Inspired

FEELING INSPIRED 

Just got home yesterday from the Anat Baniel Method Center where I did a “post graduate” 9 day training about working with children who have special needs. It is hard to attend one of Anat’s trainings and not feel empowered to help change kids’ lives. I decided to use this post to share some of what I consider to be some of Anat’s gems.

• Most children with special needs have a brain capable of learning new things as long as we start where they are, not where we might hope they would be. Another way of saying this is “if they could, they would” as related to such milestone activities as rolling, sitting, standing and walking.

• Related to the above is a little equation that is often implicit in our thinking about children with special needs. Here it is.

A neurotypical healthy child can do (fill in the blank). If we somehow make a special needs child do the same thing, that child becomes healthy.

The faulty thinking here is that a healthy child gets to roll, sit or whatever through a process of neuromotor development consisting of periodic surprises when random movement activity leads to a favorable outcome that is then repeated.

Without that process the “goal activity” has no foundation and will not necessarily lead to further development. Rather than drill a desired outcome, Anat Baniel Method practitioners provide lots of variation in providing extra support to the developmental process that has been impeded by a special needs child’s condition. In part this involves enhancing the perception of differences that is prerequisite for all learning.

• Last for this post is that special needs children, like all of us, learn their experience, not necessarily what we desire they learn. So if we force spastic limbs to stretch, a likely lesson is therapy is painful and I should tune out- not exactly conducive to learning to use the arm.  Or, if we put children with cerebral palsy on back walkers when they really can’t stand well, a likely lesson is that walking is too difficult and scary. You get the picture.

If you know a child with special needs I highly recommend that you explore the Anat Baniel Method.  For more information you can contact me moving@drizzle.com or go anatbanielmethod.com. For local readers of this blog I am offering an initial free ABM consultation for any child with special needs.