If you’re reading this, you’ve probably already tried ABA therapy. Maybe for months. Maybe for years. And somewhere along the way, a quiet voice started asking: Is this actually working?

You’re not alone. And you’re not wrong for asking.

The Problem Isn’t You. It’s the Model.

Here’s what we’re hearing from parents right now:

“Currently we aren’t seeing much progress, so I’m looking into other therapeutic support models.”

“We had to switch therapists. I like to say we fired them. It just wasn’t the right fit.”

“The constant turnover makes it very difficult for him to get acclimated.”

These aren’t outliers. A recent analysis of parent conversations across major online communities found that 68% of parents who question ABA aren’t anti-therapy. They’re frustrated with compliance-focused therapy that doesn’t honor who their child actually is.

And they’re right to be frustrated.

Why ABA Doesn’t Work

ABA (Applied Behavior Analysis) is built on a simple premise: reinforce desired behaviors, reduce undesired ones. On paper, it sounds reasonable. In practice, it misses the point entirely.

It treats symptoms, not the whole child. A child who struggles with transitions isn’t just exhibiting a “behavior to extinguish.” They may have sensory processing differences, working memory challenges, or anxiety rooted in unpredictability. Targeting the behavior without addressing the underlying neurodevelopment is like putting a bandage on a broken bone.

It doesn’t happen often enough (or it happens too much, in the wrong way). Many families receive in-home ABA services 40 hours a week. That sounds intensive. But here’s the problem: those 40 hours are often spent on compliance training and behavior management, not neurodevelopment. And let’s be honest. For exhausted parents, having someone in the home for 40 hours a week is attractive even when progress stalls. It becomes free help. Free babysitting. That’s not therapy. Meanwhile, the brain doesn’t change from this kind of exposure. Neuroplasticity requires the right kind of input, delivered with frequency and intensity, in the environment where the child actually lives. Skills learned through compliance drills often don’t transfer because they were never built on a foundation of real development.

Staff turnover destroys any progress. The ABA industry has a well-documented retention crisis. Therapists leave. New ones arrive. Your child has to start over, again and again, with people who don’t know them. One parent described her adult son (6’5″, nonverbal) who hasn’t had consistent therapy “for YEARS” because of this revolving door.

It labels behaviors without understanding them. Because ABA doesn’t look at or understand the whole child, behaviors like collecting things, lining up items, or deep interest in specific topics are automatically labeled as “stims” to reduce. But that may or may not be true. Some of these behaviors are developmentally appropriate. Some are meaningful ways your child engages with the world. You can only determine what a specific behavior actually is by looking at and understanding the whole child. ABA doesn’t do that. So it treats everything the same way, regardless of what’s actually going on.

The Research Confirms What Parents Already Know

For years, ABA was the default recommendation because it was the most studied. But newer research confirms what frustrated parents have been saying all along:

A 2018 study found that ABA participants were 86% more likely to meet criteria for PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) than autistic people not exposed to ABA. To be clear: PTSD is the same condition we see in combat veterans and trauma survivors. The fact that a childhood therapy is associated with this level of psychological harm should stop every parent in their tracks.

Academic peer reviews have called for significant reform of ABA-based interventions.

Major publications (including STAT News and The 74 Million) have investigated whether ABA may be doing more harm than good.

Meanwhile, insurance remains the gatekeeper. Many parents stay in ABA not because it’s working, but because it’s the only covered option. That’s not a therapeutic choice. It’s a financial trap.

What Actually Changes the Brain

At NACD, we’ve spent 45 years developing a different approach. One built on how neurodevelopment actually works.

Parents are the intervention. Not therapists who rotate out every few months. You. The person who knows your child best, who sees them every day, who has the most to gain from their success. We train and coach parents to implement targeted activities at home. Not once a week, but daily. That’s how you get the frequency and intensity the brain needs to change.

We see the whole child. Not a collection of behaviors to manage, but a complete human being with interconnected challenges and strengths. Our evaluators look at sensory processing, motor development, cognition, language, behavior, what they eat, how they sleep, how they play. Because none of it exists in isolation. You can’t fix one piece without understanding how it connects to everything else.

3,000+ techniques, individualized to your child. There’s no one-size-fits-all protocol. Every child gets a program built specifically for them, drawing from a toolbox we’ve developed over four decades. And that program evolves. We re-evaluate quarterly and adjust based on what’s working.

Your child’s interests are assets, not problems. We don’t suppress what makes your child unique. We build on it. Those “obsessive” interests? They’re often the key to unlocking engagement, motivation, and learning.

You’re Not Starting Over. You’re Moving Forward.

If you’ve been in ABA and it’s not working, you haven’t failed. You’ve learned something important: your child needs something different.

The brain can change. Every child has unlimited potential. And parents are the most powerful change agents in a child’s life.

That’s not hope. That’s neuroscience. And it’s been our foundation for 45 years.

About the Author: Laird Doman is the COO of NACD International (nacd.org), a neurodevelopmental organization that has served over 30,000 families since 1979. NACD was founded by his father, Bob Doman, who continues to lead the organization’s methodology development.

Reprinted by permission of The NACD Foundation, Volume 40 No. 1 , 2026 ©NACD

The post When ABA Therapy Isn’t Working: A Different Path Forward appeared first on NACD International | The National Association for Child Development.

I’ll be honest with you. Some nights, dinner at our house looks nothing like what I know it should be.

My daughter Arielle is nine. My son Lachlan just turned six. By the time we all sit down together, everyone is carrying the weight of the day. Lachlan is often a little hungry and short-fused by dinnertime, which any parent of a six-year-old will recognize instantly. Ari has her own version of the end-of-day wind-down. My wife Sadie and I are fielding the usual logistics. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, there’s a screen nearby with its particular pull, always available, always easier than the work of actual conversation.

I know this because I live it. And I know it because at NACD, we have spent more than four decades studying exactly what happens to children’s brains when the people around them talk to them, and what happens when they don’t.

What the Research Has Been Telling Us for Years

My father, Bob Doman, has written extensively about the family meal as one of the most important developmental events in a child’s day. In his piece The Most Important Meal of the Day Is Not Breakfast — It’s the Meal(s) the Family Has Together, he makes a case that most parents don’t fully appreciate: the dinner table isn’t just where you eat. It’s where your child’s brain learns to process language, build memory, attend to others, and begin to understand the structure of the world they live in.

The mechanism behind this is auditory processing, which is the brain’s ability to take in spoken language, hold it, interpret it, and respond to it. As Lori Eby Riggs has written in Auditory Processing — What Is It?, auditory processing underlies virtually everything we associate with a child’s cognitive function: attention span, language development, the ability to think in words, and the complexity of their reasoning. And what builds auditory processing more than anything else? Targeted language input. Real conversation. The kind that happens when a parent asks a child something genuine, listens to the answer, and pushes a little further.

There’s a line from that article on family meals that has stuck with me: “No one is better suited to this job than the people who know the child best; and no time may be better suited to this development than the family meal.”

That’s not a soft sentiment. That’s the neurodevelopmental science of 45 years of work with tens of thousands of families, distilled into one sentence.

And yet most family dinners don’t look like that. Most of them are one-word answers and glowing screens.

The Challenges Are Real

When I talk about the dinner table as a developmental opportunity, I’m not describing a magazine photograph of a family glowing with perfect conversation over a home-cooked meal. I’m describing something that requires real effort, most nights, against real resistance.

Here’s what I run into constantly, even knowing everything I know:

Devices

The pull is relentless. New studies are coming out by the day documenting how harmful screens are on developing brains, and yet the phone is still there, the tablet is still there, and children have absorbed from the culture around them that screens are the default way to fill any available moment. We have a no-devices rule at our dinner table, but that rule requires active enforcement every single time. It doesn’t just happen.

Exhaustion

By dinner, everyone is tired. Lachlan at six is a bright, curious kid, but by the end of the day he’s hungry and has run out of patience for things that don’t immediately interest him. Ari at nine wants to talk, but only about the specific things on her mind at that moment, and if the conversation doesn’t head there quickly, she checks out. Sadie and I are not exempt from this either. The desire to just sit quietly and not manage anything for ten minutes is something every parent understands.

The question problem

This is the one that took me the longest to name. Even when we manage to get everyone to the table without a device, even when the kids are present and willing, I often find myself asking the same questions: “How was your day? What did you do? What did you learn?” And getting the answers those questions deserve: “Fine. Nothing. I don’t know.” The questions aren’t bad. They’re just not good enough. They don’t open anything. They invite a one-word exit and everyone moves on.

This is where, in our work at NACD, we’ve always understood something important: the quality of input determines the quality of output. We say this constantly in the context of neurodevelopmental programs — the specificity of what you give a child’s brain matters enormously. It turns out this principle applies equally to conversation.

What Happens When You Get It Right

I want to tell you about something that changed at our dinner table, because it was Ari and Lachlan who taught it to me rather than the other way around.

We started asking about family history. Not heavily, not as a formal exercise. Just questions like: “What do you think Dad’s childhood was like? What do you think Grandpa did when he was your age? What stories do you think our family has that nobody has written down?”

What happened surprised me. Lachlan, who is full of ideas and moves quickly from one thought to the next, got completely still and started asking questions I didn’t expect him to have. Ari, who I sometimes struggle to keep at the table, leaned in. They wanted to know. They wanted to know us — the people who came before them, the choices that were made, the world that existed before they arrived in it.

What I also realized is that the questions didn’t just flow one direction. Ari started asking me things I hadn’t thought about in years. Lachlan wanted to know what my grandfather was like. The conversation became something genuinely mutual — kids asking parents, parents asking kids, everyone at the table actually curious about what the other person would say. That’s what good family history questions do. They make the parents as interesting as the children, and they give kids the feeling that their questions matter just as much as ours.

The family history conversation opened something that “How was your day?” never could. It gave them a sense of place in something larger than themselves. It built what NACD has long recognized as one of the most important things we can give a child: identity. A felt sense of who they are and where they come from.

Neurologically, what was happening is exactly what my father describes in his work on parents as the primary architects of their children’s development. See Where Have All the Mothers Gone? and 

Parents Are the Solution for the deeper framework. Autobiographical memory, sequential narrative, perspective-taking, the ability to hold a multi-part story in working memory and reason about it — these are all cognitive skills, and dinner conversation is one of the richest environments for developing all of them simultaneously.

The difference wasn’t the effort we put in. It was the quality of the question we started with.

What a Good Question Actually Does

At NACD, we think about intervention specificity constantly. The whole framework of Targeted Developmental Intervention — the approach that has guided our work for decades — is built on the idea that the more targeted and specific the input, the more targeted and effective the result. A vague program produces vague results. A precisely designed program, delivered consistently, produces real change.

The same logic applies to conversation.

A vague question like “How was school?” produces a vague answer. It asks nothing specific of a child’s brain. There’s no cognitive demand. They can answer it honestly and completely with a single syllable and move on.

A good question is different. A good question requires a child to retrieve a memory, construct a narrative, evaluate a perspective, or make a decision under constraints. “If you could change one rule in our house, what would it be and why?” asks Lachlan to do half a dozen cognitive operations before he opens his mouth. “Tell me about a time when you felt really proud of yourself — not because anyone told you to be, but because you just knew” asks Ari to access autobiographical memory, evaluate an emotional experience, and find the language to describe an internal state. These are not trivial tasks. These are exactly the kinds of tasks that build auditory processing, working memory, perspective-taking, and executive function — the foundational capacities that all of NACD’s work is built around.

For more on why these cognitive foundations matter so profoundly, read Processing Power: What Every Parent Needs to Know.

Why We Built an App

I’ll be direct about this, because I think the honesty matters.

We didn’t build Family Conversations because we thought parents didn’t know dinner conversation mattered. Most parents, at some level, already know. We built it because knowing isn’t enough. Knowing doesn’t solve the problem of sitting down at the table at 6:30pm, exhausted, with a six-year-old who has run out of patience and a nine-year-old who wants to talk about something specific you haven’t thought to ask about — and needing, in that moment, the right question.

The problem isn’t intention. The problem is the gap between intention and execution, in the moment when it’s hardest.

We also know, from 45 years of working with families, that parents are the most powerful force in a child’s development when they’re equipped with the right approach, the right tools, the right questions. That’s the entire NACD model — we don’t work with children directly. We train and equip the people who know those children best. As my father has written in All Our Mothers Need to Be 10s (and Our Dads Too!), the parent’s function is the first variable we look at — because the parent is the program.

Family Conversations is built on that same principle. Every question in the app is designed around a real cognitive or emotional skill: perspective-taking, moral reasoning, autobiographical memory, creative inference, values clarification. Every card includes follow-up prompts, so when the conversation stalls (and it will stall), you have somewhere to go. Each question is calibrated to your child’s age and developmental level. There’s a “Go Deeper” option for when your family is ready for more. And there’s a Quote Journal, because some of what your children say at the dinner table deserves to be kept.

One thing we were intentional about: the app is designed so the phone doesn’t have to be out at all. Family Conversations works on Apple Watch, so you can glance at a question on your wrist and leave your phone in the other room where it belongs. It also works beautifully on iPad, which is a natural fit for families who want something propped up at the table. Pull up a question, start the conversation, then set it aside and be present. That’s the whole idea.

The Table Is Where Your Family Lives

I think about my grandfather, Dr. Robert J. Doman, and the work he did as a physiatrist pioneering the field of brain injury rehabilitation. I think about my father, building on that work for half a century, developing the neurodevelopmental framework that has changed the lives of hundreds of thousands of families. And I think about what it means to be the third generation of this family devoted to the idea that children have unlimited potential — and that the people most positioned to unlock it are the ones sitting across from them at the dinner table every night.

Ronald Reagan once said, “All great change in America starts at the dinner table.” He was talking about politics. But he was right about something deeper: the dinner table is where families become families. It’s where children learn who they are, where they come from, what they believe, how to think, how to listen, how to disagree with someone they love, and how to tell a story that matters.

Put the devices away. Ask a better question. See what happens.

And if you need a little help with the question, we built something for that.

Try Family Conversations

Learn more and download the app here!
Available on iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. Designed for every family, every night.

Laird Doman is the third generation of his family devoted to the neurodevelopmental well-being of children worldwide. He lives with his wife Sadie and their children Arielle and Lachlan.

Related Reading at NACD

• The Most Important Meal of the Day Is Not Breakfast
• Auditory Processing — What Is It?
• Processing Power: What Every Parent Needs to Know
• Where Have All the Mothers Gone?
• Parents Are the Solution
• All Our Mothers Need to Be 10s (and Our Dads Too!)
• Confidence Through Chores

The post The Dinner Table Is the Most Underestimated Classroom in Your Home appeared first on NACD International | The National Association for Child Development.

by Bob Doman

Neurodevelopmental Processing and Neurodevelopmental Processing Deficits are terms needed to help people understand the significance of processing and processing inadequacies, or deficits. Neurodevelopmental processing deficits are becoming ubiquitous because of numerous factors that limit the perception of what could be and factors that limit the opportunities needed for the development of strong processing.

Neurodevelopmental processing, or simply “processing,” is a term referencing mental cognitive functions that include the ability to learn from what we see and the words that we hear, as well as what we can remember, mentally manipulate, and use to think and function. These components include short-term memory, working memory, long-term memory, executive function, and fluid intelligence. These pieces are part of the whole which determine our brain’s processing ability, cognition, and simply how smart we are.

An NPD, or neurodevelopmental processing deficit, is simply not having the processing power appropriate for your age or the demands placed on you educationally, needed to meet requirements for daily living, healthy social interaction, or work/career. Neurodevelopmental processing grows as a natural process, but the rate of development, degree of development, and later sustainability and further enhancement can be impacted through opportunity and intervention.

I use the equation IP+E=F.  Our innate intelligence to the power of our processing ability, plus educational opportunity and knowledge, determines our function, or simply how smart we are. Our innate intelligence is generally untapped, and our ability to develop our processing function is essentially unlimited. We all have the potential to be smarter, much smarter, and to function at higher levels.

Processing is something that typically develops from birth to about nine or ten years of age. There is often a slight progression from the age of ten to our twenties, and then there is usually a slow decline throughout the rest of our lives, if not for intervention or exceptional use of these functions.

From lack of maturity, inappropriate behaviors, and receptive and expressive language issues to problems with learning, difficulty with social interaction, and later to problems with job performance and interpersonal relationships, often the underlying issue is processing function that is inadequate for the expected or needed level of function.

Processing develops through opportunity, stimulation, and input. For children the first years of life are vitally important. The quality and quantity of 1:1 input and interaction largely determine how targeted the input and how effective the environment and opportunities are for the developing child. Factors that limit quality input negatively impact the development of processing. Some of the limiting factors include lack of the most fundamental piece affecting this development, i.e. 1:1 positive interaction with parents. A child provides parents with instantaneous feedback as to whether the input they are receiving is appropriate and stimulating and targeted or not; and parents innately respond and modify their interaction. This 1:1 interaction can produce targeted input, meaning input that specifically fits that individual at that point in time. The further we get from targeted input, the less effectively the child’s environment develops their processing function. Even trying to interact and be targeted with two children of the same age and keeping them both engaged can be challenging. What about 1:5, or 1:10, or even 1:30? The younger the child and the lower the processing level, the more difficult it is to provide them with targeted input. Opportunity is that which produces neurodevelopmental processing.

There are many factors which produce NPDs, including the decline of the family unit, an increase in the number of working mothers, limited expectations, negative societal influences, decline of reading ability, addictions to screens, inferior educational practices, and sensory processing issues, as well as the increase in labels and “diseases” that limit expectations.

For five decades we have assessed and worked with neurodevelopmental processing with tens of thousands of individuals, covering the full range of individuals from babies to geriatrics, as well as the full spectrum of developmental issues and labels from brain injury, autism, Down syndrome, dyslexia, and ADHD, to the “gifted.” Utilizing interventions, which have included many 1:1 activities, apps, and software such as our Simply Smarter program, it is unquestionable that anyone at any age can improve their processing ability and improve their overall function.

Significance for Those with Developmental Issues

To varying degrees, NPDs are significant, or the primary factors, in determining the level of function in the entire population; but they may have the greatest impact on all of those with developmental delays or issues.

ADHD

The primary issue for many if not most children labeled as having ADHD is an inadequate level of processing. If you have a ten-year-old child with the processing function of a four- or five-year-old, which is not unusual, and even possibly having good innate intelligence, you have a child with the attention span of a four- or five-year-old, the distractibility of a four- or five-year-old, the lack of executive function exhibited by most four- or five-year-olds, and often the maturity and behavioral issues associated with four- or five-year-olds. The “diagnosis” of ADHD is a checklist that essentially characterizes a typical younger child. Should we be using medications to slow down four- or five-year-olds so they can sit and attend longer? Then why do it with that with those labeled as ADHD, when we can easily address the common cause of the issue– a neurodevelopmental processing deficit? The medical disease model implies some mysterious, underlying limiting factor in these individuals. There can be contributing dietary factors, as well as issues related to their home, school environments, and negative behavior patterns; but the most common issue with the vast majority labeled with ADHD, this perceived incurable disease, is simply a processing inadequacy, and particularly an auditory sequential processing problem. Their processing ability is inadequate for the demands of their chronological age. We establish patterns of behaviors in our early lives. If processing has not been developed adequately when we are young, it can result in attention and behavior patterns that can remain with us for the rest of our lives. Patterns can be changed, but first we need to address the underlying issue, the processing deficit.

Autism Spectrum Disorders

The severity of those placed on the autism spectrum is essentially measured by the degree of sensory dysfunction, as well as the degree to which the child is not present and engaged, or engaged in DSAs, debilitating sensory addictive behaviors. Sensory issues impair the child’s ability to participate in, engage in, and learn from their environment; and this directly impacts their ability to develop their processing abilities. The impaired processing and related lack of engagement leads to varying degrees of global immaturity, poor receptive and expressive language, difficulty understanding and relating to people, and lack of executive function, etc. Foundational to improving the function of those on the spectrum or getting them off the spectrum is addressing their processing inadequacies. The higher their processing, the higher their global level of function. The primary difference between those on the various levels of the spectrum is processing level.

Down Syndrome

Children and adults with Down syndrome have NPDs, and their overall level of function can universally be determined by their processing level. Low functioning individuals with Down syndrome have low processing function, and those given the opportunity to develop “typical” processing levels can function in” typical” ranges. Processing can be improved in every individual with Down syndrome, at any age, and their global function and independence developed with it, if given the opportunity.

Dyslexia, Dyscalculia, and Other Learning Disabilities and Issues

Children learn differently, and a significant component in those differences reflects inefficiencies in auditory and/or visual processing and one size fits all curriculum.  Children will generally get labeled as having a learning related disability if they are seen as having “normal” intelligence, but have a problem learning to read, or doing math, or learning in general. These problems can often be remediated and fixed by identifying and addressing their processing issues and by modifying the approach to better fit their individual strengths, while remediating their weakness.  Having seen literally thousands of such children go from having issues to being at the head of the class in a short time bears testament to where potential really lies, if the children are given the help they need to turn their weaknesses into strengths.

Behavior Problems and Disorders

Behavior problems are becoming increasingly prevalent, largely as a reflection of societal trends which have impacted the role of parents and family and decreased such fundamentals as teaching children that there are consequences to their behavior, teaching them responsibility, and developing independence. There is, however, often some level of issue relative to sequential processing that impacts their global maturity, ability to process directions, and the development of executive function. Behavior issues and resolution require a thorough understanding of the whole child, including the family situation, parenting, schools, and other influences. Addressing any NPDs improves their executive function and helps to address their behavior issues.

Average/Typical Joe

There is no more limiting perception of individual potential than being viewed as “average” or “typical.” The vast majority of the population fits into this category. Being “average” or “typical” limits expectations and opportunity. “Average/typical” is generally perceived to be simply a reflection of innate intelligence. It is not! Every “average/typical” adult or child is not restricted by innate potential. With rare exception, all our innate potentials are sufficient to develop super levels of function if provided with the opportunity to develop our processing.

IP+E=F

Your innate potential to the power of your processing ability plus your E (education/knowledge) determines your functional intelligence– how smart you are.

Using the tools to develop processing should be at or near the top of every child’s curriculum and parent’s priority. Everyone trying to improve the quality of their lives can and should work to be simply smarter, and they can.

We have the tools to help everyone function better, and we need to use them.

Related Posts

Processing Power: What Every Parent Needs to Know

Parenting 101: Processing, Behavior, and Maturity

California- They’re Not Dreamin, They’re Doing! Getting Serious About Processing and Working Memory

Time to Upgrade Your Processor: Building Better Brains

If You Can’t See It, You Can’t Achieve It

•             Reprinted by permission of The NACD Foundation, Volume 39 No. 5, 2025 ©NACD

The post NPD: Neurodevelopmental Processing Deficits appeared first on NACD International | The National Association for Child Development.

So we felt very alone as we tried to figure out what was going on. For the first year of Jake’s life we frequently felt alarmed as we noticed non-typical behaviors and responses, but they were subtle, and as he was such a smiley, happy and alert child, we were told not to worry. 

Then we noticed that our child wasn’t learning properly. He was late with walking and talking. He never crawled. We had done the alternative method of potty training from birth so he skipped crawling and instead bounced around on his bottom. I noticed that he never signed back to us, communication being a part of the early potty training method. He was late to walk and talk and even then, he would come up with a word, say it exclusively and constantly for a few weeks and then forget it. When we taught him things like how to clap, we had to practice it for a while every day before he would try to imitate it, then if we didn’t practice it daily, he would forget that too. His adorable little body seemed oddly stiff, he didn’t cuddle in like most babies did and while he would sit there and smile, he seemed lost in his own dream world and did not respond to much around him. 

After rounds of specialists, three days after the birth of our second child, when Jake was 19 months old, we were given the diagnosis of Potocki-Lupski Syndrome, a genetic disorder, a replication of a tricky part of chromosome 17. The pediatrician gave us some pages photocopied from a sterile medical textbook listing the myriad of things that our child was never supposed to do and all the difficulties that he would face throughout life. We were floored and devastated. I leapt into research but everything I found on his diagnosis upset me more and I spent the first few months of our second child’s life crying. I remember asking another pediatrician about what Jake could be expected to achieve in his life and he told me proudly about a similar child who had made his first independent phone call with some limited language by the age of 18. While I understand now how incredible these milestones are for families of children with special needs, however as a new parent at the time, I did not find that information comforting. I asked another doctor what “developmentally delayed” meant, hoping that it meant he would just catch up later. She gently told me that it was a polite term for “mentally retarded”. Indeed as my darling baby could not even master or remember “clap”, how on earth was he going to build higher order skills to handle life? 

Fortunately we have always been alternative minded and I managed to shake myself away from depressing mainstream research. I turned to Down’s Syndrome as a more commonly known genetic disorder, figuring that some clever parent there had found some breakthroughs for their child. And indeed I was right! After scouring FB pages and parent groups, I found in the Down’s Syndrome world that amazing things were happening for children who had either one or both of two things: biomedical intervention and neurodevelopmental therapy. So we decided to launch into both. It took a few years to get going with the biomedical, but with NACD we were able to start immediately. Out of all the neurodevelopmental organizations I liked NACD the most as they had a program that cut to the chase with the most time effective and modern methods, and they also offered ongoing parent support and coaching which as a floundering and disorganized parent, I knew I would need. 

At the time we stared, I remember Jake had a lot of unusual behaviors, every time he saw the ocean he would freeze and stare it and refuse to move on. As we lived in a small island community glimpses of the ocean were frequent. He’d open and close cupboard doors, arrange things in straight lines and never wanted to interact with other kids. He had very limited speech, and all sorts of motor skills problems. He could not even pedal a tricycle. 

I can’t remember much about that time now quite honestly. I was frequently sick and exhausted from having 2 children close together and with an undiagnosed autoimmune condition in the background. My husband and I did program as best as we could though and I remember starting to feel hope. Jake’s mind started to unlock, he started to be able to learn and we discovered he had a few superpowers, an amazing ability understand and order numbers, remember items on sight and he could even say his alphabet backwards. For a child diagnosed with a severe short term memory problem, this felt like sunshine from the heavens. NACD kept guiding us with program and as a family we were feeling more and more normal every day. We started a biomedical approach with specially developed Nutrivene vitamin supplements around the age of 4 and then everything really came together, Jake seemed to “wake up” to a new level of awareness, his speech and motor skills took off and we were so happy. Our second child, typically developing was put on program too and he was well ahead with all his milestones. 

While I don’t remember too many details of that time now, suffice to say we went from despair, hopelessness and rounds of specialists who used lots of big words but actually did nothing to actually help, to feeling like a happy, hopeful and normal family. We no longer felt like a “special needs” family. Program was very hard in those first years, but we were getting results and our lives back! It was wonderful to finally feel like a “normal” family.

We moved overseas then and stopped our NACD program for many years, happy to just live a normal life. Jake still had challenges, but he doing so much better. He started school with an aide but his superpowers really helped him through, from a child who couldn’t remember how to clap he now had the most astonishing memory! He had a phenomenal ability with geography, and started winning the school’s geography contests from first grade. He beat all the high school kids and even the school superintendent when he stepped in as a special guest. He knew every country, capital, flag, location, shape, and once he mastered that he turned to history and somehow developed an incredible grasp of historical details on top of that too! 

We started formal homeschooling formally around third grade when the covid lockdowns started and muddled through that for a few years. When Jake hit puberty it became apparent to his father and I that he needed further help. He was still having a lot of trouble with reading, he’d been recently diagnosed with an eye tracking problem but the mainstream offered us nothing except devices to learn to live with it. We had tried everything but gotten nowhere. He still had struggles with social skills and motor skills, and while his speech was reasonably good, it was still hard for him. 

As the worry started rising again, we turned to the place where we’d found hope before, the NACD! And in just 7 months back the results have already been incredible! Jake started in November at an auditory processing of 4-5 and in 7 months is has now just touched on a 7! His maturity and awareness has developed in leaps and bounds with it. His eye tracking is improving and reading is getting easier for him every day. He can swim now, and his social skills are improving. He has developed a love for math as the NACD teaches it, and will joyfully tackle page after page of his math text book just for fun. Before NACD he struggled with basic concepts. He is taking off and once again we couldn’t be happier. My only regret is we didn’t get back to it sooner, but fortunately NACD is helping us to catch up and overcome for that lapse quickly! 

I should mention my second son, DJ too. While typically developing he did program for a year or two when he was barely a toddler, and he has continued to go from strength to strength. When he started school the testing they gave him said that he was in the top 1% and was considered gifted and talented. When he was 9, he started getting impatient with all the attention Jake got for his his impressive history and geography knowledge and told me he wanted a superpower too. After watching Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata on you tube he decided that it was a pretty nice song, and he wanted to play it. He slowed down the finger movements from a You Tube video and copied them. Within just a few months he was playing piano surprisingly fluently. A music teacher at a summer camp a few months after he started hailed me down one day with wide eyes asking me if I knew that DJ was unusually talented. He is now 12 and works in our community playing piano at events. He is well paid and makes great tips too! 

Everything that DJ does he does so easily and at a high standard. Around the age of 10 he the took up the Rubik’s cube, mastered it in record time and at high speed. It didn’t take him long to get to world competition speeds on nearly of the all the cubes, but then he lost interest and moved on. He is very entrepreneurial, and through primary school would frequently came up with new games or projects which fascinated and created a following amongst other kids. 

Previously homeschooling DJ in math was not working and he had seemed to be going backwards so I put him back in school for math. He was doing reasonably well, but after starting NACD for just a few months his teacher contacted me in amazement asking what we were doing as in the MAPS testing DJ had suddenly jumped from a 6th grade level to an 11th grade level almost overnight! Here’s the message I got from his teacher: “Hey Melissa, just wanted to share some great growth from DJ on our winter math Maps test! He improved his score by +18 points from his fall score! (+3-5 is a significant amount for a year so this is pretty impressive!). Went from a 6th grade average to testing at the 11th grade average! Very proud of him and the hard work he has put in.” A jump of 18 points in a season when 3-5 is a significant amount for a year? Wow. The only thing we had done differently was to start NACD again and get to work on his processing! 

Would DJ be doing so well without the early intervention of NACD in making sure his development was all so perfectly addressed? I guess we will never know but as a mom I am sure NACD had a lot to do with it! 

NACD are truly miracle makers. Sara, our evaluator has laser vision and doesn’t miss a thing. Our program is perfectly tailored to both children, exactly what they need. The parental support and coaching is beyond invaluable. Any behavioral, teen attitude issue is quickly nipped in the bud, and we have a smooth running household now where my boys help out, are well behaved, and are developing into responsible, helpful young adults with initiative. Amy is a coaching wonder woman, and has helped me tremendously to get my act together. NACD offers a whole family, whole life perspective that gives you the perfectly tailored program to your child and life, with the support you need to put it into action, while missing nothing. Chores, responsibilities, and the child’s personal growth and happiness are all a part of it. And guess what? The kids love it. They think homeschooling is fun. Working on processing is central, and we celebrate every step up. Processing parties are the new fun thing in our family! 

Our life can truly be measured in BEFORE and AFTER NACD. All the behind the scenes staff are incredible too, and I can honestly say that I feel like they are family, a group who has always been there for us, giving us the answers and support we need to live our best lives. We are living our dream in remote Alaska, a wild and different life, unconstrained from needing to be in city centers, near specialists and therapists. Life is happy, hopeful and wonderful and I will be forever grateful. 

The post Martin Family Testimonial appeared first on NACD International | The National Association for Child Development.

Your computer’s CPU, or Central Processing Unit, carries out instructions and performs calculations that run programs and operate the computer system. This processor collects information from computer memory, decodes, executes operations, and stores results. The better your processor, essentially the better your computer.

Our combined internal processor and CPU, our brain, gathers information through our senses, associates that input with information stored in our memories, and then performs all associated functions—learning, thinking, planning, organization, self- regulation, inhibitory control functions, and cognitive flexibility. 

Every day we hear more about AI, Artificial Intelligence, the future. AI is the technology that enables computers to act more like brains, to carry out advanced functions, and perform functions that would normally require human intelligence, including learning, understanding language, problem solving, making recommendations, and more. While all this development is taking place, we are ignoring the development of HI- Human Intelligence.

As the world works hard to create smarter computers, our society is tending to produce dumber brains. Some research is showing that we may now be dropping as much as 2.5-4.3 IQ points per decade. * Recent academic outcomes, addiction to social media and screens, and societal trends would tend to suggest that the decline is now accelerating. There are many reasons for this decline, all of which have an impact of the development of and use of our internal processors, our brains.

It was once correctly said that the brain is the only container in which the more you put into it, the more it can hold. It’s true! We build a better brain by permitting it to process more. The mechanism of neuroplasticity is that which not only permits growth and development, but it is also the brain mechanism that grows the brain the more we use it. The better our processing, the more input our brains receive, the greater our complexity of thought and function. The more and better we process, the smarter we get.

The human brain, human processor, typically develops its foundation in our first ten years of life; but development can and does continue beyond then. Neural connections and networks start developing from birth as the brain is stimulated through sensory input and use. The more targeted to the individual and organized the input, the greater the benefit. The primary components of our processor are generally referred to as short-term memory, working memory, long term memory, and executive function. These terms do not accurately depict how our processor works. Our brain function is our intelligence, which is much more than memory. It’s how we process, manipulate, associate, create, think, and behave. These dynamic systems of our brain effectively determine how we learn, think, function, behave, and ultimately who we are.

Neuroplasticity is active throughout our lifetime. We have the potential to keep growing, to keep getting smarter, given the opportunity. How our brains develop reflects the stimulation and opportunities we receive. Input develops our brain and literally grows connections and neural networks, physically growing the brain. A typical baby’s brain weighs about three-quarters of a pound, and an adult brain about 3 pounds. The degree of growth is a direct reflection of the input, the stimulation we receive and how well our processor works. Neurodevelopmental problems ranging from things like Down syndrome to autism, ADHD, ADD, dyslexia and learning disabilities are all issues that adversely affect the brain’s ability to process input. Perhaps nothing reflects the value of targeted treatment/input as the changes that are produced in all of those with obvious neurodevelopmental issues when provided with programs that organize their brains and build their processors. All of these neurodevelopmental issues can be affected and improved or eliminated if these individuals are provided with the targeted input needed to address and build their processing.

Educators and most parents are familiar with the term “curriculum.” Curriculum implies a planned course, a sequence of planned input that incorporates practice to produce proficiency. Our schools have reading, math, science, history, and other areas of curriculum, but where is the curriculum for the most important piece that actually makes us smarter? Educators have been stuck for decades with a convenient grey area defining the difference between intelligence and cognition, which are functionally the same thing and equate with “smart.” If you believe that intelligence (cognition) doesn’t, or can’t, change, the educational system absolves itself of the responsibility to develop it, which also assists in categorizing and limiting expectations. It is what it is and has resulted in accepting mediocrity in most and limitations in all of our children. Our more than four decades of experience at NACD in developing processing in many thousands of children and adults, from those with brain injuries, Down syndrome, autism, learning and attention issues to “typical” and gifted, etc., undeniably shows that not only can intelligence be improved, it can dramatically enhance and change lives. There is formal research showing the positive effects on IQ, cognition, with Head Start, preschool, and education in general. ***These changes are correctly attributed to improved quality and quantity of input, change that occurs although “education.” These changes are made even though “education” rarely if ever includes targeted activities to address the foundational components of cognition, our processing power—the ability to process more of what we see and hear, and the ability to mentally manipulate more pieces of information, the workings of our human processor, our brains.

That which develops changes, what changes can be developed.

At NACD we work with families and their whole children. A rather important part of the whole package is the brain. We have developed and utilized literally hundreds of targeted activities to build and change cognition, to build human processors. When we design individual educational and developmental programs, they include everything from diet to behavior, social skills, language, physical structure and function, to reading and math, etc. But inevitably high on the priority list, if not at the top, is processing: building and developing the human processor, the brain, and simply making people smarter.

Smarter is better. We all have the potential to be smarter and a responsibility to make our children smarter.

Trying to help a child achieve their potential without addressing their processor, or cognition, is like trying to win the Indy 500 without building an engine.

*https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-06-iq-scores-1970s.html#:~:text=In%20studying%20the%20data%2C%20the,was%20not%20all%20bad%20news.

** See video above

***https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-06-iq-scores-1970s.html#:~:text=In%20studying%20the%20data%2C%20the,was%20not%20all%20bad%

Reprinted by permission of The NACD Foundation, Volume 39 No. 3 , 2025 ©NACD

The post Time to Upgrade Your Processor: Building Better Brains appeared first on NACD International | The National Association for Child Development.

Those of us who have passed that 60-year-old mile marker will often ponder the things of our past. What would we do differently? How do we mend past transgressions? What could have been avoided had a different fork in the road been followed? I am no exception. On a personal level, after raising 5 boys I have plenty of those moments that I wish I could go back and redo. I am sure my parents did the same. So many “If only I had known.” 

Today, though, I take the time to look back on those years and ponder, “What did I do right?” One thing, without a doubt, revolves around what I share with you parents in this article. I lovingly, sometimes not easily, trained my special needs son to know how to fit into a social gathering, to be appreciated, to have good manners, and to be enjoyed. This was truly a monumental task that I did not do alone. Our extended family members played incredible parts. The NACD families and staff members that I worked alongside had a huge impact on him, as did, most importantly, his siblings. 

I can remember the early painful years when the doctor reviewed his scans with us. The thoughts of “What will he miss out on?” “Where will his life take him as an adult?” “Will people accept him?” Those thoughts were so prevalent and so constant in the beginning. There was a time at when I had to buckle down and think, “Well, whatever will be, we will do our darndest to make it as good for him as possible.” Once I found NACD, things got easier for me emotionally. Most likely the reason is that I was so busy putting into action a plan to help him that there wasn’t as much time to focus on pain. However, there were always those hurtful moments, usually when someone asked a thoughtless question or gave us “the look” that special needs families often get. At those times the hurt would come like an unexpected wave, I would sink a little, then rise up and fight again in the only ways I knew how: unconditional love, doing program, and training him to be pleasant. 

The love was the easy part. That child was seared into my heart the minute I saw a picture shown to me by a mission group looking to find him a home. You would think that the hard part would be all the hours of input needed through program to help him develop. I will confess, I did not carry that load alone. Evan’s brothers did as much program as I did with him, if not more. After getting into the rhythm of doing program, the ups and downs, the 90% days and the 2% days, NACD really became a matter of a lifestyle rather than a long intimidating list of activities to do. The hard part, though, was really focusing on social training.

I once heard a mother at one of our seminars put it in words in a way that spoke to me. She said, “At first, I thought my special needs son’s behavior had to be as good as other children, but I later found I was wrong. His behavior had to be BETTER to be accepted. If he stepped out of line from time to time, like all children do, the thought was never that he was behaving like a child, but rather a ‘special needs child.’” So many of you know the situations I refer to. You have been there and felt those kicks to the gut. 

To give you an idea of the hurdles we faced, prior to adoption, Evan was one of the most severely abused children that I have ever heard of that actually survived. In fact, he was at death’s door when I finally found him. You would think that it would be hard to overcome the kind of suffering he went through, but the real difficulty came from the tendency of others, including myself, to give him too much slack during the early years of his recovery. From the day we first had him, Evan was truly welcomed by our family members and the people in our orbit at the time. His story was so incredible that people wanted all the details, wanted to surround him with kindness and acceptance, and in some way felt a need to “make things up to him.” Within a short amount of time, that started to backfire just a bit to some degree. All the attention, all of the preference shown, started to create a situation where he became a child who wanted to monopolize everyone in his world. At parties he would pick his favorite people and want to hang on them, perseverating on the same comments. He wanted to always be the center of attention. He was overly affectionate at an age that made it awkward. There was point in time that I had to wake up and think, “I don’t want him to grow to be a person other people avoid.” We went through a time of intensively training him how to shake hands rather than hug his brothers’ teammates, to give social space, and to wait and let others speak. The social training years were tough. There was a lot of redirecting at gatherings, which he would often show displeasure at. In noticing my correction and training, often other people would say, “It’s ok. I understand. He can do— (whatever annoying thing he was doing).” There were even family members that would feed into his annoyances. I really had to put my foot down and explain that they may love him and want to patiently tolerate those immature habits, but …what about other people? How will he be received by the friends of siblings, or strangers we run across? The more pleasant he is, the more opportunities he has to be included, which allows him to experience more joy. The hardest place, I do believe, for that training was in our NACD waiting room. Keep in mind the parents we work with are the most accepting, caring people you could encounter. I remember walking out of an evaluation one day to find him sitting in someone’s lap. A new client at that. At the age of TEN! It only took one stern “Evan Waldeck” to see him jump up and know he was busted over ignoring the “space” rule we made him follow with most people. We even had to make a list of who got a front hug, who got a side hug, and everyone else needed to get a handshake. I looked so mean. I really was convinced it would pay off, and all along it was an act of love.

Fast forward to a trip we recently took. We were staying in the home of a family Evan and I had never met. At first it was just to be me and a friend, and Evan was going to spend time at home with his brother. But things got moved around, and at the last minute, Evan was included in the trip. Let me set this up for you. The adults that we were staying with both had careers working with special needs adults. After a few days, I was pulled aside and told, “We have to confess, at first we were a bit concerned. We thought about all we had planned to do. There were hikes, nice restaurants, and lot of sites to see. When we heard your special needs, blind son would be coming, we figured all plans would have to change.” They were shocked to see how easily he fit in and how much fun he added to the group. They even asked me, “How did you produce such a mature special needs adult?” Keep in mind, both of them had spent decades working with special needs adults. I have to tell you; it was a moment I will never forget. To realize that “what I knew then” was right on target gave me a real sense of achievement. The icing on the cake was that Evan had a blast.

Please know that as a staff we have decades of experience working with children at every level of accomplishment. We have experience with families we have worked with their entire lives. We also have children and grandchildren ourselves that we have raised or are currently raising. We see what happens when appropriate behavior is made a priority. As you travel this journey, always remember one of the kindest things you can do for any child is to train them up in a way that makes them a delight to be around.

Reprinted by permission of The NACD Foundation, Volume 39 No. 1 , 2025 ©NACD

The post I’m glad I know now—that what I knew then—was absolutely right appeared first on NACD International | The National Association for Child Development.

Recently I ran across a study from 2006 that presented what was labeled as “new” and exciting findings. Let me start by explaining why I placed the word “new” in quotations. I began as a parent on program and quickly moved into being a volunteer and then on to being a staff member. Early in my staff days one part of my job description was to speak at events on neuroplasticity. That was in 1992. To some of you who may not have even been born yet, that sounds ancient. Ancient until I point out that my information was coming directly from Bob Doman, who was teaching the same thing when he began NACD in 1976. To provide a little more perspective, his beginnings of this understanding started in his childhood, accompanying his father in the 1950s who had already spent several decades beginning the path of study which is now called neuroplasticity. In fact, when I forwarded the study to Bob without explaining my thoughts for application, his response was “so what is so new about this understanding?” Modern science, with all its ways to measure the brain, is now catching up with the idea that the brain does in fact develop and change based on input. The missing link is in understanding how to harness that understanding to CREATE change, rather than just crank out new studies to prove that brains are different based on the sum of the whole person and their life experiences.

In the study that I mentioned above, a small sampling of MRIs were done, half of which were on bus drivers and half of which were on taxi drivers. The findings showed that there were variations in the growth of the hippocampus between the two sets of participants. The hippocampus is an area of the brain understood to hold short-term memories and transfer them to long-term storage in our brains. The bus drivers were better at certain skills, whereas the taxi drivers were better at others. This is exactly as we at NACD would expect after decades in this field. 

The question would be how to harness the strengths of both sets when working with your children. The easiest part of the solution comes in terms of the bus drivers. On program you have a very defined list of specific and effective activities that have been tried and true, and are in constant stages of refinement, that need to be done consistently with the right frequency, intensity, and duration. We know that to build function, we need input that builds pathways to success—in essence, your program. Whether that is a processing activity, a speech activity, or a mobility exercise, you build the brain via that input. What can be more of a challenge is in how to effectively develop the advantages of those taxi drivers because that part of the day needs to be much more dynamic.

A good amount of the time we spend in evaluations is often dedicated to talking with parents about chores and responsibilities. Here is where we have the opportunity to work on a whole additional layer of development and therefore function. We believe strongly in conveying to our parents the importance of executive function. According to the Center of Developing Child at Harvard University: “Executive function and self-regulation skills are the mental processes that enable us to plan, focus attention, remember instructions, and juggle multiple tasks successfully.” At NACD, we understand the importance of using our working memory activities alongside developing responsibilities, life experiences, and general knowledge to therefore achieve goals of efficient executive function. 

So, back to those chores, let’s think again in terms of the buses and taxi cabs. The bus is the easy ride. We start with everyday tasks like brushing teeth, emptying the dishwasher, putting away laundry, making the bed, etc. These, along with others, are the everyday components that need to be taught and then expected. Now let’s think in terms of the taxi cab. How many of you have thought to teach your child to change out the filter in the air conditioner, or to fix a running toilet, or to change a tire? Often this gets missed or just delayed. What about creating a child who notices what needs to be done, has the skill set to do it, and just takes care of it without prompts, reminders, or threats?

I often see parents start off in the right direction by teaching those initial bus driving chores. However, when this stalls out what happens is that the child can then eventually do these things in auto-pilot. The danger zone in auto-pilot is that the child can basically spend that time achieving a task while totally checking out. Being present is an important component to developing, being attentive and alert. Think of your own routines that you do not have to really think about. Right now as I type out the article, I might think, “Did I empty the dishwasher this morning?” Odds are pretty good I did, I do it every morning, but at this moment I don’t necessarily remember anything about doing it. Compare that to my son who right now is outside working on changing the oil in his car. If I ask him later, he will very easily remember what he did at the time. Why would he remember he changed his oil and I won’t remember if I unloaded the dishwasher? I was driving a bus, he was navigating a taxi. With your children, think of the difference between cleaning off a table and cooking the meal that went on it.

As you proceed forward in the wonderful journey of parenting, keep in mind: focus on both the bus and the taxi. Who knows, some day you may end up with an astronaut.

Reprinted by permission of The NACD Foundation, Volume 37 No. 3 , 2024 ©NACD

The post Taxis, Busses & Rocketships: Harnessing Responsibilities to Build the Brain appeared first on NACD International | The National Association for Child Development.

by Bob Doman

The key to understanding and improving global function in children and adults with Down syndrome is determining and developing their cognitive function.

Whether we are looking at a two-year-old or an adult with Down syndrome, their level of function, their ability to learn, think, and communicate is a reflection of their cognitive level. 

Cognition is the mental function that permits us to process information, to acquire knowledge, to understand, think, and communicate. Cognition is not reading, math, or specific knowledge per se; it involves the neurodevelopmental pieces that comprise auditory and visual short-term memory, working memory, and eventually executive function. 

Cognition, or intelligence, is partially a reflection of what we were born with, but primarily it is something that develops. Anything that develops can be developed, impacted, improved. Unfortunately addressing cognition, how we process and manipulate what we see and hear, is missing almost universally from all education. For children with developmental issues, this leads to inappropriate, untargeted* input, low and unrealistic expectations, and poor outcomes.

Case in point

I recently received a report from a school outlining their curriculum for a twelve-year-old child with Down syndrome. Her curriculum includes the following:

• Science – forces and magnets
• Geography – comparing Australia, Greenland, and Africa, including significant historical events
• History – Stone age to Iron age
• Reading – creating and writing sentences about what they did over the weekend
• Math – shapes, positions, directions, statistics
• Computing – the pros and cons for social media advertising
• and a project to research, create, and launch a campaign to encourage others to be healthy.

Sounds wonderful—what a great opportunity for this child. This curriculum would be appropriate for perhaps a typical or gifted child, and even a few children with Down syndrome who have been given the opportunity to develop typical or better processing skills and who had a commensurate educational foundation. Unfortunately, the child in this classroom is functioning at the cognitive development level of a two-going-on-three-year-old. She is just putting two to three words together, learning to feed and dress herself, and developing the ability to process two to three step directions. She’s not twelve, she is two going on three. This is perhaps an extreme example, but it’s real! However, it would not be at all unusual for a twelve-year-old, but functional two to three, to be taught phonics and printing and other inappropriate things, based on their functional level. Would you think it appropriate to teach a typical two-year-old phonics and printing? How successful would you be, and how much of a waste of their time would it be? And what about all the things that would have been appropriate for them? The point is that when targeting the needs of children, it is their level of function, their cognitive level, their ability to process information and their complexity of thought that should determine what is appropriate and targeted.

Children develop when we provide them with what is targeted and appropriate for them. This targeted input is what develops their global function, helps build cognition, and leads to good outcomes. Where they are is more a reflection of their processing level than their chronological age. You don’t try to teach algebra to a child who can’t add.

Looking at a child with Down syndrome primarily through the lens of their chronological age does them a great disservice and results in inappropriate, ineffective education and therapies, and poor outcomes. Such historic failures have resulted in a poor perception of potential. The foundation of all development is neuroplasticity, and the first fundamental rule of neuroplasticity is to provide the child with input that is targeted to them.

We have been fortunate to have worked with many thousands of children and adults with Down syndrome, and in the case of many individuals, we have worked with them for decades. We have seen what is possible if we, along with the family, work with an understanding of the whole child and work diligently to build cognition. Without exception, those who develop processing abilities in the “normal” range can become the adults who have good jobs, drive, have good social relationships, and enjoy good lives. After these years and thousands of individuals with Down syndrome, we have never seen one reach these high global functional levels without having developed the commensurate level of cognition. 

Optimally we start working on processing and cognition virtually from birth; and the sooner we start the process, the more we begin funneling in the pieces that help produce global knowledge and functional intelligence. Years lost are gone. Can we start working on this function later? Absolutely. Addressing the foundational pieces of cognition, short-term memory, working memory, and executive function even starting with adults can produce dramatic change; but time lost is time lost in teaching that brain how to learn and think and filling that brain with the knowledge and experience that builds full lives.

Developmental and educational priority number one is developing the ability to learn and think—cognition/processing power. 

To learn more about processing power, watch our video below

Reprinted by permission of The NACD Foundation, Volume 37 No. 2 , 2024 ©NACD

The post Down Syndrome & Cognition appeared first on NACD International | The National Association for Child Development.

What do you remember from last month, last year, a decade ago, or five decades ago? I still have some vivid memories from college over fifty years ago, and none of them have anything to do with what occurred in a classroom.

I take every chance I get to speak with young people graduating from high school or who are attending or have just finished college.These talks help reinforce for me the value of intensity or the results of the lack of it in education.  I ask these young people whose education should be fresh in their minds very simple questions about everything from geography and science to civics and history. I’m no longer surprised when many of these “A” students cannot answer even the most rudimentary questions, the answers to which should be essential to simply functioning in our society. What happened?

All learning involves impacting and changing the brain. The mechanism for this change is neuroplasticity. The world of education has largely ignored the basics of neuroplasticity even though the fundamentals have been known for many decades.

Sadly, the term neuroplasticity has become synonymous with the simple statement – the brain changes.  This is true, the brain constantly changes based on the input it receives and how it is used. But to take advantage of neuroplasticity we must understand and pay attention to the fundamentals of neuroplasticity. The fundamentals are not difficult to understand, but as mentioned, are very rarely employed in education.

Targeted Input

The first fundamental of neuroplasticity is providing the child’s brain with input that is targeted to them. We optimize neuroplasticity when we provide the brain with targeted input. Targeted input simple means that which is significant, relevant, and which specifically fits the individual.  If we try to apply this to a typical classroom we are unfortunately far away from targeted. In a typical classroom of about thirty children, we have thirty individuals, each with their own experiential background, level of related knowledge, their own unique learning and processing abilities, and of course various levels of interest or lack of such in the subject. Classes are often being taught by someone who is merely following a one size fits all set curriculum and who may not have a real interest in the subject themselves.

Frequency

The second component of neuroplasticity is frequency.  

We grow brain connections when we supply the brain with specific targeted input with sufficient frequency, often enough to produce relatively permanent change. One of the most glaring examples of the lack of frequency in typical education is in math. Only twenty-four percent of high school graduates in the United States are proficient in math. If they had in fact learned and retained what was “taught,” the proficiency rate would theoretically be very high. (The present Common Core math is a failure, as was the “new math” of the sixties from which it is based.) In truth math outcomes have never been good because there is almost never enough review, i.e. frequency. Case in point: the year students take Algebra, their overall math score tends to drop. Why? Not enough use of or review of previously taught processes.  The majority of what is taught in school is never to be seen again after the exam, the exam which is supposed to be an indicator of what was “learned.” Most students, even the good ones, do not approach the content with even the intention of really learning it.  The intention is to pass the exam, because they generally are not interested in or see the relevance of the material to them. If you don’t know the information weeks or months, let alone years, later one might question if it was in fact ever learned. What was the point? 

Duration

Going hand in hand with frequency is the third component of neuroplasticity–duration.  The input needs to come in over time to help grow those connections that change the brain and produce memory. That period of time generally takes us back to frequency, because in one session as we increase duration, we lose intensity. Short and sweet. The less targeted the input, the less the impact on the brain and the greater the duration needed to impact the brain. However, the more targeted the input, the higher the intensity and  the lower the requirement for high frequency and long duration.

Intensity

Intensity, the fourth component of neuroplasticity, is extremely important and the least realized of the fundamentals of neuroplasticity in most schools, classrooms, and even homeschools.  Mentally go back to one of your classrooms, be it from elementary school, middle or high school, and hopefully to a lesser degree college. What did that classroom look like?  Kids half asleep, kids doodling, kids looking out the window, kids listening to what was going on in the hallway, some staring blankly at the teacher, and perhaps a few who were interested in what the teacher was saying and were paying attention. There rarely is much of any intensity. Intensity is student specific, a reflection of how targeted the input is, what you bring to the moment, to the class, to the subject. This brings to mind the paradox of some “learning disabled” children struggling with every subject in school and failing, but who can tell you the name of every major league baseball player and their stats. Often, it’s all about intensity, to what degree what is being taught interests, fits, or targets the student. Is what is being taught targeted to the student? Is what is being taught being presented in a way that involves and excites the student? 

The typical educational, curriculum-based model doesn’t really work, if measured by the time invested by both the school and the student (time which can never be reclaimed) and expense relative to what is actually learned.  Our brains demand something different.

Our brains only learn and change through the mechanism of neuroplasticity. Go back to those long-term memories and think about what they had in common.  The odds are the common component is intensity.  

Where is the student in the equation? 

When instructing parents or other educators, I always address intensity.  Do your best to target the student. Do your best to understand them, know them, interact, and observe them. I even suggest that they imagine a number in the center of the student’s forehead that constantly fluctuates, that rates their intensity on a scale of 1-10. 10 is such high intensity that learning is almost instantaneous; it’s an experience that happens once and you never forget it. The odds are you’re not going to see a 10, but you can shoot for a 9. Bring down the number to 7 or 8 and learning is occurring, but you are going to need a lot of frequency and duration to change that brain. At 5 or 6 the impact on the brain is getting to be marginal at best, and below 5 everyone would be better off taking a nap. This is real, and the truth is we are kidding ourselves and wasting our children’s time and turning them off to learning if we are trying to cram information into a brain that’s not being targeted.

One of the major issues related to focusing on curriculum and largely leaving the child out of the equation is that we miss the fact and the reality that we have the ability to actually change the student. We have the means to make every student smarter. We can develop short-term memory and then build on that foundation and develop working memory, which is now appropriately being called the new IQ. And then the working memory creates executive function, which is the higher-level cognitive function that permits us to control and orchestrate all our cognitive functions and behaviors. But the fact is that “education” ignores the individual to such an extent that these incredibly important fundamentals that affect how well we learn, think, and function in every aspect of our lives are lost. This is a travesty. 

We need to put the child, the student, at the top of the equation, not leave them out of the equation other than to give them a grade that reflects our failure.

There are better ways.

Reprinted by permission of The NACD Foundation, Volume 37 No. 1 , 2024 ©NACD

The post Education & Neuroplasticity appeared first on NACD International | The National Association for Child Development.

What is the difference between a parent or a caregiver trying to push a child to take a developmental step and a child being driven to take that step? For all children it is very significant; but for the developmentally challenged child it can literally be the difference between success and failure.

If you observe the changes that take place in a child as they gain more and more functional mobility, be it a child who is developing typically or a child with challenges, the associated global changes are hard to miss. The child being able to initially move and crawl on their bellies and get to something is a major step in independence. When they can move faster and better and can creep on their hands and knees, they take another leap, as they do when they start walking. At each of these stages, the child’s level of awareness and the degree to which they are present and are taking in more information takes a major leap forward. The added input their brains receive, along with the associated neurodevelopment, results in improved processing, cognition, language, and more. However, another often missed but related and important piece to this process is the effect of independence.

I have observed that independence results in an increase in initiation.

One of the toughest challenges for the parent of a child with developmental issues is trying to get them to do something that requires work, time, and perseverance when the child couldn’t care less and lacks the perception that they are actually participants and can initiate and do something. Some of these initial steps can be maddening for parents. It’s not surprising that many parents of developmentally challenged children often feel like Sisyphus, from Greek mythology, who was forced to keep pushing a boulder up a mountain only to have it keep rolling back down. These first steps are so difficult because a child who lacks independence, who has limited ability to interact or play with a toy, feed themselves, speak or initiate much beyond getting a reaction from a parent with a smile or a scream, does not perceive that they can initiate or produce change, or simply, just do something new or different. At every stage of a child’s development, the more independent and empowered they are, the more they strive to move forward on their own, as do most typical children to varying degrees.

It amazing how apparently minor acts of independence can produce global change. As an example, it has been interesting and enlightening to observe the impact of self-feeding on independence and initiation. Many parents of children with developmental issues see feeding as a process by which you get food from a bowl into a child’s stomach as quickly and as efficiently as possible. This often means feeding the child pureed foods that do not require chewing and using a rather large spoon so the food can get shoveled in as quickly as possible, leaving time for what are perceived to be important things. Comparing children who are very developmentally similar who are encouraged and taught to eat independently as soon as possible to those who are fed is often dramatic relative to their overall development going forward. If you think about independence, being able to feed oneself is as foundational as it gets.

One of the things about working with a lot of whole children is that it permits you to see correlations and associations. I understand parents, and I get it that some are not making the connection and giving their children the opportunity to learn to finger feed because they don’t want to deal with their child painting themselves and the kitchen while learning how to do it, or to deal with their discovery that a spoon can function as a catapult, permitting them to launch food even farther*. But where many parents see a disaster, I see initiation. The more a child does independently, the more they become aware of themselves, their surroundings, and their ability to impact their lives, to change things and do new things, to move forward, to initiate.

I have a little grandson who I have loved observing as he moved from crawling, to creeping, to walking, and watching his world change. Crawling permitted him go, to explore, no longer dependent on someone bringing the world to him. Faster, more efficient mobility, creeping, opened up more territory and the ability to start getting up into a kneel to reach and interact with things at a higher level; then pulling to stand permitted access to more of his world, which quickly transformed into walking and reaching higher places and getting around faster and freeing his hands to move and carry things. Each new step in his independence opened up more of the world and taught him that he could change it, which taught him he could initiate doing more and more himself. The more empowered he was, the faster and faster he developed. At sixteen months of age, I watch in amazement as he moves around a room, exploring and discovering that “This does that and that” and “Oh, I can make it do that too.” “I can initiate,” “I can change and impact my world.” He just sees challenges, not limitations. Independence produces initiation, and initiation produces more and faster development.

Coaches often talk about trying to instill an “I can do” attitude. The truth is, the more you can do, the more you instinctively know and believe you can do.

For a child with developmental issues, this correlation between independence, initiation, and global advancement is ongoing and as significant for the teen or young adult as it was for the infant.

Independence and initiation develop through the basics, such as moving, feeding oneself, and independence in dressing and toileting, into the ability to get themselves food and drink, to the understanding that language is a means to get what you want and need, as well as communicate feelings and thoughts, which have the power to influence and produce change. But it certainly doesn’t stop there. Some of the first questions I ask parents about their children relate to independence in self-help skills and chores. The independence that comes from doing chores without prompts**, from owning chores, doing your job without someone standing over you and prompting you, translates into self-confidence and initiation. Being independent and responsible for chores generalizes into all aspects of the child’s development, education, and maturity.

Parents, don’t put independence at the bottom of your list, put it at the top.

Independence fosters initiative, and initiative is a key to development.

* There is also a huge range of other benefits from a child learning to feed themselves, ranging from foundational oral motor development needed for speech, to focus and visual convergence, to digestion, just to name a few.

** One of the more difficult things to overcome in a child with developmental issues is prompt dependency. Being taught that someone needs to prompt you to do every step teaches dependency, not independence, and kills initiation.

Reprinted by permission of The NACD Foundation, Volume 34 No.2, 2021 ©NACD

Related Articles

Teaching Chores Better Than Teaching Algebra?

Chores: An Integral Part of Your Child’s Development & Education

Confidence Through Chores

The post Independence and the Developmentally Challenged Child appeared first on NACD International | The National Association for Child Development.