Special Needs Children: 3 ways to go with a heel that won't touch the ground

 

Change from outside vs. change from inside:
Or: Fixing vs. connection

This happens: a child with cerebral palsy, through great inner desire and perseverance, comes to walk. And yet, the putting their heel to the floor eludes them, so it seems as if they are walking on their toes all the time.

There are at least three ways adults can react to this, three routes to take.

To the rescue: the knife

One route is the surgeon's scalpel, cutting into the Achilles tendon, to allow the heel no recourse but to lower. If we discount what a child goes through in surgery, this seems to solve the heel down problem. But…

Push, prod and correct

Parents and various professionals can try to soften the tissues by “stretching,” or massage, or both. They can try pressing the heel forcefully down to the floor. They can “remind” ( nag, usually, unfortunately) the child with some range of possibility to do what she or he is “supposed to do.”

Braces can be put on the foot, to mold it to “how it should be.”

Again, a step in the right direction it seems, but…

The problem with these

These are all outside forces. They demand and force the change. Not only are they teaching the child, One: there is something wrong with you, and Two: only by outside initiation can any change happen, they tend not to work very well. Stretching, botox, scolding all wear off. Even the surgery often begins to undo after the foot begins to heal from the trauma.

Calling on….the brain.

What if the child in this story is not missing a foot that defaults to a 90 degree angle with the leg, but she is missing a representation in the brain, totally missing a feeling and idea and body awareness sense of what it’s like for a heel to press against the ground? That just doesn’t compute for her.

And if pushed and stretched and prodded, the feeling of touching the floor is always vastly diluted by all the stress and effort going on.

So, here’s the solution in the Anat Baniel Method and the Feldenkrais Method®. The child lies on her back, already a great start from the complexity and demands of walking. And then, instead of pushing and efforting the foot to 90 degrees, a false floor is brought to the foot.

The false floor

A book is held against the child’s foot, exactly at the angle of the foot. Slowly pressing the book against the foot, the whole foot more or less touches at once. Other things are done that make sense from having had a 4 year training, to help deepen this, but you get the idea: the foot feels the way it would if it were “normal” in terms of the contact of the entire foot with the ground.

The brain = the child is now in the picture

Now, the foot, and the brain and the child all begin to expand her idea of what a foot is, and how the heel really is part of the same “story.” Connections with the whole foot and the rest of the body are made.

Ideas and pathways are laid down in the brain with this “whole foot” feeling of the thing at the end of the leg. It’s a delight and a revelation, and the child is smarter, and has one more experience of creating change by creating more awareness.

Awareness is life. Awareness is freedom

This learning will spill over to other movement improvement the child is ready to make.

This learning will “work” not just in movement, but speech and school and play and life. The more differentiation and awareness we have, the more freedom to become and do something different.

What can a parent do?

Bring the child in for lessons.

Watch the lessons, be enthusiastic about small changes, encourage the What Is, of even the most minute improvement. All improvement that involves the brain spills over to almost everything, as mentioned about.

How about the book on the foot?

No, not really.

But parents can remember not to scold. IF THE CHILD COULD DO IT DIFFERENT, THEY WOULD.

And the parents can play with variations of many other things: directions of bringing foot to the mouth, pitch and length and texture of sounds, ways of moving a ball or a toy or a small chair.

Kids Beyond Limits, Anat’s new book!

Read and reread Anat’s book. It’s full of small and non demanding activities that don’t take much time, that create pathways for learning, and maybe best of all, create time and quality for bonding and love between you and your child.

My kids' blog, specialneedschildren-chriselms.blogspot.com/, too, has many examples of small but significant actions you can take. For example: do anything you usually do at half speed, and make this a game.

Another: follow your own breathing, for your own relaxation, and to create a "vibe" of inner awareness for your child. As above: awareness equals freedom. For you and for your child.

If you haven’t signed up for lessons recently…

Now is a great time to do so.

Essential Three: Variation, examples with special needs children, And this is food from Freedom for all us adults

Variation on what to do with the left hand. Notice how attentive Harper is.

Once, when working with a boy who seemed to have a habit of getting
into a funk
and whining and clinging to his mother,
I stopped trying to work on anything else,
stopped hoping or attempting to distract him to
"more important" learning, and focused in on the whining.

I asked him to raise his pitch, giving him an example.

I asked him to lower the pitch of the whining, giving another example.

I asked for the whining to come in burst of two, and in patterns of three.

I asked for louder.

I asked for softer.

He was game for all of this, and the whining became a game to him.

When I mentioned this latter to Anat, she commented that until we'd brought
variation into the picture, he may well have had no idea that the whining was his action.

Once we made a game of it, and gave his action lots of variations he could control,
his distress went away,
his pleasure in life went up,
and his brain got back on the track of being a learning organism.

He could tell the differences.
He could make the differences.
He made a difference from his awareness and his choosing different actions.

In another case I'll always remember, Anat was supervising about 6 different student practitioners, who had taken 10 basic segments of training, and now where on their first Special Needs Children segment.

On one of the tables, an autistic boy was busy throwing this and throwing that, clearly just working out .....? Who knows what.

Anat came by the table and asked him to make choices: did he want to throw the toy dog, or the ball off the table? Did he want to throw the book or the truck?

And so on.

This satisfied and calmed the young man, and after that, Anat advised the student practitioner to work slowly, and verbalize each action she was doing: "Now I am moving your arm, holding your elbow." "Now I am moving your leg, holding your foot. I am rotating it this way and that way."

That was all for the rest of the thirty minutes.

The child went home and apparently verbalized in ways that he never had before.

.........

In Anat Baniel's new book: Kids Beyond Limits

Anat very clearly not only explains:

One: research with rats and with humans (learning the game of Go), that supports Variation as the key to improving the brain and improving the learning.

Two: gives an inspiring example of a small boy who came to her essentially trapped in his conditioning after many months in a full body cast.

Three: gives examples of playing / learning games parents can use with their children to increase the enjoyment of their interaction, and the quality of their child's brain (and the movement, too, as the by product)

Four:
Clues us in to some valuable concepts we can use in our own lives, as we as helping the children:

Such as: (And these are in bold in the book, too)

Think of your child's mistakes as a wonderfully rich source of Variation
(And therefore, never correct mistakes. Use them as jumping boards for more and easier and more fun learning.)

Without light the eyes cannot see. Without Variation the brain cannot learn or organize action very well. 

..........

In Anat's article for Massage Therapy magazine,
called New Possibilities: A revolutionary approach to special needs children

Anat says this about variation:

"The more new variations the child experiences, the better and faster his brain can differentiate and form new solutions. The child learns how to learn. Without variation, we starve the brain of the new information it craves, no matter how hard the practitioner and child try, the outcomes will be very limited until you provide these variations. If the child is unable to do what the practitioner is trying to have him do, then something new needs to be introduced. If the child can already do what you are offering, it is time to move the child forward into his next level of functioning"

......
The chapter in her book says plenty more, but I can't copy it off the Internet so at $10.88 from Amazon, I'd recommend getting three copies, one for one and the other two for grandparents, or OT, PT, caregivers, anyone who comes to your child and would love to know how to be far more helpful, and how to stop unintentional strategies that are actually hindering your child's learning.