Part Three was partly about the primitive reflexes. Briefly I mentioned was the fact that they don’t always ‘disappear on cue’ and that this can lead to problems in learning, attending and behaving. Seeing if a child has an active primitive reflex and strategies to integrate that reflex form the focus of this appendix.
Finding the information I’ve reproduced here was one of the great professional journeys Mum and I have taken over the last eight years. For many years we had just tested and treated children for two primitive reflexes. Then we came to the Murchison and discovered that more than these two reflexes could be kept past infancy. Once we’d worked this out, we began looking for information on how to treat children who’d kept a swag of primitive reflexes.
It was difficult to find because there was such a valuable market in selling reflex integration programs to parents. Practitioners can charge as much as $6000 per child for a program — and you, the parent, will still be doing the bulk of the work. We were amazed to discover that what should be the birthright of every human is subject to commercial confidentiality clauses. But not all practitioners refused to share. In this appendix you will find the knowledge developed by Australian occupational therapists, teachers and teacher’s aides of the movements and strategies that will help your child.
You might be thinking, ‘But surely the prescribing of movement sequences and carrying out a program will take a professional?’ It definitely does help if you can see a professional to assist with working out what movements and games your child needs. But with waiting lists in excess of two years within the public system, and the high cost of private consultations, this is not something that is accessible to all parents. As for the carrying out of the program, the best results occur when parents work with their own child.
Parents are the better therapists for their own child because of the chemistry of attachment. Just as babies learn better from a secure attachment, so does a child. The ‘feel good’ from having a parent involved means a greater release of oxytocin, and so learning happens faster.
David is a puzzle to his sporty parents. How can he be so different from them? Balancing their way around the outskirts of the oval on the low pine rail fence that surrounds it was a favourite game for them both as children. David, at seven, won’t do it without a parent on either side, holding his hands. His posture is slightly stooped and his muscle tone and endurance are low. He gets carsick even on short journeys.
David’s teacher has expressed concern that David’s bank of sight words is not translating into smooth reading. Not only that, but he can’t pick out words that he should know in a sentence: David has told her that ‘the words keep shifting’. She has noted that his ‘cooped up’ posture seems to be interfering with his ability to do jigsaw puzzles or colour-in. If the pieces or pencils aren’t right in front of him he doesn’t pick them up. She says she has to remind him to ‘take a deep breath’ to get his best performance out of him. That cooped-up posture is contributing to shallow breathing and less oxygen getting to his brain. Finally, his teacher has gently pointed out to his stunned parents that it almost certainly no coincidence that David’s headaches always occur before his physical education class.
What is responsible for David’s difficulties? He has retained the tonic labyrinthine reflex, which babies normally work through in the first months of life during ‘tummy time’. He has kept this reflex because the rented house where he grew up had cold cement floors and rough carpet in the lounge room. As a baby he did not like being on the floor, and his mother, not surprisingly, did not like him being there either.
With the intention of ensuring that he was off the cold floor she kept him in his pram. Later, still wanting to keep him warm but also wanting him to be active, she purchased a walker and a jolly jumper. David spent a great deal of his ‘awake time’ in both pieces of equipment from four months onwards. He walked at 15 months and never crawled. The end result is that, rather than having integrated this reflex in infancy, David is suffering the typical consequences of a strongly retained tonic labyrinthine reflex.
Untreated, David’s difficulties will increase in impact. The absence of the postural reflexes will mean that he doesn’t have the grace of his peers. In fact, he has the kind of awkwardness that increases the likelihood that he will be targeted by bullies. As reading texts get harder and the print smaller, he will battle more and more with reading. All text work, especially mathematics written vertically, will be hard for David.
Looking down for David is accompanied by the sense that he’s about to fall, due again to the action of the reflex, and this is translating into a fear of heights. No little boy wants this, so he has a deep and growing sense of disappointment in himself.
It is important to remember that the persistence of a reflex is not an all-or-nothing thing. At one end of the continuum you have the person with cerebral palsy, at the other the normal adult with a ‘shadow’ of a reflex that is barely detectable by a trained clinician. In fact, most of us have one or two primitive reflexes that persist in a shadow form. It is only the most physically coordinated among us, such as our ballet dancers and elite athletes, who have entirely integrated all their reflexes. But otherwise normal, healthy children can experience negative effects from the retention of a primitive reflex.
Why might a child keep a reflex, apart from having missed movement sequences in infancy? Some children just need to spend longer working towards integrating reflexes than others for genetic reasons. You might like to consider your own school days and see if you can relate to any of the markers listed below also.
In trying to help a child with a retained reflex, bear in mind that reflexes are normally integrated doing something meaningful: achieving a milestone. Movements to help with reflex integration need to be kept as meaningful as possible. There are some people who believe that the movements required need to be carried out ‘exactly right’. Mum and I don’t believe that, because babies aren’t that precise in their movements. It is more important that the movements need to be kept meaningful. The best way to do this is to make them fun.
The ideas for activities are not just for parents, there are growing numbers of teachers who have replaced the Perceptual Motor Program with reflex integration programs in reflection of the fact that more children require ‘earlier’ skills to be addressed. The bad news is that, although children can integrate a retained primitive reflex later in life, it is much harder to do so. It’s easiest for everyone, particularly children, if reflexes are integrated in infancy.
You need to ask:
Did my child spend a lot of time in the pram, walker or highchair?
Did my child miss out on or have almost no tummy time, back time and time being carried by me?
Did my child move through all the movement milestones or did she skip some steps?
Was her early childhood a traumatic time in our family’s life?
These are some of the general markers of primitive reflex activity in an older child. Ask yourself:
Does my child have poor balance?
Was she delayed with her motor milestones? (Not sitting until after 10 months, not crawling until after a year etc.)
Does my child have low muscle tone? Does she fatigue quickly and have a soft, floppy body?
Does my teenager get motion sick easily?
Does my child battle to stay still?
Does my child struggle to work out how to carry out a procedure, including mental procedures?
Does my child struggle with organising herself in general, compared to other children her age?
Does my child W-sit?
Does my child find cutting-out difficult?
Does my child sit either in a ‘cooped up’ or a ‘spread right out’ fashion? When her head is bent, does her whole body tuck up? Or when her head tips back, do her arms and legs straighten?
Does my child have a ‘hook grasp’ in writing — their wrist hooked around so they can watch themselves write?
Does my child have an ape-like walk?
Does my child find it difficult to sit for long periods of time?
Does my child find it hard to break up words into syllables?
Is my child a messy eater?
Is she often chewing or sucking on non-food items?
Does she make noises constantly, such as little sucking sounds or lip smacking?
Was she late developing hand dominance or had no clear dominance by 30 months of age?
Does she have difficulty making her eyes track smoothly along a line of text after seven years of age?
Does she struggle to concentrate in a busy environment?
Does she find it hard to reach across her body to pick something up — to reach into the right side space with the left hand and the left side space with the right hand?
Does she have a poor short-term memory?
Could she cope okay with schoolwork at a primary level but not so well at high school?
If you agreed with points in this list, then please keep reading. If you have opened the book here (which is where my friend Cindy says she’d be starting), please consider reading the beginning of Part Three, which is all about how movement normally develops.
In 2003 education researchers at the University of Western Australia asked boys with ADHD to bring a friend without ADHD in to be tested for primitive reflexes. They found that the boys with ADHD had active primitive reflexes. Their friends did not. The researchers also found that if the primitive startle reflex was present, then that child would also have more reflexes. The startle reflex was a gatekeeper to higher development.12 Throughout the book I’ve talked about the startle reflex but I did not mention another, even earlier reflex that may also act as a gatekeeper.
A stressful in-utero environment or birth trauma or some kind of in-utero accident is also considered to potentially lead to children who also keep the precursor to the startle reflex, which is called the fear paralysis reflex. This reflex is simply that ‘freeze’ that occurs in many of us in situations of great terror: although we want desperately to move, we cannot. For many people it is something they only experience in dreams. And, at a guess, it may be something that is ‘retriggered’ as part of panic attacks. It is barely mentioned in the wider research literature, although it is discussed on the internet, and as it is not something I have personally treated it is only getting the briefest of mentions here.
If you have a toddler who faints through holding her breath or seems to suffer occasional ‘paralysis’, you might like to investigate the fear paralysis reflex as a possible cause. (Adults very occasionally report these symptoms too, often coupled with hypersensitivity to sensation.) The fear paralysis reflex has also been suggested as a cause of sudden infant death, and the research reports suggesting this also strongly support recommendations to sleep babies on their backs.13
Sally Goddard, the Irish therapist who remains the most influential writer on the role of primitive reflex activity in learning, also links muteness (inability to speak) to the fear paralysis reflex. There is a treatment path available, so it is certainly something for parents of such children to consider.14 Children who still have a fear paralysis reflex will not have been able to fully develop their primitive startle reflex, so they are one step further back on the journey.
We are going to focus more on the primitive startle reflex as it appears at this present time to be a far more common issue. You might be wondering why children from normal home environments might have a startle reflex retained. The answer to that is not at all clear, but the children that the UWA researchers were testing actually lived around the university, which is very much inhabited by middle-class families. Certainly with no generational poverty.
The strongest piece of connected research reinforces that there is no safe level of drinking in pregnancy. This shows that children whose mothers use alcohol, even at very low levels, both startle abnormally in the womb and for longer afterwards.15 And supporting the idea that it is the startle reflex that contributes to some of the behaviours of disorganised attachment, mothers who drink are more likely to have children showing disorganised attachment.16
This is not to say that all children with ADHD had mothers who drank while pregnant. It has not been researched in humans, but clinicians and non-drinking parents have said to us that they suspect high doses of MSG in takeaway food at the wrong time during pregnancy might have been a factor. In rats similar effects from MSG have certainly been found, and, supporting clinicians’ views that healing is possible, these effects are not necessarily permanent. The rat’s development is very delayed, but not permanently damaged.17
If your child has a fear paralysis reflex she is likely to have difficulties with the startle and all other primitive reflexes. If your child has a startle reflex, then it is most likely she will also have retained most other primitive reflexes.
As you will see, this profile is very similar to a child with a lack of right brain development, met in the last appendix. Look for:
a combination of primitive reflex signs, such as poor balance, motion sickness, poor coordination, poor auditory skills, delayed eye movements
a semi-permanent upper respiratory tract infection
difficulty coping with moving from one activity to another
‘all or nothing’ emotional responses
photosensitivity; bright lights bother these children
problems with reading and other visual-perceptual tasks
hypervigilance: constantly scanning for a threat
aggressive boys and withdrawn girls
a ‘fists up’ movement pattern in response to a surprise (child jerks up clenched fists), or an absolute refusal to lie on her back and float in swimming
stronger reactions to sensation than most children
after a ‘bad patch’ at home, all gains in classroom skills will be lost.
Parents and teachers always need to consider this as an explanation when a child comes from a home with a history of domestic violence or has lived in a war zone or through a natural disaster.
How can parents and teachers help?
If you feel that there are attachment and safety issues, the healing must start with you, the parent, and by changing the environment. (Some ideas on healing attachment are described in the previous appendix).
Institute a routine so that the child always knows what is coming next.
Movements that will assist are those that help in integrating the startle reflex in babies. Loving touch to the face and hands and feet, such as face painting, hand games (‘Clap clap if you feel you want to’, ‘Round and Round the Garden’), feet games (being barefoot and playing ‘This Little Piggy’). These are just suggestions, use your imagination!
Strongly consider a massage program using essential oils like lavender to relieve stress.
Balance games, specifically those that let the child move through the startle movements: rocking backwards on her bottom and throwing her arms and legs out wide and then drawing them back in. Making an office chair spin by thowing legs and arms out and then bringing them in again.
Singing, particularly in a high voice as this stimulates the vestibular nerve.
Eye movement exercises.
What will help this child cope in the school setting?
For teachers these children can be very difficult to manage as the only thing that gets their attention in a normal classroom are big scary movements and loud angry voices, because they are scanning the room for threat and until a threat presents they don’t attend. The only way through is a very quiet and controlled classroom, where students feel safe. Only when your students feel safe will they learn. Teachers who are imperturbably calm are the best for these students.
We also strongly recommend the ‘turtle technique’. This can be used across the school or the class. It is introduced by telling the story of a little turtle with anger management issues. He is always in trouble, so a wise, elderly turtle teaches him to pull back into his shell until he is able to come up with a response that won’t get him into trouble. This position of pulling back into your shell is basically the foetal position. The class rule is any child in that position is left alone. It is the ‘stopping and thinking’ position.
Position affected children away from each other. The Meekatharra District High School, in Western Australia, removed tables and chairs from one room and replaced them with tents. This has led to a much calmer, safer classroom, and one where children get much of the floor time they missed as babies.
Deliberately burn off stress hormones in students before class. Exercise is one way. Fascinatingly, one school in the Murchison has a climbing wall, a high ropes course and a ‘cage’ that drops terrifyingly but safely to the ground. They have found that teenagers perform a great deal better in the classroom after adventure experiences and that the teenagers are happy to go again and again.
The Massage-In-Schools program, which counters the stress hormones with oxytocin, is another recommended intervention.
Finally, there are suggestions from research reports that an approach where children are given feedback on their heart rate variability will help them ‘tune in’ to their bodies and better manage their startle response.18 (See Chapter 8 for more information on heart rate variability.)
In the classroom there are always children who tip their chair backwards. Some children will be doing it to focus better — the feeling of falling backwards, with its echoes of the Moro, remains highly alerting throughout life. But if a child is always tipping back her chair, then losing control of herself and the chair, you should start suspecting not devilry but an active tonic labyrinthine reflex backwards. If the child has a lot in common with Jane in the following example, then it should be considered the most likely suspect:
Four-year-old Jane is a very busy little girl. She bounces on tippy-toes and wriggles incessantly. She is charming, her verbal skills are excellent and she talks a great deal. The careful observer will note she employs these verbal skills to save her from actually having to ‘do’ very much. Her dad calls her his Muppet-Puppet and that is simply because, from early on, Jane has reminded him of a puppet. Her movements are jerky and her limbs are a little stiff. As she runs on her toes across the oval it looks for all the world as if someone is rapidly working strings above her. Despite her speed, Jane is not an athletic kid. If something catches her attention when she is running she will ‘trip over her own feet’ and she never seems to get her hands up to protect her face in time. Like David she gets carsick easily. She does not like looking at books or doing puzzles; her parents say that she is their ‘free-range daughter’.
Jane has a retained tonic labyrinthine backwards. Her body is still dominated by the straightening and arching muscles on the back of her torso, so there is a profound imbalance between her front and back muscle compartments. As a baby, Jane learned to roll early to get where she wanted to go, and then began pulling herself into standing. She didn’t sit at all. She was cruising (walking by holding onto furniture) very early and walking at ten months. Not having crawled she hasn’t developed the near vision required for books and puzzles. Whenever she looks up her body extends a little more, her toes straighten and she trips.
Why is this little girl so busy? Our sense of self comes from feeling ourselves to be ‘in our body’ and knowing where we are in space. Jane is never quite sure; the constant ‘tripping’ of the reflex is interfering with her balance sense and there is a mismatch between the visual and balance information she has. Movement, though, provides information through touch receptors, about what is her body and what is not her body. This little girl races through a world that spins disorientatingly around her, constantly moving in an attempt to keep her sense of self intact in an unreliable world.
Remember that children may either have a TLR forwards, where the child has stronger ‘curling up’ than ‘straightening out’ muscles or a TLR backwards, where the reverse is the case. It’s all about an imbalance between the two muscle groups.
Ask yourself:
Was my baby a ‘bum shuffler’ (sitting up, she moved by pushing herself along with her legs instead of crawling)?
Was my baby a ‘bear walker’ (she kept her legs straight in crawling)?
Does my child have poor muscle tone? Does she lean on me, desks, walls and other children, fatigue rapidly and have a less expressive face? When you massage her back, does it feel ‘jellyish’ rather than muscular? TLR forwards — stronger curling up muscles.
Does my child have jerky, puppet-like movements and walk on her toes? TLR backwards — stronger straightening out muscles.
Does my child still get motion sick after puberty?
Is my child always tripping over her own feet? Is she clumsy when putting things down? Make sure her vision is accurate, but also consider the TLR. For children who have an existing prescription, glasses being changed may ‘set off’ some TLR signs. Children with rapidly changing prescriptions are likely to have a number of these difficulties because this reflex is all about matching position to visual information, and if the visual information keeps changing it puts the system under stress.
Does my child have terrible difficulty staying still; not fiddling, but moving her whole body continually? If she rocks on the chair and spins, consider an active TLR. Don’t stop her if this occurs while she is concentrating as she is using it to help along brain growth. You must also ‘exclude’ for giftedness with this behaviour. If the child is also prone to lots of talking with rich idea development, strong response to sensory information or nervous ‘tics’ in movement when excited, giftedness is a potential diagnosis. Of course, there’s nothing to stop a gifted child also having an active TLR. It is a matter of looking at the whole child.
Does my child have problems with space perception?
Does my child struggle to work out how to do certain activities, such as knowing whether to push or pull? This also applies with problems mentally reversing procedures in maths or spatial problems. A lack of mental flexibility here can be directly related to the inflexibility created by a lack of fully developed mature reflexes, due to the presence of underlying primitive reflex activity.
Does my child W-sit or sit with her legs wrapped around chair legs?
Does my child have ‘sight words’ but great difficulty moving her eyes along a line of text? This may have to do with lack of eye dominance (see Chapter 19) also.
Does my child have untidy handwriting? A retained TLR is one potential cause of this.
Does my child have problems with maths problems when they are written vertically?
Does my child have difficulties with organising space, such as keeping her desk and room tidy? If she has other TLR signs then strongly consider a TLR.
How can parents and teachers help? Remember that you are seeking to provide the movement sequences that the child missed or didn’t have enough of as a baby:
Get the child to spin around and around on her bottom to music.
Ask the child to roll in as straight a line as possible. This is much harder than it sounds.
Encourage her to rock on her back, moving from lying down to sitting in an uncurling, gentle and slow movement.
Have your child climb into a barrel (you can purchase these from toy stores) and make it roll.
Ask your child to lie on her tummy and throw her beanbags to catch.
Make a scooter board for your child — a square of wood 300 mm x 300 mm covered with carpet with four castor wheels on the bottom — and encourage her to scoot around the house on it.
Swimming is excellent for integrating the TLR — often children show a massive improvement at school after their first summer of swimming lessons. Particularly good exercises are ‘duck’ diving and kicking while holding a float.
How do I help a child with an active TLR cope with school?
Awareness is important for teachers. When the teacher knows that the child doesn’t like physical education because the reflex makes it impossible for her to succeed, or that the child will struggle with maths presented in vertical sums, he can build a stronger relationship with the student.
Students of all ages should not be allowed to ‘W-sit’. Teachers need to look out for both this position and the child wrapping her legs around chairs. This prevents the child integrating the TLR in sitting as she uses her leg muscles instead of her trunk muscles to achieve balance.
Donald is six. He is a dear little boy with a cooperative nature. He wants to do well in school. He succeeds pretty well, except for when he must put pencil to paper. He carefully holds the pencil the way he has been taught, tightens his hold into a ‘death grip’ and bends his head over his paper. All sorts of ideas are boiling in his head ready to be translated to paper! But within short order, his hand stretches itself out straight. He lets go of his pencil and looks at his outstretched hand and then his attention switches to out the window where the school principal can be seen, walking across the lawn with visitors.
Luckily, before the principal can notice him looking out the window, Don’s teacher (who understands the activity of the asymmetrical tonic neck reflex) catches his attention and reminds him to use his non-writing hand to hold his book. And as soon as both arms are bent his attention returns to his writing. Unfortunately, he is five minutes behind the other children yet again.
There is a lot of controversy about when the asymmetrical tonic neck reflex should have been integrated by a child — some people saying at six months14 and others in the school years.19 While it may not sound very interesting, this argument underlies a far more controversial topic. By proving that an active ATNR is found in normal children, critics of movement programs seek to rebuff claims that such programs help children succeed in school, particularly with reading.20 Equally, by showing primitive reflex activity in children who have problems in school, researchers hope to promote movement programs.21
Unfortunately, the research from both sides can be contaminated by the fact that these competing sets of researchers often have programs to sell to parents and teachers. I have seen movement programs contribute greatly to improvements in children’s reading, however. I have also found a correlation between the children who are struggling with school and the presence of the ATNR in whole class screens. And there have been a number of studies that support this.14
So how could prescribing movement improve reading skills? I believe that better impulse control and attention (both are critical for the development of a good working memory) happens in part by the child becoming ‘free’ from the constraints of the primitive reflex movements. There is a lot of support for this theory. Research shows that both children with ADHD and those with reading difficulties (often called ‘dyslexia’) show particular movement difficulties.22, 23, 24 For example, if a child still has an active ATNR it keeps both sides of her body doing opposing things. This makes bilateral movement very difficult, and bilateral movement builds the bridge between the right and left sides of the brain. This has huge implications for reading. The bridge between the two hemispheres is called the ‘corpus callosum’, and scientists have found that there are quite clear differences here between the brains of readers and non-readers.24,25 The difference occurs in a part of the corpus callosum which they think connects up with the part of the brain responsible for eye tracking.26
If your child is struggling to read, I believe that, among the other issues (see Appendix V: Troubleshooting reading) you need to consider an active ATNR. Little boys are more likely to retain this reflex; something else for parents of boys to bear in mind.27
The way therapists check for an ATNR is to ask the child to go upon all fours, knees bent and fingers and thumbs pointing forward. If the hand is out to the side the child will be ‘locking’ her elbows. Then we explain to the child that we are about to turn her head to the side, and ask her consent to do this. If the elbow on the ‘skull side’ of her head bends, that is the ATNR in action. You might like to check this on your child. Also, ask yourself:
Did my child miss the milestone of rolling as a baby?
Does my child struggle to bring scissors and paper together when trying to cut?
Does my child battle with keeping both arms bent when using a knife and fork. Does she prefer to use her fingers or just one implement?
Does she hook her whole arm around her pencil when writing so she can watch herself form letters?
Did my child develop a dominant hand later than three years of age?
Does my child struggle to cross the midline of her body?
Does my child find it difficult to converge both eyes on a single close object, like a word?
Is my child is over eight years and reversing all the different types of symbols, including letters, words and numbers?
Does my child seem to battle to write anything down because she is not able to hold paper and pencil simultaneously?
Does my older child struggle to experience a free flow of ideas, even without being asked to write them down?
Does my child have problems with attention, including difficulties with attending to the text she is reading?
How can parents and teachers help?
Encourage rolling games.
Make a scooter board for your child — a square of wood covered with carpet with four castor wheels on the bottom — and encourage her to twirl around and around.
Sit down with her and do activities like jigsaws or building with construction toys and keep prompting her to keep both arms bent.
Play games which actually ‘move her’ through the reflex position. Go back to pages 145–147 and read through all the ways in which babies work through the ATNR and see if you can play games that mimic this. For example, the child lies on her back with her eyes closed and brings her thumb down towards her nose and then opens her eyes to check how well she guessed where her thumb was compared to her nose. Another is to flip from side to side on her back. First of all, she is to follow the dictates of the reflex — the hand she is looking at is extended and the opposite arm bent. Then reverse this, so she keeps the hand behind her head extended and the hand she is looking at in close.
Any games where both arms are bent or both arms straight are good, such as tug of war, paddling an imaginary canoe, cartwheels, wheelbarrows, pretend to drive.
How do I help a child with a retained ATNR cope with school?
Teachers need to encourage this child to keep both arms bent. Otherwise, once an arm is extended, the child is likely to have difficulty keeping her attention on her flexed arm and her work. Her attention is drawn inexorably to her outstretched hand, and from there, out the window or to another child.
Teachers need to particularly encourage this child to cross her midline, otherwise she draws on half the page, writes on half the page and reads half the page. So when she is colouring-in, ensure she is using sweeping, crossing-the-midline strokes and not tiny little movements. When reading, check that the finger traverses the whole line. Make sure she doesn’t keep her work on the right or left of her body but in the middle, so that she must keep crossing her midline.
So connected are the hands and mouth that we find that children who still have rooting and suck reflexes also have their involuntary grasp (Palmar) reflex as well. For this reason we have grouped the reflexes together here, because helping to integrate one will help in integrating the others.
Ask yourself:
Does my child chew on pencils, erasers, hair, sleeves or collars?
Is my teenager’s voice more childlike than I would expect?
Is my child hypersensitive around her lips and mouth?
Does my child sometimes dribble while eating?
Does my child have unclear speech?
Does my child have poor fine motor skills?
Does my child have an unusual pencil grip?
Are her palms hypersensitive?
If my child is talking, do her fingers twitch? And, when engaged in a challenging fine motor task, does she screw up and work her mouth?
How can parents and teachers help?
Many teachers and parents stop the child sucking only to discover that her fine motor skills become worse still. The answer is to deliberately exploit the link between hands and mouth to improve her fine motor skills. Add the sucking back in, but in more socially acceptable ways. The ‘Sip and Crunch’ program, which encourages children to bring water bottles and carrot sticks to school, helps here as chewing and sucking during fine motor tasks assists children to integrate sucking and develop precision in fine motor activities.
The Palmar reflex — involuntary closing of the hand to a touch on the palm — is integrated in infancy by touch to the palm. It is much harder to integrate later on, but the same principle applies — touching the palm in a way that motivates the child to keep it open is what you want. So pushing games, clapping games and games like ‘Round and round the garden’ where the parent is tracing a finger over the child’s palm are still the best ones. Crawling games (playing ‘What’s the time, Mr Wolf?’ where everyone has to crawl, for example) and chair push-ups are excellent for older children as both provide heavy pressure to the palms.
The touching the face games used for a startle reflex are also helpful.
These children also often show ‘tactile’ problems, so you might like to read through the list of markers in the following appendix and include those suggestions in your program.
This reflex has only the briefest mention in Part Three, to say that baby needs time on her back to integrate this reflex. So what happens if your child has kept it?
Lauren appears to have ‘ants in her pants’. When she’s sitting down, she’s squirming about on her seat. When she’s wearing shorts with a waistband that is a bit tight she also squirms. She drives her teacher mad with her inability to ‘listen with her whole body’. The sitting very still that denotes attentive listening doesn’t seem to be possible for Lauren.
Her walk is a bit unusual, as though she is ‘hitching up’ one hip as she walks. And, although seemingly unconnected to her physical peculiarities, this little girl also has great difficulty remembering. Her memory is so poor that sight words that she knows on Friday have vanished by Monday, much to her distress. She loses maths facts overnight. The continued action of the spinal galant also makes it difficult to develop the mature reflexes required for fluency in movement. Now in Year Four, she’s struggling to master the skills required for sport in upper primary. On top of everything else, she sometimes still wets the bed.
This is an extreme example, but as a clinician I have met two children like Lauren.
One of the interesting aspects of this reflex is the question posed about just why it has such an effect on short-term memory. Does it impact simply by decreasing attention span, which has a negative effect on working memory? Or is there something else going on as well? There is the barest hint in the research reports that the spinal galant may be used by babies in the womb to respond to and remember sounds.14, 28
Therapists ask children (or adults) to go onto hands and knees and then trace down one side of their lower spine with something soft like a feather or a brush. If they wriggle involuntarily to that side, then the reflex is still present. If the reflex hasn’t been found after three ‘strokes’ then it isn’t there.
Also, ask yourself:
Does my child appear to have ‘ants in the pants’?
Does my child wet the bed?
Does my child have a scoliosis or a limp?
Does my child struggle with storing things in long term memory? Does she battle to recall maths facts, for example?
Even though I can get my child to bring her attention to bear on something, does she struggle to keep on concentrating?
How can parents and teachers help?
Just as in infancy, this reflex is integrated in an older child by having her lie on her back and kick. Due to the action of the reflex, this does make children very flatulent, so we’ve learned to always do these activities outside on the lawn!
Such lying and moving around on her back games could include asking her to catch and throw beanbags with her feet, wriggling along on her back through a tunnel, asking her to pass balls to another child with all children lying on their backs, rolling games and teaching her forward rolls.
Let her work on her tummy to learn new things: this way she can concentrate unhindered by involuntary squirming.
Try to avoid her wearing something ‘tickly’ on her back if at all possible.
The most commonly given suggestion is for children with a retained spinal galant to be given a soft cushion to sit on, as this makes their constant shifting less distracting for others.
This was the reflex that gave baby a ‘bend at the hips’. Of course, children who bum shuffle or bear crawl or only crawl very briefly haven’t released this reflex. So how does this involuntary movement pattern affect older children?
If they are looking down, their arms bend and their knees straighten. If they are looking up, their arms straighten out and their knees bend. Imagine sitting at a desk. You look up in response to the teacher and your arms straighten, taking your hands from your work. When you look back down at your work, your arms bend but your legs and hips straighten, making sitting on a chair most uncomfortable. These children are consequently extraordinarily restless; being asked to sit and write unleashes an unconquerable urge to wander about the room.
With all the difficulties these children have in sitting and balancing, they often resort to the W-sitting we mentioned earlier. The position is bad for backs, knees and ankles: some long term W-sitters have needed surgery to loosen up ligaments in later life.
The STNR has been explicitly linked to ADHD by some researchers.14 So will a program of movement designed to integrate primitive reflexes such as the STNR help every single child with ADHD? No. It will certainly help some, but only those for whom the primitive reflex is still active.
When Mum and I began working with children many years ago, she would only find about one child who had an active STNR every year or so. It was one of the more unusual findings. In the Murchison where we now work, it is more common than not. And, as children are spending less and less time crawling, it is an increasingly common finding around Australia.
Therapists test for an STNR by asking a child to go upon hands and knees and then bending her head gently up and down. If the child resists the movement or her hips, knees and elbow straighten or flex based on head position, the reflex is still active.
You might also like to ask yourself:
Did my child miss crawling?
Is my child very uncomfortable in sitting?
Is my child over seven and without a dominant eye?
Does my child W-sit?
Does my child have an ape-like walk?
Does she slump at the desk or table?
Does she hate copying from the board?
Is she finding it hard to learn to swim?
This reflex is still best integrated by the same movements used by infants on the way to crawling and by crawling itself.
Play bunny-hops with your child.
Make crawling games more fun by making tunnels and playing spotlight — your child creeps up on you in the dark, making sure to freeze when you switch on your torch. If you catch her moving, she must go back to the start point.
Swimming is also important. Ask your child to swim with her face under water much of the time, blowing bubbles and using the flutter or kick board for support.
For school, provide these children with tilted desks to help keep both arms bent even when their head is tilted back.
As each of these different reflexes fits into place — no longer active but lying tame in your child’s brain — she will add the adult reflexes to her movement repertoires. Teachers and parents have found time and time again that these movement patterns really do help their children get ready for learning. (Circus, Brain Gym and the Alexander Technique also contain these same movement elements.)
But remember, just as she did when she was an infant, your child will require lots and lots of these movement experiences for the change to happen. Before starting I recommend you line up 21 consecutive days on which to put in the program. This will help doing the program to become a habit for you and your child. You might see changes in as little as six weeks but my experience is that it takes about 14 months on a program to see permanent change. And when your child has a growth spurt you may find you need to do the exercises again.