John | Integrated Learning Therapy

John, aged 8 years and 4 months, is a delightful child who cooperated willingly during the evaluation. However, he was having problems paying attention at school and at home. He experiences difficulties completing tasks in class and his parents and teacher are concerned about the poor progress he is making at school.

He suffered from high fevers between the ages of 2 – 6 years, experiences headaches and has to be encouraged to make his bowels work. His mother describes him as being ‘too lazy’ to go to the toilet.

The pregnancy and birth were uneventful and he was born by normal vaginal delivery without any assistance from drugs or instruments. He settled well and was breastfed for six months.

He met his earliest milestones but was delayed in terms of walking, talking, dressing and feeding himself. He was also delayed in drawing and writing. The evaluation showed up several sensory motor areas that were not functioning regularly and that he had not integrated certain primary reflexes that should no longer be operative after a very early age.

The evaluation confirmed that the delayed milestones as well as the behaviours he was showing at school and at home were symptoms of developmental delay. By school-going age, he struggled to cope because of an immature Central Nervous System.

This means that the ‘primitive’ areas of the brain had not had a chance to develop completely, which in turn led to underdevelopment of higher brain levels needed for school related tasks. This child was simply not learning ready.

His diet is limited as he dislikes many foods and juices due to texture. He eats a lot of sweets, margarine, mayonnaise and fried foods.

He was given a programme of activities aimed at helping to integrate the aberrant reflexes as well as to help his neurological organisation. He and his parents promised to try and adjust his diet to include more fruits and vegetables (by making ‘Smoothies’ to help avoid the textures) and to cut down on the fried foods.

When John returned for the second session after two weeks, his ILT practitioner remarked on how exceptionally well he had responded to the programme. She believed that this was largely due to the dedication of his mother, who had made all recommended changes to his diet and who was participating enthusiastically in the activities.

John’s teacher reported that he was a different child in the classroom. He was sitting still and completing his work within the given time. This is a remarkable difference in such a short period, and a good example of how diet, combined with certain, focused movements can bring about positive changes.

Martin Doherty, writing for The Conversation, says that at the age of about four, children reach important milestones in brain development.

One of these is a huge improvement in understanding others’ thoughts and feelings. This is the start of empathy. Another is in spatial thinking—understanding how objects are positioned and related. This is the beginning of the ability to read maps.

Martin and his colleague, Catherine Sayer, conducted a study with 175 two to five-year-olds to explore how children are able to use scale models to figure out where something is in the real world. At about four, children are able to use a scale model of a room to work out where something is. We thought that this might result from children’s understanding of how one thing can represent something else. But we actually found that four-year-olds’ ability to use scale models came from their spatial abilities.

At the same age, children start to understand that someone’s behaviour is due to what that person believes, not necessarily what is really the case. This has interesting consequences.

If you’ve played hide-and-seek with young children, you may have noticed that they aren’t always very good at it. They love the ritual of looking in all the wrong places first, but beforehand they may tell you where they are going to hide, hide in the same place every time, or not be especially hidden.

After their fourth birthday, they get much better at hide and seek. They understand that the seeker looks in the wrong places because they don’t know where the hider is.

At about three to four children also start to tell lies. They realize they can make someone believe something that isn’t true.

Understanding symbols

Martin’s earlier research with fellow psychologist Josef Perner suggests that four-year-olds don’t just start to understand how others’ minds work. Figuring this out is part of the development of an understanding of “representation”—that symbols, like thoughts, words, or pictures, can be used to stand for something else.

Children start to think about how words relate to objects. This means, for instance, knowing that “animal” can refer to something you already have a name for, such as “rabbit”. This might help children learn the new word.

Their ability to use a understand the components of pictures also improves around this age. Very young children use a lot of trial and error to complete a jigsaw, picking up random pieces to see if they fit. By the time they are about four years old, they start to use the picture as a guide, trying to connect lines and match bits of colour, while checking the guide picture on the box lid.

Developmental experiments

Another ability children develop at around four is using scale models. A classic set of developmental experiments involved a model of a regular household room. The real room had typical furniture—sofa, table, cupboard and so on—and the model had miniature versions laid out in the same way.

Children were shown where something was hidden in the model and told to find an object hidden in “the same place” in the room. Children of around four can find the object using the identical layouts. If shown a sticker under a particular chair in the model room, for example, they can go straight to the “same” chair in the other room. This is the fundamental understanding required to read maps.

Adults see scale models and maps as representations. Maps represent a town or a country. A scale model of, say, the Eiffel Tower represents the real thing. At first, Martin suspected children’s ability to use scale models is more evidence of understanding representation at this age.

He was wrong. Instead, the researchers found that this ability is based on a development in children’s spatial abilities that also occurs at about four. This is the ability to think about spaces and where objects are within them. Spatial abilities help with maths skills, and good spatial ability is linked to an interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Their experiment was simple. They compared the model room task with a test of understanding how representation works. The two abilities develop around the same age, but they found they were not related. Children who could do one task couldn’t necessarily do the other.

They also had a test of purely spatial ability. Children who passed the model room task also passed the spatial task. So it looks like the model room task relied on children‘s spatial thinking.

They don’t yet know why two important but apparently unrelated abilities arise at the same time. Perhaps it’s related to changes in the growing brain at this interesting age.

Provided by The Conversation.

Image supplied by Freepik.