Healing Our Children with Attentional, Emotional, and Learning Challenges

Author // Susan R. Johnson, MD, FAAP

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Healing Our Children with Attentional, Emotional, and Learning Challenges
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My son’s gifted kindergarten teacher worked with him after school for two hours, twice a week, for a year-and-a-half doing lots of harmonious, non-competitive, rhythmic movements. It was calming to be in her presence. She lived in the present moment. When she sliced apples for the children to make applesauce, the thoughts of her mind, feelings in her heart, and the actual movements of her body were all aligned with the task of slicing apples. In her speech and in all of her movements her mind, heart, and body were as one. My son went from grasping a crayon with his fist and scribbling at the age of four-and-a-half years to finger knitting and weaving during the next one-and-ahalf years. He went from being unable to catch even large balls easily to juggling tennis balls with her across the room. His balance, auditory processing, and speech articulation all dramatically improved. He became a social being who could relate and play imaginatively with his peers while his oversensitivity to touch seem to disappear.

I had to find out what his Waldorf preschool and kindergarten teachers knew about the relationship of movement to brain development. I had already completed four years of medical school, three years of pediatric residency, and three years of fellowship training in behavior and developmental pediatrics. I learned how to identify the various pathways of learning, whether auditory, visual, or kinesthetic, but I didn’t learn anything about sensory integration. After watching my son transform in his development, I completed the three-year Waldorf Teacher Training Program, and then spent another year studying sensory integration with Ingun Schneider, a physical therapist and sensory integration specialist at Rudolf Steiner College. I attended numerous workshops by neuropsychologists like Judith Bluestone of the HANDLE Institute and Carla Hanaford, who works with Brain Gym. What I have learned from all of these experiences is that movement forms the neurological pathways in the child that are later used for reading, writing, spelling, mathematics, focusing of attention, and creative thinking.

There is a relationship between the development of the vestibular system—which includes balance and muscle tone—and auditory processing—the ability to understand and follow verbal instructions. If a child, whose hearing is normal, still has difficulty with auditory processing (following verbal instructions) then strengthening his or her balance will help. If a child has low muscle tone with a tendency to drool and lisp during speech, then working with movement, specifically balance, will strengthen that child’s overall muscle tone and improve the articulation of consonants.

There is also a relationship between proprioception—the child’s ability to know where his or her body is in space—and the child’s ability to sit still and “pay attention.” A child has difficulty focusing his or her attention if the proprioceptive system is not yet fully formed or integrated. During the first seven years of life, the child’s mind needs to make a map of the location of pressure receptors within the muscles, tendons, and joints of the entire body. You might say that there is a universal law that the mind must know where the body is at all times. If the mind of the child can’t locate the different parts of the body when sitting still, then the child will need to actively move the muscles or sit on his or her feet in order for the mind to “feel” connected to the body while the child is looking at the blackboard and paying attention to the teacher. Unfortunately, a child who is continuing to wiggle in his or her chair while gazing at the teacher will often be seen as not paying attention and be labeled with attention deficit disorder.

In addition, this same child who hasn’t developed a sense of spatial awareness and doesn’t feel where his or her body is in space also lacks an inner sense of movement when looking at abstract forms like letters or numbers. The child’s eyes will follow the movement, the lines and curves of the letters and numbers, but the forms won’t imprint. The child will forget the shapes and not remember which way the number 2 or 3 goes or which letter is “b” and which is “d.” In addition to being labeled with ADD, these children with proprioceptive difficulties often get labeled as having visual processing and visual memory types of learning disabilities.