“Josh didn’t crawl, he didn’t walk – he ran,” his mom laughed and rolled her eyes as she reflected on the warning signs she had missed. Rhonda felt like she had been running after him since he was a toddler. If a child has a right brain weakness or underdevelopment, their difficulties are usually detected…
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You know what I hated about teaching grade 7 & 8? Graduation. All the kids in their fancy outfits filled with a sense of hope and accomplishment didn’t blunt out the fact that there were far too many who we had failed. That’s right. I failed them and so did the school system. It made…
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Adam was like so many kids I work with. He felt angry, hopeless and stupid. He was thirteen and said to me, “I hate reading. It never gets better no matter how much I practice, and I feel like more of a loser every time I do it.” Adam had been struggling with reading, writing…
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Have you ever been told by your child’s doctor not to worry when your child skipped a milestone or didn’t seem to be progressing through the milestone the way you thought they should? Well if you answered ‘yes’, your mama instincts were correct. The sensory system and motor system when stimulated in certain ways help…
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When people try to convince me that nothing can be done for dyslexia or ADHD or even autism because brain imaging scans have shown these kids have different brain structures, I want to climb a ladder to the top of my house and scream from the roof top, “Yes! And decades of research have shown…
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Have you noticed that when we make progress or an advancement with a discovery, everyone jumps on the bandwagon and that’s all we hear about? Everyone seems to forget about the other pieces of the puzzle and thinks this ‘new advancement’ or ‘discovery’ is the answer to all of our problems. Our culture loves a…
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The ability to learn well, focus, concentrate and even have a positive mood is connected to posture more than you might realise. When you consider that when you are interested in something, you tend to lean in and sit up straighter, this doesn’t seem as far-fetched. The Landau reflex is known to help the body…
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When Brian and Kim met me about their son Josh they had very different opinions about why Josh was struggling in school. Brian thought his son was just lazy. The teachers did too. Mom knew Josh was trying his best and that he didn’t want to be what Josh called ‘the dumb kid’. But all…
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“He barely crawled.” “She was an early walker.” “He didn’t crawl.” “Her crawl was more of a shuffle.” I hear this all the time when it comes to kids with learning and behaviour difficulties. It’s the reason why retained primitive reflexes can wreak so much havoc on a child’s ability to read, learn, write and…
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I get really excited when I do a screening on a child who is struggling and find that there are clear areas of underdevelopment in the brain or areas of disconnection. Parents kind of think I’m crazy because for them this is really scary. I get it. Nobody’s debating whether the brain is an important…
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