This is our 5th year meeting in Transylvania and something our families and staff look forward to each year. This year about 50 families were able to come from all over Eastern Europe and beyond to have their children receive their triannual evaluations and have their NACD programs updated. It was also an opportunity for our families to spend some time together at the beautiful Cheile Gradistei resort and to learn, play, interact, rejuvenate, and create new bonds and friendships. These two weeks are Bob’s favorite time each year; he gets to not only help the families, but is able to take time to enjoy the kids and their families in the relaxing beautiful mountain setting of Transylvania.

These events just underscore the role of the family in NACD. We know that parents are the ultimate experts on their children, those most motivated to help their children, and that the family unit can be the best equipped to implement the full range of developmental and educational interventions for their children, if they have ongoing direction, guidance, and support. We at NACD feel honored and privileged to be able to support our wonderful families and to help them achieve their vision for their children.

Reprinted by permission NACD Newsletter, July 2023 ©NACD

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https://apps.apple.com/us/app/nacd-speech-apraxia/id1625372283

Ogden, Utah
July 30, 2022

The National Association for Child Development, an innovator in all aspects of child development since 1979, announced today the re-release of their very effective and successful app that addresses Childhood Apraxia of Speech/dyspraxia, as well as apraxia of speech in adults.

This very successful and fun tool has been used by parents, individuals, and speech therapists alike. With the Speech Therapy for Apraxia app, targeted speech therapy can now be accomplished on a daily basis right at home. Frequent application fulfills one of the basic requirements needed to trigger neuroplasticity and produce real change.
In keeping with NACD’s mission to provide affordable services and tools to families around the world, this comprehensive app is being made available for only $9.99

Speech Therapy for Apraxia app reflects NACD’s decades of international work with tens of thousands of children and their quest to find, develop, and utilize better and better tools to assist families in helping their children develop to their full potential.

Speech Therapy for Apraxia is one of a series of speech apraxia apps being re-introduced by the National Association for Child Development. These apps are developed by NACD’s team, including a certified speech-language pathologist.

“It was important to us to develop an app that parents can use at home for speech practice with their children, but that is also an effective tool for therapists. The emphasis of the app is the child’s production. The parent or therapist should be an active participant in order to provide the user with feedback, reinforcement, and additional modeling.” Lori Riggs, Speech-Language Pathologist at NACD.

This comprehensive app permits targeted application and includes the following features:

• The user can choose from 8 different consonant groups- a total of 19 consonant sounds.
• Customization permits the user to practice at a chosen level within each group.
• Detailed instructions describe how to choose appropriate groups and levels.
• Moves through a progression of 8 levels for speech motor planning.
• There are illustrations and audio provided for each syllable.
• Includes options that permit the user to repeat levels, reset, or move to the next level.
• Can be used as a straight articulation drill for specific phonemes.
• Simple enough for a parent or adult user to progress through by themselves, but comprehensive enough for a therapist to incorporate into their targeted program.

The app is not intended for independent use by children.

“For decades we at NACD have had the goal to educate and assist both parents and professionals in order to develop and modify present therapeutic interventions. Successful application of neuroplasticity requires targeted high frequency, preferably daily intervention, to achieve desired outcomes. Part of our mission has been to develop systems and tools to assist in accomplishing this goal.” Bob Doman, Founder and Director of NACD.

About NACD

The National Association for Child Development is a unique organization with a distinctive family centered approach to child development. Founded in 1979 by Bob Doman, NACD has worked internationally to help tens of thousands of families remediate developmental issues and enhance the development and global function of their children. NACD has developed an approach to human development, the achievement of human potential, and the remediation of developmental, educational, and neurological problems that is based on the gestalt of the whole individual and an understanding of neuroplasticity. The efficacy of NACD’s Targeted Developmental Intervention has been demonstrated with the full range of individuals, from comatose to gifted.

NACD designs comprehensive targeted interventions that are implemented by family and caregivers within the home on a daily basis, supported and overseen by NACD’s staff of professionals and coaches. NACD has chapters around the United States and internationally.

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I am pleased to announce that we are launching an NACD Facebook group. We are hopeful that this will serve as a vehicle to provide our members with even more support and to strengthen our community—our NACD family. It is very important, however, that we do it properly.

The majority of families in the world are not potential NACD families. The majority of parents are comfortable letting the schools, therapists, and other professionals direct and supervise the education and development of their children and are willing to accept the outcomes.

NACD families are cut from a different cloth. Although they are from all over the world and have children ranging from severely disabled to accelerated, our families have similar characteristics and attitudes. Our NACD parents universally want more for their children, and they realize that they need to assume the primary responsibility for their child’s development and education if they are going to help their children realize their potential. Our NACD parents want more.

There have been a few occasions when we were really able to embrace the NACD family. In the two years preceding the 9/11 terrorist attacks, we held the NACD Rendezvous for our families in the mountains of Utah. Both events were great successes, and it was wonderful seeing our families get together and share their mutual love and hope for their children and just “be” with others who shared their commitment and dedication. Unfortunately we had to discontinue the Rendezvous after 9/11 because of the financial impact 9/11 had on many of the families and the organization as a whole.

In June 2019 an event similar to the Rendezvous occurred, this time in the mountains of Transylvania. Our Romanian families organized this weeklong event at a family friendly mountain retreat. During this week I was able to do all of the children’s tri-annual evaluations and spend some great time with the families, share meals, and just hang out with the parents, kids, and their siblings. Many of our families expressed how wonderful it was just spending time together and sharing their experiences, victories, and some of their heartaches as well. Being able to do this with other families who “got it,” who shared it, was invaluable for them. Since last June I had been looking forward to repeating the Transylvania event, but COVID-19 eliminated that possibility. Hopefully next year!

The Rendezvous and the Transylvania event exemplified how much our NACD families have in common, both from the perspective of their children and meeting their children’s needs, but from also their need for a sense of community. Our NACD family is a special group of folks, and I am hopeful that we can strengthen our community with our new NACD Families Only Facebook group.

The reality of now is that we in the NACD family are spread all over the world and we cannot easily meet together. I have high hopes that we can at least partially create the same sense of community that our previous events had, but to do so we need to define what we should and should not do with the group.

What we should do is replicate the Rendezvous and Transylvania experience as much as possible. To do that we want to share stories. We all are fueled by hope, and seeing what other families and their children have achieved gives all of us hope and inspiration. The more we can share about our kids lives and achievements, the better. We can also share our heartaches and frustrations, not looking for specific guidance (that is what the staff of NACD is for), but certainly for support. We can also use the group to share things like ideas for unit studies, favorite children’s books, educational websites or TV programs, or fun apps that you have discovered. The Facebook group is also going to permit our NACD staff to hold live video meetings with our families and address questions throughout the year.

One of the most important messages, if not the most important, I have tried to communicate throughout all of my years of working with children is how unique each child is; and if we are going to utilize neuroplasticity, we have to be as targeted on each day with each child as we possibly can. Our list of more than three thousand individual techniques, with the tens of thousands of modifications to those, that are created for specific children at specific times bears testament to our conviction to target the specific needs of each child.

The “thing that changed Susie,” the “magic bullet that cured Johnny,” or that “taught Johnny to read” perhaps helped them. But every specific thing that for whatever reason was associated with a change in a specific child has the potential to help or hurt every other specific child. Some of the greatest tragedies I have observed have been the result of families jumping into something that sounded “right,” only to have it undo years of work or lead to outcomes that could not be remedied. Our job at NACD is, and has been, to be aware of, to investigate, to evaluate, to carefully observe, run our own trials, gather data, and constantly challenge what appeared to be, so that we can determine what we believe to be best thing for any child at any specific time in their development and education. We are in a constant ongoing pursuit of what works.

NACD is and has been unique in our insistence of working with the whole child. Four decades of working with many thousands of whole children has been both enlightening and humbling. Our experience and the wealth of knowledge we have gathered certainly has been educational for us; but the more we have learned, the more it has been underscored over and over again that each child on any given day is an incredibility unique and complex being. Our job has been to help every parent be as targeted with their child as possible and to help them avoid running down rabbit holes and doing things that might actually be harmful.

As should be apparent, we form this group with some level of trepidation. Historically many of the viral “things,” the magic pills that have spread across the country and world, were not made viral by the professionals, but by parents—well intentioned parents who wanted to share. I have told hundreds of parents over the years that a parent’s experience of “one,” their one child, is extremely dangerous. What appears to have helped your child might have helped your child, but the reality of attempting to scientifically determine cause and effect with all the components involved in the physiological, behavioral, and developmental aspects of a single child is really difficult. And even if the dots can be connected for your child, it doesn’t mean that it is at all appropriate for another child. Well meaning parents can be the undoing of children whose parents are looking for hope and help. Facebook groups of parents who are taking their experience from their one child and sharing what “worked” have the potential to be destructive and harmful; for that reason I have discouraged groups of parents from sharing and discussing specifics of what they have done with their child or heard that someone did with theirs. Drawing from my college days, group discussions were often referring to as ‘’pools of ignorance.” Let’s not do that. In our group, let’s please stick to the guidelines. In addition, I strongly wish to discourage any of our families from starting any unsupervised Facebook groups that involve NACD parents.

The NACD Families Only Facebook group is being made available to our active families. I believe this group offers us a great opportunity to strengthen our NACD community and add to everyone’s NACD experience. Please enjoy it, please share you successes and resources, and, if needed, heartaches. But as for your specific questions and concerns, or even the specific things you are doing or have discovered, please discuss those directly with your coaches and evaluators.

Enjoy the group.

Let’s all do our best to help our children and support each other.

Best,
—Bob

How to Join

To join the NACD Families only Facebook group, please go to the following link and answer the approval questions. Approval can take a several days to process.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/ActiveNACDFamilies/

Once there, you will need to fill out the following questions:

Question 1:
Are you on a paying membership with NACD?

Question 2:
What is your NACD Family Portal User ID#? This is to confirm your membership status.

Question 3:
What Chapter are you in?

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The post Special Training Event appeared first on NACD International | The National Association for Child Development.

The lectures were organized by Gabriela Trichkova, one of our super NACD moms, and the Bulgarian Down syndrome Parents’ Organization. Gabriela was anxious to help educate both professionals and parents in Bulgaria about NACD’s perspectives, as well as help change the view of potential and offer a means of achieving better outcomes.

Bob’s Message

It was a great pleasure and an honor to speak with the folks in Bulgaria. Gabriela did a great job of organizing everything and making sure that I was well taken care of while in Bulgaria. Arriving in Sofia felt a bit like coming home. As the plane landed I could see the city laid out at the foot of the beautiful mountains that were still covered with snow. It looked just like landing in Salt Lake City, Utah. The mountain overlooking Sofia, from what I understand, is Vitosha, which is one of the symbols of Sofia, just as Mount Ogden is back home.

It’s interesting that upon arrival in a new county with a very different language and different form of government than ours, it felt like home. Throughout my stay, meeting, lecturing, speaking with the people, sharing meals with our NACD families, and touring Sofia, it only reinforced how much it felt like home and the people like family. As I travel and meet with families and professionals around the world, the word “foreign” is becoming more and more “foreign” to me. Children have the same needs, parents have the same love and motivation to help their children, and fortunately most of those working with children have their hearts in the right place and are looking for ways to do what they do better.

I was very pleased by the attitudes and interest expressed by everyone attending the lectures. The group was obviously bright and anxious to learn whatever they could to further either their work or their efforts with their own children. I felt that I was able to provide them with some new insights and perspectives and hopefully did enough to help change some children’s lives. From the response I received, I feel the conference was a success.

I wish to thank everyone who made my visit to Bulgaria possible and look forward to seeing and helping more and more of these children and families.

Below is a slideshow video of the event:

[kad_youtube url=”https://youtu.be/YkogfmstyVA” width=”960″ height=”540″ maxwidth=”1200″]

Photo Gallery

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Free with your NACD membership

NACD Math was designed not only to teach children how to do math, but also to help them learn that math is easy, that they are good at math, and to enjoy it.

NACD Math is now made available online for our NACD clients through the NACD Family Portal. The new updated NACD Math replaces Modular Math, as well as supplemental math books.

Lyn Waldeck and Sara Erling, along with John McCallum, have been working for the last two years to bring together the pieces of NACD Math. NACD Math is targeted for the special needs population, particularly for those children with Down syndrome, those on the autism spectrum, and children with learning disabilities who have historically had difficulty with math. The program has also been used with great success for typical children to establish initial math concepts and to teach them math processes from initial number and quantity concepts through sixth grade computation.

NACD Math has a long history of development and has been used with thousands of children internationally.

Math education for special needs children has been an issue, except for those who have been using Bob Doman’s Modular Math program. The reason our program has been so effective is that it is built around how children learn, whether they are on the spectrum, have Down syndrome, or simply are young. Historically math instruction requires a lot of words. A lot of words are not something any of these children process or understand well. Our math program is very visual and teaches the child just one step at a time; and it is designed to avoid the need for, or dependency on, prompts.

NACD Math has been designed so that virtually anyone can teach it. The program incorporates video step-by-step instruction, so the teacher, parent, or even a sibling can watch a short video and then replicate/teach the simple steps. Each math computational process builds on the previous processes, creating simple transitions from one process to the next.

NACD Math has permitted many hundreds of children with Down syndrome to start learning math even before their typical peers and often to stay ahead of them for many years. With the solid NACD Math foundation, children with DS have been able to move into algebra and higher math. To say that NACD Math has been helpful for this population is a gross understatement; it has been a game changer. NACD Math builds a math foundation and understanding that has permitted special needs children to advance into higher math and has established a foundation for typical children that gets them off to a running start and puts them way ahead of their peers.

Reprinted by permission of The NACD Foundation, Volume 31 No. 10, 2018 ©NACD

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To Get Started with the NACD Program,
please visit our NACD Get Started page

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Three Sets of Concepts

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Video Instructions for the Parent or Instructor

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Handouts with Examples of Each Concept

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To Get Started with the NACD Program,
please visit our NACD Get Started page

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This inservice provided Staci with the opportunity to share many of our foundational NACD concepts, such as the application of principles to trigger neuroplasticity and the need to and means with which to develop working memory and executive function.

The response from the organizers in Nigeria was excellent. To quote Popoola Paul, the Principal Consultant for HL Consult Training Solutions, “I want to express our unreserved and profound appreciation and gratitude. Indeed you didn’t just teach, but rather you impacted lives. This I must say will have a multiplier effect on our state and nation at large.”

Our mission is to impact the lives of as many children as we can and to help change the perception of potential and develop the tools to achieve it.

You will be hearing more about the NACD International Academy in coming months and our efforts to assist not only families, but also nations with our international programs.

NACD Newsletter, October 2018 ©NACD

The post NACD International Outreach appeared first on NACD International | The National Association for Child Development.

by Bob Doman

At the end of September in Brasov, Romania, one of our parents, Endre Csato, organized the second of his annual conferences, Galeria Terapiilor. The conference was for Romanian families who have children with disabilities and professionals involved in providing services to these children. I was honored to present the keynote speech via Skype last year. This year one of our great NACD mothers, Raluca Manea, spoke to the group.

A number of our families and some NACD supporters from around the country came to the conference to help educate fellow parents and professionals about the potential of their children and to offer hope.

I have been very heartened by our Romanian families. These folks work diligently to help their own children by doing a great job implementing their programs. They also do very well in communicating with us on a regular basis, even though creating an email in English can be a rather daunting task for many of them. But perhaps what is most meaningful for me is that even though most of these families have children with very significant issues and heavy programs, they deeply care about all of the children who are not being helped. It is quite obvious from what they all do that they feel an obligation and responsibility to spread the hope that is NACD to other families throughout the country.

I wish to personally thank parents Endre Csato, Raluca Manea, Angela and Paul Hlatca, Raluca Busuioc, Florina and Georghe Bolchis and our great advocates and supporters, Teodora Pop and Justinian Milosav. You folks are the best!

I’m honored to be able to know each and every one of you and to have the privilege of helping you help your children.

Let’s continue to work together to provide a better future for your children and to also give hope and tools to many more families.

NACD Newsletter, October 2018 ©NACD

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