Children for centuries have had a predictable pattern of normal development that is innate. Other way to say it, but it's just the natural progression of how our brain and bodies move together.

So to come up and make an arbitrary change that didn't even include crawling. Which crawling is the first thing the babies do for integration? Visual motor integration.

And brain. Brain, right? Everything is connected and I'm here to tell you how. I am Dr. Laura Hanson with Connect My Brain. This podcast is for moms who are concerned about their child's development.

The brain impacts our mind, body, and overall health. I explain how your brain is wired, what happens when it's out of balance, and how early childhood development not only impacts your child, but can affect you as an adult years later.

Want to know how to improve your life? Join me and learn about your amazing brain and what it can do for you. Hi everybody, it's Dr. Laura with Connect My Child's Brain.

So I'm so excited that you're tuning in today and I have got a real treat for you. This is one of my greatest colleagues but also dearest friend, Ray Brashear is going to join us today.

The last time that we did a podcast together, this is when I was managing my own and it was years ago and still collaborate and talk about different cases and things that we're seeing in the world and love her perspective on helping parents truly understand why it is important to look at a developmental assessment.

What can we learn from it? What do we know? And how can forecast things that probably will happen? So I'm going to introduce you. This is Ray Brashear.

Hello, and thank you for joining us. Thank you, Laura. It's a pleasure to be here. We've been recently collaborating on when a child is maybe a year or so old and they're still not crawling, they've got low tone, and what this really means for the whole picture.

And I just want to give you the platform and just help our parents understand what's going on. Okay. Let me give a little background of why I'm still so passionate about this.

I come from a perspective of Montessori education, but it really colored my whole world when I became a Montesori teacher because I saw the connectiveness between the body, the environment, and what education is supposed to be.

And so I've always had, for 40 years now, I had a perspective of movement, of being the foundation for education. So as we look into our highly digitized world, what's missing?

Why are things on the rise? Why do we have more ADD, more autism, and more of the things that are harming our children and causing problems? And what are we missing?

What have we missed? So not only have I been a Montessori teacher, now I am an adult education teacher. So I see adults in my classroom every day who didn't get the help they need.

And I'm able to see that because of my perspective and development. I did a good over a decade and a half or more developmental foundations for neural connections as it related to cognitive processing.

So I'm a holistic person. I look not just at what I see in front of me, but the behind and where they're going. And I think that's the issue is where are they going?

Why would I be doing these things? Where do I want my trial to go? So that's my background for education. I'm a mom, I've had two children and one had developmental issues that kind of drew me into this work.

And it's because of the successes I had as a parent that I really want to speak to someone today. Don't know who this person is, but there's some parent asking themselves, am I enough?

I want tell you, you are enough. you are exactly what you need to be for the child you have in front of you. Don't ever doubt yourself as a mom, because first there's this thing that the mom knows before anybody else, that she's oftentimes poo-pooed or dissuaded from following her heart and following your instinct.

But it's because I never let go of that call that my son progressed and I didn't leave any stone unturned and I did things that nobody else understood, but I felt guided and compelled.

So please, if you're that mom questioning and doubting, are you enough? Do you have the right idea? Follow it because only you know your child like no one else does.

So if that's affirming to you, I'm glad. But let me go back and since we're on the video, i'm going to show you a book that is kind of the seminal work when it comes to early education and development and it's understanding the human being.

And that really is what we're talking about, is the creation of a human being, and that is a work of the child. And this is actually a direct monetary quote.

I have one of her books as well, that children's work is to create the man that they are to become. So it's not just childhood, but you're really beginning a whole life, a person's hood, if you want to say it that way.

Why do kids need to move? And what Dr. Allard and I collaborate so much on is that the body informs the brain, and the brains informs to body. And without that connective loop, you don't get a complete process.

You don' get the complete development. So where you want to jump in about why movement and connectivity is so important, please do. Well, I'd love to share with parents is that you come into this world, your fully formed, but you're not fully functioning.

All those things that children are expected to do, are the things that are going to wire them up. And when any of those things are either late or even too early, because that means they didn't do the preceding one long enough, if something interrupted another developmental window, it has a cost on how that brain is actually going get wired up and sometimes You're not finding this stuff until they are school age.

Sometimes you do see it when they're little. It just really depends on the nature of what's going on, that when is it going to actually show up? And to speak directly to parents, you are enough, you do know your child and trust what your gut is telling you.

If you're really feeling like my child is struggling and I just don't think I'm really getting to it, that's when we want you to reach out and have a discussion.

Have just a conversation so that we can help you connect the dots. if I were to go back and That's really old school, the things that I believe, but I want to kind of touch on five things.

That really come out of movement and children. And one thing is, believe it or not, basic faith in oneself. Okay? Being able to have freedom to move, they can pursue their own ideas and interests.

Now that sounds like something you'd want maybe a fifth grader to do, or what do you want be when you grow up kind question. But it really comes down to I can pull myself up.

I want the red ball I Want to see what's in the bucket? I think I? Can do this I wanna have the freedom to pursue my own interests and ideas Those ideas about your own interest don't just happen when you get to have a cognitive ability to reason with the world they come from a deep deep inside place that is developed through being able to reach and get your goal.

Well, that may just be the bottle, it may be a pea on your plate, maybe the blocks in your bucket, whatever, but that initial movement is so important to lay the myelination for the foundation of how this body gets constructed.

So let me ask you a question. If you've got a little person And you can actually see them beginning that initiative to go after something, but they can't get their body.

What would typically happen as a result of not being able to do it? There's no one pat answer, But you kind of see that it would lead to lack of ability to try, lack interest.

and you begin to close off that part of yourself and not initiate. If you think you have faith in yourself, that's what we're trying to build, and if you don't ever get to experience success with that, then it would become, I'm not able, or I am not worthy, the I-am-nots.

And that would just be the reversal. You're not driving motivation, therefore you're driving frontal lobe. development, which that's like the other one everybody always wants to talk about, right?

Is that my kid has no executive function. That's also a fancy way of saying ADD or what have you, but that this is the frontal lobe and this where it happens and where that thought connects.

Oh, I see that stimulus. I want to go get whatever that is. So that's going to build on the second part, which is self-confidence. And we've all, as adults, experienced that thing we thought we couldn't do and then we did, whether it was, in my case, heading a perfect loft drive or maybe making a perfectly soufflé.

Oh! You have a sense of confidence in something. For a small child, the confidence of being able to satisfy their own need. We can't take away from them.

So we have to give them opportunities to do these things. And so if movement and having the freedom to that is what begins to embed self-confidence and the faith in oneself, what does that mean?

That means from earliest stages, they have be on the floor, have have out of the car seat, have to have freedom to move, have an environment that allows them to stimulate at their eye level.

So lots of tummy time, lots things. When I remember I put a mirror, one of those folding mirrors, I've put it sideways in David's, my son's nursery. He had an opportunity to see his whole body from the time he was two months old and laying on his tummy.

Lots of that type of body awareness and what happens when I move my legs. That kind of thing so anymore comments on that i think it kind brings us even again to that idea.

What if i can't do it and so i loved when we were talking about a combination of delay in movement like crawling or even pulling yourself up or walking.

and then this combination of low tone. And let's clarify, low-tone, you can see it. So low tones is like when a child is on their hands, those elbows really bow in.

Over the years, it was kind of phrased as double-jointed, but it's really low toned. What does tone mean in the world of gravity and what is that doing neurologically to the coordination, to brain development, and to eye development?

What would you say to that? It's hard to really define because you just have to notice it. You have see the effects of it versus you can see something.

Like when you hit a reflex on your elbow and your arm just out, that you see. Tone just looks like this very mushy, can't quite put a finger on it, what you are the effect of that.

And so from development inside the womb, tone is being developed. It never stops developing and it's the tone that comes from the primitive reflexes that are enabled in our brain stem back here.

These are stylized patterns that God gave us for our protection. these are movements that embedded in us that thrust us from one stage to the next and help build that tone through sustained activity.

That's also something else that gets confused. Oh, I can do it once. But can you sustain a slow push? Can you sustainable slow retraction? can your muscles have that sustained control?

That might be a way to look at tone. And we're talking about the development of eye muscles. Those are some of the first muscles to develop because they're connected to the mouth muscles, so the suck, the tone needed to have a sustained suck for nutrition coordinates with the medial rectus, the mediolaterus muscles in the eyes for sustained tone for convergence, which translates into reading, being able to come to midpoint to read, and then the sustained tongue for divergence, was just far away reading which is going to be looking up at the board looking back at your paper, tracking across the page, having both sets of muscles work.

So when you're looking at the first one year of life, you are setting the stage for age because you going to see this whole developmental pattern. You're going to see it again at three.

There's a triangle of development that goes for the first six years, and then six to 12, then 12 to 18. That's like a larger perspective of Development.

We can break that down also to the First Three Years and the Second Three years. The first three years of life are really about the movement that we do internally, externally, And then all about ourselves for The First three Years.

I am aware of my body. I can move my body, I could get my own needs met. Then three to six is all about the social development, and that's why we now become looking at ourselves inside the world.

But that first three years, we've got to move the coordination. So the moro reflex, the spinal galant reflex the tonic labyrinthine reflex. and the AT&R and STNR are some really critical reflexes that deal with the tone of the eyes, the tongue of their hands, and tone the body for that sustained push or that sustain stance, all those things really happen early on.

So connected that dot about the eye and reading, but it would also play a part in writing, right? And how how kids are writing and are not writing because they've got their hand wrapped all the way around the writing instrument, or they have to put their body in a certain position, which is connected to those reflexes.

And so let's kind of take that overview. Now, There are lots of parents that come in and they'll say my kid has trouble with reading and writing and we're going to do this tutorial program and this is going help them with writing.

And most of those programs do not go backwards. I'd love for you to tell the audience your opinion. If I start here, what can I expect? But if I come where the problem really exists, how can i permanently change what's going on?

Can you talk to that? I want to kind of bounce back to my, I said five principles I'm going to draw. This is a great time to go into number three, which is the sense of autonomy and independence.

And so when you don't have the success with moving the way you want to, and you can't attain what's really your own motivations and interests, you begin to lose interest in things that other people say are important.

So you began to tune out to reading because it's hard. You can't make your eyes see the page correctly. You cant make you hand hold the pencil correctly or it hurts.

It doesn't even have the development of that muscle tone. So rather than try to create a cognitive frontal lobe approach to think your way through something.

Think your ways through how to not have this ability. I can look at golf on TV all day long and I could see cognitively how to hold a golf club. But until I get out there and do it myself, I don't really understand it.

In that kind of same way, you can think about better reading, and you could think of strategies for better handwriting, but until you give the body the foundation it needs to have the support to be able to do, then you're not going to ever really fix the problem.

You can cognitively override only so long, but then you really kind of break the child's sense of independence because they think, I can't do it because I'm broken.

It just becomes devastated. And that leads to number four, which is self-esteem. So if you're always telling your child, you can read well, and you don't write the right way, You have to go get better at this one thing that's so hard for you.

but we're not gonna help you fix the underlying root cause. We're just gonna tell you, if you just think better, think harder about it, try harder. I know you can do it.

You're getting the point. And then they just begin to feel like they're being heard. So then that leads me to number five, which is social participation.

Being able to interact in your world with confidence, with the freedom to pursue your own ideas that makes you a better participant in the classroom or in, in a community or even in family.

So it's truly kind of a total picture approach, but therapies that address the issue without understanding why that issue exhausted in the first place are missing the vital link between the mind, body, and movement connection.

So anything that just has your child sitting down longer and looking at a page more is not going to be effective because they're going have to move to make the neural connections.

And that's why your work with Connect My Brain is so important because you put children on the treadmill on a climbing wall. You have them do right, left, right left motor integration before you even try to do the right-left-right- left interhemispheric neural integration.

Can you speak to that? Yes. I mean, that is just my passion is if you look at a baby, they are not reading and writing and doing arithmetic. They're moving.

So as that baby has, like what you said, freedom of movement, as a baby can accomplish going after the red ball or hold their own bottle. they're gaining new connections.

So you can find out in a history, maybe mom didn't feel lots of movement when she was pregnant. That's actually the beginning of the whole movement is in the womb and with the primitive reflexes that.

Well, the baby's. Yeah. Yeah, that movement awareness begins in utero when mom moves. We're having a good conversation. So like the AT&R, asymmetrical tonic neck reflex, when mama feels that kick, that's actually working towards building the sensory motor cortex.

So a lot of times we're saying this child has sensory-motor processing problems. But there's things even before sensory motoring, and that is the reflexes.

And if those reflex is either don't come on board, don' get integrated, stay around too long, they block the ability for that child to move into the higher brain.

It's like it becomes a battle between the high brain and the lower brain, and then that just leads to stress for the child. So here at Connect My Brain, we do a ton of movement.

Our assessment looks at, are you moving as you should be at this age? and then watching the patterns of how they navigate that. Do they have to do it a different way?

Classic example is a jumping jack. So we all know what a Jumping Jack is. You should be able to jump apart and the arms go up. So what I typically will see is either just the arms move or they go backwards.

So as the legs are going out, the arm are coming down. but it's an atypical. The other thing that I wanted to also tie in, we don't want to just talk about this from an academic point of view, even though I know that's the focus of all parents.

What about the kids avoiding to ride a bicycle? You know, that is a rite of passage, to write a And if their balance is off, if they're eyes are off. If their trunk is often they get up on this thing and they fall off they go, okay, I'm not doing that again.

And they do they begin to avoid those movement patterns that would real. I mean, have you ever stopped and thought about how many things are going on at the same time while you're riding a bike?

You have to sit up on the seat. You need to hold the handlebars. Put your feet on your pedals. One foot is going forward while the other foot goes back.

Be able to look. Listen. Your vestibular has to know where you are. All of that is happening at one time. You have to modulate the speed. You need to be able to do all these things.

But Laura, I have a question. When was the last time you saw the child on a bike? Well, here at Connect My Brain, we've taught a lot of kids how to ride a bicycle.

I am so big on that and I ride bikes. I just got my bike tuned up because it's been in the office for the last five years and I've been letting the kids ride my bicycle on a trainer.

And I said, well, I'm going to take my motorcycle home. I got it tuned and every night I go out for about 30 minutes and ride the bike. I don't ever want to lose that skill.

I'm 65 years old. And that's what it should be. It should a drive, right? One of the things I am hot on is digital games. Video games, I think we've all now heard that these video games were created with the intention of addiction.

These video differently functioned. So when I ask the question, how many kids ride bikes these days, I can drive through a whole neighborhood I know is full of children and I won't see one bike left out in the yard.

Wow. You want to make sure your children aren't doing bicycle kinds of things. This is Dr. Montessori's book. It's one of the famous ones. The Modern Approach by Paula Polk-Lillard.

One of the greatest mistakes of our day is to think that movement by itself as something apart from higher functions. Mental development must be connected with movement and be dependent on it.

It is a vital that educational theory and practice should become informed by this idea. Now, this was written about a hundred years ago by Dr. Donna Story.

Wow, a 100 years. We know now. though to your point that whole body movement is what we're striving for even in infancy and when we look at a young child who's not engaged in whole-body movement, it's okay if at the young-child the one year, the two year are not quite differentiated and that's a term you and I understand to mean You can have your hand move and had your mouth not move.

Babies do this because they're trying to organize muscle groups. But it's so when I'm looking at a young child who's not differentiated, I am OK. That's fine.

In fact, i'm Looking for those reflex patterns that are still flaring. And it is oftentimes you'll see one kind of dovetail into another one as this new one takes off.

So there might be some overlap. The brain's organizing. When there's no movement or only one and none of the other, you get this striated discord that begins to say there is a gap opening that's going to show up later, bigger.

The developmental stages build on themselves. So what began maybe as a young six-month-old should be crawling. Then you go to a year and then you should be walking and by 18 months you be a full on run and beginning to do some hopping kind of stuff.

More larger motion. If you don't do it here, you're not going to over it. So you begin to see that as the developmental shift happens because the body is bigger, And the mind's thinking, oh, I see someone else, but I don't work that way.

It's just going to become harder and harder unless we go back to the beginning. Let's also weave into this because we're giving a lot of references to time.

And about three or four years ago, the CDC changed all the developmental milestones. I would say that facial expression right there, or oh my gosh, I'd say right here that tells it, but just give the audience your thoughts too.

That's kind to be saying it that way. But when that happened, it was just a gas because I didn't think any other country had done it. And so this is where we get to the universality of the human being.

It is very understood that you can be parents of Chinese origin but have a baby in South Alabama. And because your origin is Chinese, but you're raising that child in Alabama, that maybe is going to sound like people in Alabama, or it's going have a trace like that, and vice versa.

If I took my Georgia self over to Italy or some other country, it would pick up those things, but the developmental progression is gonna be the same. That Chinese-born child is gunna do the the things whether he's in China, whether in he is Alabama or wherever you are.

Children for centuries have had a predictable pattern of normal development that is innate. Other way to say it, but it's just the natural progression of how our brain and bodies move together.

So to come up and make an arbitrary change that didn't even include crawling. Which crawling is the first thing the babies do for integration, visual, motor integration.

And brain. Brain, right? We could do two hours of crawling alone. Yes, we could. So that it didn't include one of the most important developmental stages for muscle development, for visual development and for cognitive development which is crawling.

It just made things normal that would never have been normal before. All of my child development books were published a couple of decades ago. Yeah, I'm 60. So my kids were raised with the 12th month.

That's when you walk developmental pattern. To give parents the idea that more time will make your child normal, it goes against human history. It goes again everything else.

And to this day, still haven't heard if other countries followed suit. Wasn't that around 2001, 2002? Yeah. And it was just like, oh, by the way, we're doing this.

There wasn't some incredible piece of information that came about. But what it WAS around was around COVID. And within six months of COVID, there had already been research articles put out about the little ones in that time frame and how they were already demonstrating some form of delay.

And then the next thing you know, CDC changes all of that. I always frame it as I feel like we have decided we're going to normalize developmental delay.

And there is more conversation out there about being more accepting of all of this. I think the one thing I would really encourage people is to realize the brain is marvelous and it can change.

we have this term neuroplasticity. And even with me 65 and Ray 60, we can still improve our game. I keep working on mine. You ought to see this woman's, I call it a farm, she calls it garden.

But it's just unbelievable what she has created with her hands. And the thing is, is that we all have this possibility. And to limit our children, I'm just dumbfounded by this kind of a concept.

I saw a magazine when I was in the airport a few weeks ago that talked that all the naysayers about children working on computers and digital products, as if when we say this explosion of digital and what it's actually done to our children, you're always going to have somebody that's going try to put something out there to keep that point alive.

And just from a clinical point of view, many things that go on when we all, not even just kids, but when live too much on these products. A computer is 2D, your eyes are 3D.

It ramps up the left side of your brain more than the right side. The need to talk is on the work of talk. Big muscles are on right, small muscles on left.

If you don't want to take that, they've done Digital imaging, it's called DTI, dense tensor imaging to look at white matter in the brain. So you have gray matter for processing.

You have white matters that's like the trains on the track. It's where it is all going. How I share in my circuits front to back, left to right, etc. But the world of digital is actually creating more white matter than gray matter, or more White Matter than it needs to have.

So that means I can't filter, I Can't process, and I'm driven. I am driven to that fast pace thing. And how could you ever focus? if that's what you're looking for.

Go a little direction here because I taught children for many many years and the last five years I've been teaching adults and what I hear all the time is I have ADD, I can't focus.

And so I tell them I don't believe in ADB and I will tell you I Don't Believe in AdD because i don' believe the word deficit. I don't think that God would have made a deficit.

I think you have a difference in your priority. So rather than deficit disorder, which allows it to be part of the DSM code and you can medicate it, let's call it an intentional priority difference.

Because you are paying attention. It's just not maybe to what someone else says is the priority at the moment. So when I was practicing private work and doing the schools, it was always getting kids to tune into what they were having to attend to.

Maybe it the tag in the back of their shirt, maybe it it's the sound, or maybe other things that were sensory oriented. Once we could prioritize and calm down the priority that was more primal, more internal, then I can help them rebuild the ability to focus.

So I'm in my adult education classroom, I am a GED teacher. I help people get their lives back on track when education fell off somehow. And I have created two hours of space in every of my sessions.

The first two hour is for attention building. It's self-guided work. You need to understand how you learn. I can't fix them in my capacity because there's no way to do a program, but what I do is create what is appropriate.

And what's appropriate is giving them a place to learn how to attend. As a Montessori teacher, we spend the first year of a child's classroom time teaching them how they pay attention to what they want.

Building that attention priority, building that attending ability really is the focus of practical life and the sensorial work and it's the first level of work in a Montessori classroom.

Move ahead, become an adult that never had the ability to focus. Traditional schools want every 25 to 30 minutes to move to a new thing. And I'm trying to get people to, now it's block time, outside time.

Now it is coloring time now is this time I want to create an ability for you to move at your own pace. So when you have the opportunity for two hours of uninterrupted time i'm teaching you how to focus and so many of my adults can't.

They don't know how. So it's a retraining of those neural connections. It's that neuroplasticity that I'm gently trying to create space. You know what?

It is working. People come after a hard day because they know they're going to have a quiet place to come to feed their brain. That's great. Well, I think, too, by sharing where you are today, it really helps us create that full circle of what we're talking about is that you can determine if a child is not going in the direction that they should be going.

and you're now working with adults that we may not know all the specific details of what they did, what didn't do when they were little. But you can see that somehow or another that academia, which is the expected steps that you are going to take, something got derailed, but there is something that's driving them back and having someone help them relearn how to do that.

It is such a gift. And I must say, Ms. Ray is Teacher of the Year, and so she has done… It was quite the honor and the tip of iceberg, or the top of summer, I guess, for a statewide honor like that, thank you for saying that Laura, it's given me the perspective to see from the beginning to an end point, you know, how does the human continuum for academics, for self-improvement, or self esteem.

All of these things we're talking about at the first, with the self Esteem and the motivation for learning, all those things tie into who you're going to be as an adult.

So if we were to say, if I'm going create a well-informed adult, I have to create well connected one-year-old, two- year- old, three- years old. And when that is in place, the rest can kind of fall into its natural capacities.

Well, we're going to wrap it up for today. But if there was something that you could say to a parent out there that if you notice then we're really encouraging you.

Don't wait. Have somebody like me check you out and we get these kids going. I am really working towards, don't keep this information, Don' keep connect my brain a secret.

We want to help these children get back on track. So what would you say? Early intervention is the best. That's not a secret. There are lots of state and federal programs that are built on like on that way.

But you as a mom have everyday connections and you, as your mom or dad, have every day opportunities and don't let those slip through your fingertips.

Take a walk, build a fort. A box and a ball of twine and stick are great inventions. Use them for something creative. Take the time to be creative with your child.

It's going to do so much more for them. Turn the TV and turn the iPad off and create those connections not only within your own family community, but how that creates connections within the child themselves.

Well, thank you so much for being on Connect My Child's Brain. We're so excited that you were with us. And again, if there's anybody out there that your listening to this and you're going, wow, this information just really resonates with me.

Go over to the website, connectmybrain.com and send us an inquiry and I will be the one personally gets back to you. Now, depending upon when you hear this, make sure you also check out our upcoming events.

So next week, we're actually having an open house on May 7th. And I have a feeling that this recording will go out after the fact. But go over to our events page under the resource tab.

In June, I am actually doing two events. One is a parent's training on primitive reflexes. It's only one hour, but it's to give you hands-on understanding of what is primitive reflux.

What does it mean if it doesn't integrate? What are some things that you might be able to do with it? But another key point that I really want to highlight, it definitely work with somebody like me that knows how to help integrate it.

Sometimes I think there's just too many little things out there and people start trying them. And you know what? These are actually neurological reflexes.

If we do something that maybe the timing wasn't right, we put something in there that the child really wasn' t ready for, something else can happen. So that's why I decided I'm going to do a little workshop and it's free of charge.

You just come to the office and we're going spend an hour together on a Saturday and I will help you understand that. The other event that I'm going to have, I am calling it Babysitter Club and I m going help maybe just its teenagers or people in their early 20s that still do any type of babysitting or child care and you're working with a child with special needs.

Some of the conversations that come up quite often in the office is do you know anybody that can babysit because when we get a babysitter, my guy really just tears them up and they never want to come back.

So helping people understand what that population really needs can make a better relationship in caring for a child with special needs. So make sure you check it out.

Thanks so much for tuning in. We hope that you enjoyed this conversation and of course, be blessed. Thank you for listening. I hope today's lesson will help you or someone you love.

Do you have a question or just really want to talk to somebody about brains? Connect with me over on Facebook or Instagram at connect my brain Looking to understand and optimize your particular brain Check out connectmybrain.com for course information and resources See you next class

Rhea Brashear

The Hidden Link Between Crawling, Reading, and a Child’s Confidence