs some medical help, have your therapist look for medicines that aid behavior and learning without spacing-out your child or erasing his/her personality. Watch for detrimental side-effects, such as muscle twitches, liver damage, or blood-sugar spikes; some can become permanent. But please do not let the doctors hospitalize your child; s/he’ll feel abandoned by you, with makes self-esteem worse. There are other options.
And have hope! My son’s therapist, Nancy Pierce, has had several bipolar-child patients who have outgrown their disorder and have been weaned off the meds in their college or young adult years. This is my plan for my son, too. And this may be true of ADHD and other disorders.
Without these preventatives, the cracks in your child may be dyslexia, speech problems, resource remediation classes, being teased at school, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism, rage, low self-esteem, insecurity, childhood depression, low self-confidence, lack of imagination, lower IQ, slower learning capacity, math incompetency, caught in the downward educational trend, and/or low-paying jobs. They all may be preventable or curable. You, mom and dad, are the key. It’s not rocket surgery!
http://thegodfreymethod.com
No comments:
Post a Comment