What iLs can help improve
Coordination/Balance/Motor Planning
Are you able to perform a new motor activity easily? In the right order? Or, do you have to do it over and over again from beginning to end until it is no longer ‘new’? Are you clumsy? Drop or bump into things? Our sense of balance and where we are in space are important to our ability to coordinate our actions to perform them with ease.
Children and Coordination/Balance Issues
Poor motor planning and coordination often result in being the last one to be picked for the team, late to ride a bicycle, poor/messy handwriting. These struggles can shatter a child’s confidence.
Adults and Coordination/Balance Issues
Our balance and coordination are extremely important for our health and safety throughout the lifespan. As we age, steps become obstacles, picking things up is difficult, getting out of bed can even become dangerous. The good news is the system governing the mechanisms associated with balance can be improved at any age.
Attention & Focus
Struggles with attention can affect every part of the day. Information is lost, instructions are forgotten. The resulting stress and scattered thinking leads to frustration.
Children Attention/Focus Issues
The smallest distraction in the classroom disrupts a child’s ability to focus. At home the child struggles to follow a simple set of instructions. Homework takes forever to complete. Parents often have to provide prompts to help the child get through the steps of the day. Lack of independence and constant monitoring leaves the child upset and frustrated, and strains family relationships
Adult Attention/Focus Issues
Adults struggle to complete tasks at work, stay focused in meetings and during critical conversations. While deadlines are necessary, they create stress and anxiety in an adult with attention difficulties. The result is job dissatisfaction.
Memory & Learning
Everything we learn is stored in our brain via a highly complex encoding system called memory. It is our memory that allows us to retrieve information we have learned, skills we’ve acquired, even precious moments we’ve experienced. Yet, we are not just pulling information off the shelf. Memory decides what’s worth keeping and the relationship of new information to what’s already stored. Therefore, in order to learn, our memory must be dynamically changing to accommodate the new information arriving all the time.
Children and Memory/Learning Issues
– What’s going on when your child can’t remember what they learned on the previous page?
– They know the spelling words one day and the next day they are gone.
– Math facts are memorized and seem to evaporate by the following day.
– The struggle to remember makes it feel as if the brain is a sieve.
These are painful experiences due to poor short-term and intermediate memory.
Memory is the key to learning and learning is the synthesis of the information we remember. It is difficult to create a strong foundation for learning if critical pieces are not retained. This constant battle to remember information eventually leads to giving up.
Adults and Memory/Learning Issues
As we age, we inevitably have more information to remember. With more to remember, there is more to forget. You might forget someone’s name, or have trouble finding that right word on the tip of your tongue.
Our memory may fail for many reasons, and the amount of information we are trying to hold is one of them. Further, increased reliance on our digital devices has decreased our practice of information retrieval.
Behaviour Regulation & Resilience
Have you ever found yourself flooded with emotions that led to an outburst when an unpredicted situation arose? Self-regulation is our ability to manage our emotions and behaviour in response to these situations. The flexibility to adapt quickly to changing situations is called resilience.
Children and Behaviour Issues
Kids don’t misbehave in the classroom because they choose to misbehave. Misbehaviour is a result of internal frustration from the inability to regulate their state and stop the impulsive behaviour. Transitions are challenging, and change is met with resistance. It’s difficult to recover when things don’t go their way.
In most cases, the cause of the behavior hasn’t been identified or addressed. Typically, more time is spent enforcing punishment than finding the source of the struggle. Consequences typically don’t work, and the effort to enforce them is exhausting for parents and teachers. The student is left feeling frustrated and misunderstood.
Adults and Behaviour Issues
In adults, the inability to inhibit responses can result in disruptive, broken relationships at home and at work. Reactions to the smallest inconvenience can be overblown and misunderstood. Think about it: if you’re late for something important because of traffic and someone cuts you off, don’t you find that you react more strongly than normal? You’re usually so calm! Do you find yourself trying to box that person out of a lane? You’re not a vindictive person! When you’re angry, isn’t it harder to consider the other person’s perspective? You’re normally very empathetic!
How you feel at any given time – your physiological state – is central to your emotional regulation, behaviour, and resilience.
Reading & Auditory Processing
It’s commonly believed that reading is a visual activity. While that’s true, reading relies just as much on our auditory processing. While we do see the words when we read, it’s also important that our brain hears the sounds, words and meaning contained in the text. When auditory processing is compromised, the brain cannot make sense of these sounds, making all activities that require auditory input difficult – reading, following directions, capturing details.
Children and Reading/Auditory Processing Issues
You hope this is the year your child will read better – the new teacher will somehow find the ‘key’. The school tells you to have your child read twenty minutes a day, as if practice is going to eventually flip the switch. That twenty minutes of reading becomes a chore and before you know it, your child’s joy of reading is completely gone. Gone with it is the willingness to try; grades plummet.
Being unable to read is embarrassing. The fear of being asked to read aloud leads to withdrawal and physical anxiety. Reading is required for everything: spelling, math, science, instructions for games and menus in restaurants. Falling further and further behind each year, the inability to keep up with the rest of the class becomes more evident.
Low self-esteem and lack of confidence may follow, which lead to social issues for children and make family life difficult.
Adults and Reading/Auditory Processing Issues
Adults have similar reading problems. They read slowly because processing the information takes a long time. Unfamiliar words or names in a text seem to be written in hieroglyphics. They reread information multiple times for comprehension.
If you are a slow reader, or if you’ve just discovered you have an undiagnosed reading problem, you’re working harder to read, and reading is likely not enjoyable.
Reading is an auditory processing skill that requires decoding the sounds of the words in the proper sequence and to do so rapidly, within milliseconds. Poor decoding skills are the primary cause of reading problems in children.
Auditory Sensitivities
You may have seen that child with her hands over her ears at a party or at a fireworks display, but sound sensitivity is not something that only affects children. For many, everyday noises can seem unbearably loud and may even inflict pain. And paradoxically, despite being sensitive to sound, some people with auditory sensitivity have difficulty understanding what others are saying. This results when all the sounds and frequencies of the environment are let in indiscriminately.
Children and Sound Sensitivity Issues
Sound sensitivity is more debilitating than many realize. Hearing the sounds of our world louder than most people means living in a world of discomfort, even pain. Many children whose nervous systems are immature will regularly put their hands over their ears or run screaming from the room. Parents bring headphones to every event in an effort to control noise levels. It’s difficult to understand that while some sounds are experienced as overly loud, others – like being told it’s time to leave – are difficult to hear.
Adults and Sound Sensitivity Issues
Adults have difficulty hearing a conversation when there is a lot of background noise causing them to avoid social gatherings, restaurants, and important events and activities.
When a particular sound triggers an exaggerated response, it can be equally debilitating. The sound of a clicking pen, a slurping straw or chewing can be annoying; but when it’s all you hear, it becomes a distracting obstacle.
Difficulty With Relationships / Social Engagement
We live in a social world. Interpersonal communication is essential to developing healthy relationships at school, home and work. In fact, our sense of safety in the world depends on healthy social engagement. When we feel safe, we can participate genuinely with others and be open and willing to accept new ideas. Without a sense of safety, our self-preservation and motivation to get through the current situation kicks in. We become closed off to others, oppositional and short sighted.
Children and Social Engagement Issues
Kids who struggle to interact appropriately with classmates, teachers and other adults are uncomfortable in new situations, in crowds, or when the environment is changing and unfamiliar. When eye contact is avoided, it is often interpreted as rude, uncaring or awkward. Despite desperate efforts to belong, they are unable to connect to friends or strangers.
Adults and Social Engagement Issues
Adults with poor social engagement misinterpret the meaning in conversation and are themselves misunderstood. The back-and-forth flow of conversation may not be easy for them. This damages relationships and makes work and social events uncomfortable and unproductive.
Mood & Motivation
Mood and motivation are hard to tease apart. Like the chicken and egg, it’s hard to know which came first. Low mood and poor motivation are perplexing for all family members. Unmotivated students seem not to care about grades, missing assignments or what others think of them. It can be difficult to find consequences, positive or negative, that produce the desired outcome. It seems that nothing will ever improve. The unmotivated adult with low mood doesn’t receive any pleasure or joy from work, from interactions with family members and friends, or from new activities and opportunities.
While a low mood may affect motivation, it also affects the response and spirit of people within that person’s influence. Imagine the change for the entire family as the unmotivated person “wakes up” and wants to participate in life again!
Speech & Expressive Language
Speech is our primary way of connecting to others. Having clear, fluent speech patterns is essential for being understood. Not only that, the quality of our voice and our intonation will influence how we come across and how our meaning is interpreted. Good speech is critical for good social engagement.
Is your child making only very gradual improvements in speech therapy? The problem may actually lie in the receptive component of speech which is affecting the output of speech. To speak clearly, sounds must be received clearly. A history of chronic ear infections is one way distorted hearing leads to distorted speech.
Executive Function
Executive functions are the skills that help us focus attention, set and stick to a plan, control our impulses, and juggle multiple projects. All of these are critical to achievement at school, work, and in life. The multiple and simultaneous demands of a classroom, household or busy office require effective executive function.
Children and Executive Function
Your child’s backpack is a mess. Their planner isn’t used and homework can’t be found. Instructions from the classroom are forgotten. Planners are meant to help students get organized, but without good executive function, it’s nearly impossible to learn how to use them effectively.
The lack of organization triggers a downward spiral. Negative self-messaging about forgetting the homework and negative feedback from behavior in the classroom result in not being valued as an individual, as a student. Low self-esteem and lack of confidence often follow.
Adults and Executive Function
Adults have similar, just more grown up, versions of this scenario. They may have great ideas in a meeting but struggle with the follow through. Their desk is like the backpack! It’s difficult and stressful to meet deadlines and thousands of dollars are spent on organizational tools.
Anxiety
Do you ever worry excessively? Feel tense, restless, agitated, have difficulty relaxing or falling asleep? You are not alone. Almost one in twenty adults in the United States will experience some form of anxiety this year. And it is reported that as many as 25 percent of 13 – 18 year-old teens may have mild to moderate anxiety.
Children and Anxiety
The effects of anxiety can be seen in even very young children. The smallest change in schedule or routine sends kids with anxiety into turmoil. Anxiety can create stomach aches, migraines and hives.The fear of failure makes some kids spend excessive time on homework and projects. It leads others to procrastinate and to avoid starting an assignment or project, leading to continued anxiety.
Adults and Anxiety
Adults similarly delay work and projects due to feelings of nervousness or dread. And recurring feelings of worry lead one to feeling even worse. This downward spiral triggers an imbalance of the autonomic nervous system and affects mood, motivation and cognition.
Sleep
Ahhh… the difference a good night’s sleep makes. You’re more alert, in a better mood, able to learn and feel ready to take on the day. But parents and children alike have experienced sleepless nights, and if a child isn’t sleeping, at least one adult is not sleeping either.
It’s tough to get up in the morning after a poor night’s sleep. You feel tired, foggy-headed, and forgetful. Mood swings, behavioral problems, and lack of concentration may also appear. Studies show it’s even worse than that! Performing daily tasks, including driving, without good sleep is the same as being drunk!
Early start times at school require that students be engaged in learning before their systems are awake. Poor sleep quality exacerbates an already stressed situation. To have the strongest foundation to tackle the requirements of the day, a good night’s sleep is critical.