There is ongoing evidence to support the need for plenty of sports and active play in pre-, primary and secondary schools.
A study by Uppsala University and published in the journal Psychological Science showed that babies with good motor skills are better at solving problems that require good cognitive skills. More specifically, the study had 18 month olds performing a motor control task that tested speed and deduction skills, and an executive task where the children were given three different cognitive problems to solve. These three problems included the child’s ability to resist touching an attractive toy when told not to, a working memory component where the children had to recall in which of several drawers a toy had been placed and lastly finding a way of opening a transparent box containing a toy by means of a lever.
The researcher found a link between how the children performed the motor control element and the cognitive elements. “The children who were quick and successful in the motor control element were better at the tasks that required working memory than the children who were slower. They were also better at stopping themselves from reaching for the sparkly toy. These findings indicate a link between children’s motor skills and their cognitive development. ‘The body might shape their mind’ – this is a strong argument for the importance of physical activity, for focusing on sports and active play in preschool,” says Janna Gottwald, the researcher.
She believes that knowing this link can help children with motor control issues. If this aspect receives attention and the child is given intensive help, they may be able to avoid learning problems later in life.
“If we can see early on that a child’s motor skills are not developing as expected, it could be a sign that the child needs help with cognitive development later in life. This gives us the chance to prevent problems and plan for special educational interventions early in school and preschool,” says Janna Gottwald.
We’ve known for a long time that food can cause us problems. The well-known adage ‘One man’s meat is another man’s poison’ was reportedly said by Herodotus in 460 BC. Later, Hippocrates identified that stomach and skin complaints could be caused by drinking milk. Yet the link between the food we consume and children’s problems remains stubbornly ignored by many. Inattention is seen to be the result of ‘unbalanced brain chemicals’ or a symptom of a mental disorder (ADHD). This is in spite of much evidence that attention and other typical challenges (can’t complete tasks; loses focus; is aggressive; can’t follow instructions etc) may well be linked to brain function that is disrupted by food substances.
There’s a difference between a food allergy and an intolerance. A food allergy means any immediate adverse immune reaction to any substance inhaled or eaten or coming into direct contact with the skin. The reaction (swollen lips and tongue, asthma attack, rash) is immediate and so can usually be traced back to a particular cause. Peanut and shellfish allergies are perhaps the best known.
Food intolerance is the name for reactions that show up to 72 hours after exposure, making the trigger food or substance much more difficult to identify. While the reactions may not be life-threatening, as in the case of an allergy, they can certainly impact badly on the general health and functioning of the child. Symptoms of food intolerances can be divided into two broad categories: physical (especially digestive) and mental/emotional/behavioural.
It is much easier to understand the link between what a child eats and what happens in his digestive system than to see the relationship between his food and his feelings, behaviours and learning. Nevertheless, we have known for decades that reactions to foods can cause, amongst others, hyperactivity, nervousness, learning problems, depression, hostility, aggression, periods of confusion, irritability, mood swings and clumsiness.
Partly clouding the issue is that the distinction between allergy and intolerance is still not recognized. This means the absence of an immediate negative reaction to a food is seldom thought of as a possible cause of emotional/emotional/behavioural issues.
Dr William Philpott, a psychiatrist and an author of an interesting book titled Brain allergies, reported that intolerant reactions to foods and pollutants often trigger violent behaviour. This rings true to ILT practitioners, who have had experience of children as young as 3-years-old being expelled from their nursery schools for violent outbursts. On careful analysis, the causes were food additives – such as colourants, preservatives and flavouring.
Another case[1] involved a 5-year old boy with poor speech development. The child showed an abnormal EEG (brain scan showing abnormal brainwave patterns) and a temper that was out of control. The boy was found to be intolerant to chocolate, milk and cola, which were then eliminated from his diet for over seven months. The EEG was repeated and found to be normal, and his behaviour was much improved. When the culprit foods were then reintroduced, his EEG was once again abnormal and his behaviour worsened.
Common food intolerances
Many foods may be the triggers to adverse reactions but to help alert you to the most likely culprits in childhood, here are the top five usual suspects:
Cow’s milk products
Food additives and colourings
Gluten grains (wheat, oats, rye, barley)
Sugar
Yeast
In addition, sometimes the clue to a culprit food may be the food that a child craves and insists on eating all the time. Eating too much of the same food too often can lead to a food intolerance which then becomes a craving for that food. Yet another reason to try and ensure that your family has a varied diet.
It is difficult to test reliably for a possible food intolerance and some tests are also expensive. One method that can be done without expense at home is an elimination diet.
Elimination diet
As the name suggests, this approach means that you withhold the suspected food to see if symptoms improve. This means being very strict and ensuring that the suspected food is totally absent from the diet. For example, you may be withholding milk but the child is eating other foods containing milk, for example, baked products, cheese and so on.
If the symptoms do seem to abate, after a while you add the food back to see if symptoms reappear. Don’t be in too much of a hurry. If food tolerance is the cause of the symptoms, it might take up to several weeks to see improvements – especially if the symptom is related to a health condition. On the other hand, children sometimes show remarkably quick improvement. An example of this is a young girl who showed mood problems, low energy levels, ‘foggy head’, sore muscles and some digestive problems. We suspected wheat as her diet was particularly high in this, being part of nearly every meal. After cutting out all wheat and wheat-containing products (read the labels!), she felt very much better after only a month. In the first few days, she had felt worse, which is a well-known sign of withdrawal from a biochemical addiction. This was a confirmation that the approach was correct and luckily passed after only a short while.
If there are multiple food intolerances, identifying them may be a long and difficult process. Symptoms may not improve even if one suspected food is avoided because other culprit foods may be contributing to the symptoms. In this case, it would be better to consider a test, for which you should consult a medical doctor with specific knowledge of allergies and intolerances.
Is there a cure for food intolerances?
There is no simple remedy for a condition that is a manifestation of the body’s inability to adapt to certain things, not least eating too much of the same foods too often. The only real way to deal with a food intolerance is to avoid the food so as to reduce or eliminate the symptoms.
[1] Haynes, A J & Savill, A. 2005. The food intolerance bible. HarperThorsons: Berwick upon Tweed
Those of you who are familiar with Integrated Learning Therapy (ILT) will have realized that we take careful note of a child’s current diet as well as a history of eating patterns. Most people discount this, believing that the fare on offer at supermarkets, restaurants and fast food outlets is acceptable and what people have always eaten – without consequences. Many rely on ready-to-eat snacks, pastries, cakes and meals. Many believe that much of the food we give our children is healthy, such as muffins, crisps, dried fruits, fruit juices, fresh white bread and more.
This is contrary to evidence of what foods are good for the body and brain. Time after time, we ILT practitioners see how changing a child’s diet brings about remarkable improvements in challenging behaviours, attention problems, mood, feelings of being unwell and ability to learn efficiently. One of the first signs that we often see is that children appear calmer and more in control of themselves.
A combination of poor choice of food and overuse of some medications, like antibiotics, causes unpleasant side effects in a child’s systems, one being ‘leaky gut,’ which sees a breakdown in the integrity of the intestinal wall. This allows content from the gut to move into the blood stream, where it certainly doesn’t belong. Symptoms of this often show up as a child who complains of not feeling well, being overly emotional, constantly tired and unable to focus on schoolwork. A recent case study saw one (initially) sceptical mom returning with her child to report on changes after following a strict diet for one month. She said that she was surprised that her child had easily conformed to the restricted diet and neither complained about or resisted it. At this stage, the child turned to his mom and said “Yes, but I like that my stomach doesn’t hurt after eating anymore.” This was the first time that mom had heard of this and she was surprised but also very pleased at the positive result.
So consider your child’s diet and your choice of what you feed your family. There are ways of getting healthy foods onto the table in a short time. It might take a little research and planning but the rewards are great. And if you are struggling, there are professionals out there to help.
With acknowledgements to Amanda Morin and the ‘Understood’ team.
Key points:
Children with weak flexible thinking skills have trouble knowing when not to use typical grammar and pronunciation rules.
They may have difficulty understanding abstract concepts in maths and reading
There are tools and strategies that can help your child or learner in the classroom think less rigidly.
Flexible thinking is something we use every day. For instance, when a plan goes wrong, you need to be able to think of an alternative. For instance, if your usual route to work is blocked, you’ll visualise an alternative to get to your office. We need to be able to quickly switch gears and find new solutions to problems.
Many children with learning and thinking differences struggle with flexible thinking, which plays an important role in how they learn and adapt to new information. Here are six ways kids use this skill for learning.
Flexible thinking and real-life learning
The term ‘cognitive flexibility’ includes flexible thinking and set changing. Flexible thinking is when children are able to think about something in a new way. Set changing is when they can let go of ‘old ways’ of doing and adopt new ways. For instance, when learning to lie shoelaces, children start out with the ‘bunny ears’ method of making each lace into a loop. Then they often progress to the ‘squirrel in the tree’ method of making one loop and wrapping the other lace around it. Flexible thinking enables children to consider the new squirrel approach. Set shifting helps them ‘unlearn’ the bunny ears way in order to use the new method.
Kids who are rigid in their thinking have difficulty moving beyond the more basic ways of doing things. When kids have weak flexible thinking skills, taking on new tasks and responsibilities as they get older may be tough.
Flexible thinking and reading
Children use flexible thinking both for learning to read and for reading to learn. At first, flexible thinking enables them to understand how the same letter combination can make different sounds. (For example, the combination of ‘ough’ in words like enough and dough.) It also helps understanding of how words can be used in more than one way (We slip on the banana peel and also sign the permission slip.)
When children begin learning from books, they need flexible thinking to understand what information is important and what details are used merely to add to a description. It also helps them understand the perspectives of different characters.
Flexible thinking and language learning
Flexible thinking allows children to understand idioms (‘keep your ear to the ground’) and puns (‘the joke about the duck quacked me up’).
It helps them to learn the rules of language, for example, knowing that the way to put most words into the past tense involves adding ‘-ed’ to the root word. It also helps them come to terms with the exceptions to the rules so that it makes sense that the past tense of ‘go’ is ‘went.’ When learning a second language, it helps to understand that the same letters have different sounds.
Flexible thinking and writing
Writing is complicated for children. When they struggle with flexible thinking, their writing may not have enough supporting details, or have lots of language errors. They may find it easier to learn by listening to how people speak the language rather than trying to learn the rules from a textbook.
Flexible thinking and maths
Flexible thinking is a key skill in maths. It is used to find ways to solve word problems and to understand that, for example, a phrase like ‘how many in all’ means that addition needs to be used. It helps them realise that there’s more than one way to solve a maths problem and also how a new type of problem can be solved using a formula they already know.
Flexible thinking and studying
Doing homework and studying for a test needs flexible thinking too. Knowing how to switch between different subjects during homework time becomes increasingly important as children grow older and have more work to juggle. Answering maths problems need different strategies than a writing assignment. Flexible thinking allows youngsters to change their thinking to handle both.
Studying requires this skill too. They need to work out to what kind of information they need to pay the most attention. Which facts need to be memorised and which need to be understood in order to cope with a multiple-choice format.
The good news is that there are ways to help. Teachers can use strategies in the classroom to teach in ways that make more sense to a child. Parents can play games at home to build children’s flexible thinking skills.
Visit the Understood website to find suggestions of ways that you can help. They are a valuable source of information relating to children’s learning problems and can be recommended.
Most people still believe that learning happens in the brain and the body doesn’t play a role. See how teachers insist that children sit still without any fidgeting with any part of the body when in the classroom.
In the past, children could make up for this body neglect by using their bodies in all kinds of activities after school hours. They used to climb, run, tumble, dig, fall into ditches and fall out of trees. The change isn’t all due to TV and screen time but also because today’s families live in small homes without access to open play areas. Long hours are spent in commuting to and from school. The streets have become dangerous places. It’s been estimated that children are spending 25% less time on free play than they did in their grandparents’ time.
The reality is that the brain needs the body’s movement in order to create the neural pathways that make ease of learning possible. You can’t make a child learning ready with workbooks, i-pad games or computer programmes. It develops as children’s brains mature along with experiences occurring as a result of bodily sensation and movement.
Important movements are the early reflexes, followed by large body movements such as climbing, jumping, swimming, playing hopscotch, catching and throwing balls, riding bicycles, running, skipping, sweeping and digging. Smaller body movements develop fine motor skills, such as cutting vegetables, drawing, building with blocks, moving to music and learning rhythm through clapping, singing and so on. Movements that need crossing the midline help build the pathways connecting the two brain hemispheres and are crucial for learning to read, write and understand maths.
Children love to move; they need to move. If their bodies are given the chance needed to move in play, they will develop to a stage of learning readiness. Perhaps not all of them will reach this stage at exactly the same time but we do have the genetic potential to be wired to learn.
So limit sedentary time. Push your children out of doors. Make sure you spend quality time in play parks or open spaces over the weekends – with due care for Covid-19 safety, of course. Buy body healthy toys like trampolines, skipping ropes and balance boards rather than the latest hi-tech toy. Go back to basics if you really want your child to reach his or her potential at school.
Most adults respond more strongly to visual stimuli rather than auditory or tactile input. In fact, we rely so much on what we see that we might ignore other sources of information coming from our senses of hearing and touch altogether. This means that we are alert to the body language and facial expressions of those around us.
Not so with children. Researchers at Durham University in the UK found that children up to the age of 11 years focus more on auditory stimuli when trying to grasp emotional aspects of their experience. During an experiment, children tended to ignore visual images of people depicting various emotions (joy, sadness, anger and fear) and rather drew conclusions from the emotional voice tones used, even if these contradicted the visual image.
This study suggests that when an adult is communicating with a child and trying to hide anger or frustration with a smile, it might not matter. In other words, putting on a positive front when one is sad, for example, is unlikely to convince a child unless your voice sounds happy too.
According to the researchers, these new findings could also have implications for teaching and education. In fact, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many children are currently studying from home, where they might be more exposed to auditory distractions. The observations reported in the study hint to the possibility that emotion-related stimuli in a child’s home (e.g., programs about COVID-19 on TV, family members arguing, etc.) could influence how a child engages with or perceives his/her schoolwork.
“We have several studies lined up to see how far we can push the effect we observed,” Dr. Ross, one of the researchers, commented. “For example, we will be adding emotional faces into the mix and running another version of the experiment using emotional music instead of vocalizations. It could be the case that any emotional stimuli could be sufficient to influence a child’s visual perception, it might not even need to be human.”
