What is a brain injured
child?
Brain injury may be microscopic, or it may be
global. It may be recognized in disturbances
of learning, of visual perception or even of
speech. But these are minor disabilities in a
generally healthy child. The global brain
injury resulting from illness in mother during
pregnancy, injury during a long or difficult
birth or injury after birth such as a car
accident will reveal itself as major
disability. It may affect mobility; as for
example spastic cerebral palsy or language
impairment or as a generalized developmental
delay of physical growth and activity and
mental or emotional delay.
What can we do for the brain injured
child?
A developmentalist can provide you, the
parent, with the tools/activities and
education to give your child the needed
sensory stimulation at the appropriate
developmental level.
Why is this important?
Movement is learning. It allows the brain to
know where the body is in relation to the
world, it provides the opportunity for
increased experience of touch, vision and
hearing. A brain injury can create barriers
that stifle this process. Guidance in the form
of patterning movements, increased touch,
visual, or hearing stimulation at the correct
level can help reorganize these processes in
the brain.
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What is a healthy, disorganized
child?
Neurological development within the brain
occurs as a result of interaction with the
child’s environment. Prone on the floor
the baby begins the effort to crawl, army
style. When care givers talk to the baby about
everything all his waking hours he will begin
to babble back and progressively acquire
language. A baby soon finds fingers and toes
to play with but will then discover objects in
the environment to manipulate, to play with,
to take apart, and eventually reassemble. But
for the child with some degree of brain injury
this interaction with the environment is
obstructed. The developmentalist provides
techniques to replace these deficiencies by
various exercises such as patterning to
cultivate integrated arm, leg, head movement,
visual tracking of the eyes while maintaining
a clear single visual image whether at far or
near and manual dexterity. Such activities
provide organized sensory input which
stimulates effective, integrated motor output.
Minimal cerebral dysfunction occurs in the
child with very little if any abnormality in
the MRI. But this child may lack coordination
of walking, running or skipping. He may have
difficulty following a line of print from side
to side or a column of figures from above down
or transcribing from the board to his desk in
school.
The developmentalist teaches the child by
means of sensory input - the child learns the
sensation of crawling and creeping, learns the
sensation of tracking with the eyes and learns
the sensations that are perceived through the
skin moment by moment through the day. This
stimulation program known by the general term
of patterning is taught to the family to
perform at home.
What can we do for the disorganized
healthy child?
There is no visible pathology in the brain,
but this child finds it difficult to receive,
process, retrieve and use information. There
is a glitch in the integration necessary for
organized thought processes.
What can we do for the disorganized
healthy child? A developmentalist can
provide you, the parent, with the
tools/activities and education to guide your
child to live in a more organized way.
Recognition of visual, touch, or hearing
processing problems will help to design
approaches to learning that integrate all the
senses so that there is success in
learning.
Why is this important?
If the process of thought is in a jumble
because the path is not even or complete, then
it is difficult to get through the day. Think
of the thought process as climbing a ladder.
If a few rungs are missing or incomplete then
it is far more difficult to climb. It is
important to integrate all our senses so that
we can perform our best.
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