Tag Archives: child development

Another Peek at Potential

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Today I had an initial evaluation with a very cute, sweet 6 year old girl from Romania. This terrific child is being homeschooled by her mother and grandmother and is doing rather well, actually, exceptionally well.

This amazing child is a native speaker of both Romanian and English (I don’t know that she has ever been out of Romania and speaks with zero accent) and reads both languages at about a 4th or 5th grade level, is advanced in French, which she reads as well, is conversational in Spanish and German, and is presently learning Russian and Italian. Languages are her passion.

It never ceases to amaze me what we can do, where we can function, if we are passionate about what we are doing and learning. Intensity, Intensity, Intensity. You’ve got to love it! This little girl is doing what she is doing because she can, because her family has been able to help her pursue her passion.

Part of my discussion with her mother today was about mandatory school attendance, which will become an issue next year. How do we continue to provide her with the same kind of opportunities that she can receive at home? How can we help her pursue her passions?

These peeks at potential keep driving me to find new and better ways to help all of our children.

How do we stop school from not only interfering with her education, but stop it from killing her passions, her individuality, and her opportunity to become a truly wonderful, unique person?

Do you think that most schools really provide a vehicle for most of us to pursue our passions, to become exceptional and provide a foundation for us to spend our lives excelling and enjoying life engaged, contributing and doing things that we are passionate about?

What do you think?

 

 

 

“Read Slowly and Change Your Brain”

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wall-street-journalThe banner across the top of today’s Wall Street Journal read: ”Read Slowly and Change Your Brain.” The accompanying article didn’t actually extol the benefits of reading reaaallly slowly, but rather the benefits of actually reading books, literature, and fiction, which is sadly becoming a more and more rare phenomenon.  Apparently the number of those over 18 who read is getting smaller and smaller. A study in 2011 indicated that only 76% of this population had actually read a book in a year. The article is worth a read, a slow read, not a scan or an “F” pattern read. (An “F” pattern read is reading the first line, then scanning down the left side and reading just the first few words on the left side of a few lines.)

The article lists the benefits of properly reading books. This included:

  • Deepens empathy and provides pleasure
  • Heightens concentration
  • Enhances comprehension, particularly of complex material
  • Improves listening skills
  • Enriches vocabulary
  • Reduces stress

Not a bad list, and let’s add relaxing, entertaining, thought provoking, educational, and, yes, it does change your brain. What a deal!

One of my ongoing concerns about our society is what I perceive to be a drop in processing skills. The lower the processing ability (short-term and working memory), the more simplistic is thought. The ability to think is rather important, and people who can think seem to becoming fewer and further between. I’m girding myself as we get started in a new election cycle. I hate to see and hear one more election that is orchestrated by those who should be selling breakfast cereal rather than explaining the views of a politician in one-liners. Perhaps if the majority of the population could process better and understand more, we could actually look at issues in depth and we wouldn’t need to sum everything up with a one-liner.

Take some time and read a book; actually, lots of books.

Intention

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Strategies won’t work if you don’t believe that the outcome is really possible.

In my last post I introduced you to Lia, an exceptional young lady with an exceptional mom who believes that her daughters can do exceptional things. When Ashly works with her girls, she does so with the expectation that they can and will do exceptional things. As obvious as this sounds, the lack of such intention presents one of our greatest challenges.

Strategies won’t work if you don’t believe that the outcome is really possible.

Whether I’m giving a parent yet another strategy to address their child’s behavior, or a motor development program for their developmentally delayed child, or you try another diet or a new exercise program, or as a nation our government is trying yet another approach to solving some international issue, our intention, which is a reflection of our belief, can determine or undermine all of our efforts and strategies, affecting the results. As an example: Mom says “no” for the five thousandth time to Johnny for an inappropriate behavior; but her expectation is that he is going to do it another five thousand times and that he really can’t help it, or that she can’t really stop it. Her intention is to do her job and give him the feedback that his behavior is wrong; but Johnny reads the part of her intention that is that she really doesn’t believe that it is going to stop. Whether she has a consequence that goes with the “no” really doesn’t matter, because her intention will affect her behavior and Johnny’s. And to compound the issue, Johnny is going to fight and resent the consequence because he knows it is really only punitive and that mom doesn’t expect him to stop regardless of the consequence.

A number of years ago I created “Visceral Response Technology,” a system/protocol to change perception, increase awareness, and change responses and attitudes by changing a person’s visceral/gut response. Education alone often does not significantly affect our visceral response, attitude, belief system, or expectations. Changing all of that requires creation of a new perspective, a new conceptual construct.

Bottom line: if you don’t really believe you can do it, you probably won’t.

Believe it and make it so.

There is Some Hope for the World

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liaBetween hearing horror stories about what is happening in education from our families, as well as reports and studies and seeing the results first hand day in and day out from our families, there are some glimmers of hope that we might survive in spite of our governments and institutions.

As much as I care about all of our kids with developmental problems, I am on a larger scale really concerned about our future as a society. We have wars going on all over the planet, people seem to find new reasons for killing and harming each other, and technology keeps giving them faster and easier ways to do it. We have people starving, people who lack even the basics needed to sustain life. One would think that in 2014 we would have some clue as to how to live together and help and support each other on this tiny planet; but evidently we don’t.

There are obviously a lot of things that need to be done; but we certainly do need to make everyone smarter, and we really need to help some people become really smart. We can help more of the people get it and some of the people really wrap their heads around the problems and start really fixing them.

Today I saw a glimmer of what can be. I saw a beautiful young lady who gave me hope. At her last evaluation I encouraged her family to buy her her very own set of encyclopedias. She likes to read—a lot. On good days her digit spans are hitting 12, and today her math was testing at high fourth grade, word recognition at college level, and reading comprehension at tenth grade level. She carries around medical books for casual reading, and today she needed to tell me about what she thought were the three most interesting spinal diseases. Cute, sweet, great sense of humor. (With an impish grin of her face today—just to mess with me—she said she thought that TLP was causing her tinnitus. Then she laughed.) She’s doing wonderfully physically and starting to get into doing chores. Great kid. And, by the way, she’s five! Five! Meet Lia.

There is hope for the world.