… there was so much to see, and hear, and touch walks to take, hills to climb, caterpillars to watch the special smell of each day …
Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth, 1961.23
Our inherent sensory preferences and sensitivities shape the people we become: our likes, abilities and vocations. The child with a genetic propensity for good coordination has a lot of room on her body map: she will be capable of far more refined movement as she is able to better organise information coming in through her touch and body senses. This is the baby who is sitting up and accurately matching pot lids to pots at five months of age. Another baby may be humming in tune at eight months: he is better able to register and organise auditory information than most children.
In fact, most of us don’t think of perceptual sensitivity so much as skills but as character traits because they have so much influence on how our child behaves. A child who is super-sensitive to touch is not going to be as outgoing as other children. She will be more easily upset. This looks like ‘difficult behaviour’, and yet any of us who experienced touch as taxing, invasive bombardment would behave the same way.
There are so many cross-linkages between perceptual sensitivity and the other self-regulation skills. Perceptual sensitivity is strongly linked to attention: we pay attention through our senses. Our senses are the spotlight we use to illuminate the world, and attention directs that spotlight. Perceptual sensitivity is also required for empathy, impulse control and theory of mind, because without it we do not detect the vital clues coming in from other people and the environment.
In the western world we tend to know most about the external senses: vision, touch, hearing, smell and taste. In our culture, making sure our babies have a range of different experiences in each sensory modality is something parents do well because it is part of our preoccupation with stimulating our babies. We tend to know less about the internal senses, the ones that detect head position, body position and movement. And yet these ‘secret senses’ play such a big part in a child’s learning.
Attachment and perceptual sensitivity
To grow the senses your baby needs movement. As your baby explores space, movement and time her already interconnected ‘sensory processing’ brain areas become a rich tapestry of pathways. She needs to devote as much time as possible to this, exploring for more data and sorting through what she’s learned. What allows a baby such a free rein and grants such confidence? A secure attachment.
In the beginning our babies are drawn into the world through their contact with us: the pleasure of loving touch, the enticement of our smiles and voices and smell, the stimulation of being rocked and held. We are their world to begin with, and the more predictably responsive we are, the faster our babies learn.
So a secure attachment is a big player in creating strong perceptual skills. Insecure attachments create children who are more focused on what Mum is doing; even the avoidant child, though apparently ‘off exploring’ is doing so in order to keep Mum close. The child’s attention is not on the wider world, but on staying safe. Learning occurs when a child is truly paying attention: the insecure child is not. A less well-developed sensory system will result.
With the world of Mum under her belt, the securely attached baby ventures out into the wider world. She knows that she is watched, that she is delighted in, that she will be rescued when it is required. This utter confidence that she will be kept safe allows her to enjoy the multi-sensory buzz of moving, seeing, hearing, balancing, touching all at the one time and under her own steam. Your baby learns to organise, synthesise, store and select from this massive volume of data to create a ‘continuous’ picture of the world. Eventually, her strong perceptual skills will bring her a great deal of joy: she will dissolve into a blue sky, surrender to music and feel herself accelerate away from the starting line.
I have just read all this to Mum. To my astonishment she responded by roaring with laughter. Eventually she stopped laughing and explained that my words had triggered her memory of how she and Dad had tried to teach me about the danger of falling off something. The house was full of such traps: verandas, high steps and so on. So they would place me up high on the mantelpiece or on the cupboard or on the forbidden top step and watch me anxiously for signs that my depth perception and sense of danger was developing. As soon as I looked like falling they would catch me.
So did I learn that high was dangerous? I didn’t. The entire time that I was up high I was being delighted in, kept safe, and rescued as required. What I learnt was that high was fun. By the time my siblings arrived my parents had learned to teach ‘danger’ simply with a warning gaze, a shake of the head and saying, ‘No, dangerous’.
As I write I frequently reach out to a mug. It’s an automatic motion. My hand ‘knows’ where the mug sits due to the information coming in from my peripheral vision. My expectation of the mug’s weight is already influencing the amount of muscle power I am recruiting to lift it. My hand is setting itself to wrap around the mug based on the ‘memory’ of its size. My fingers will slip around the outside and grip. I can bring it to my mouth without looking: tipping and opening my mouth will coincide without me needing to think about it.
So what makes this possible? It is my ‘inside senses’ at work. I have a sense of head position, called the vestibular sense, which tells my hand where to bring that cup. My kinaesthetic (body movement) sense is feeding back about any changes I make in my position. And, holding this all together is my sense of where I am in space, my proprioceptive sense. This is what is telling me where my mouth is in my head, where my hand is in relation to the cup and so on. I don’t need to look — I can just ‘feel’. With all those secret senses working in harmony with ‘touch’ and with each other, I can close my eyes and still know where every bit of me is. This is so basic to our lives that we don’t think about it.
When those senses are well developed our child will be able to write letters without looking because her hand will ‘know’ the shape of an ‘A’. I am often referred children who don’t have the sensory development to do this: they watch every letter as it is shaped by their pencil. They can’t get to the ‘automatic’ stage because they have to look to know what they are doing. They can’t just ‘feel it’. They can’t store the ‘memory of that feeling’ either. They are stuck.
What do therapists do when they meet a child like this? They go back to scratch, putting in the early sensory games that this child obviously needs more of to grow this particular sense. And we recommend that it is you who plays those games with her. Your child learns that way. Having fun with someone you love leads to the release of oxytocin, not just the love but the learning hormone, and rapid brain (neural) growth is the result.
Every child is different. Some children need more time to develop a particular sense. Some children are hypersensitive. But when parents play as much as they can of these games in early childhood, this rich, detailed sensorium can grow ‘the first time round’. You will find many early games described in the rest of this chapter, and more in Appendix IV.
In fact, we are born with just one sensory system ‘ready to go’ and it is this one: the vestibular or balance sense. The neurons that connect to the tiny little hair cells deep in the ear which detect position changes are hard-wired and working well before birth.
You might be thinking, ‘What about the auditory sense? Isn’t that also fully matured?’ They are very close to the same thing. The senses of hearing and balance share the ear. Physicists see both sound and movement as ‘vibration energy’, albeit vibration at different speeds. And this is something we all know innately. The near-exploding boom box that we can both feel and hear is the perfect example.
Fascinatingly, your baby doesn’t move around in utero just ‘because’, but in response to different sounds.24 So hearing and balance and movement are tied together from the very first.
On page 131 I wrote, ‘Beyond survival, though, the reflexes also link movement and sensation tightly together, paving the way for perceptual sensitivity and precise movement later.’ The reflexes are already linked to the ‘ready to go’ balance system, and their action tunes all the other senses to balance first.
Both my sisters are heavily pregnant at the moment. And because I always ask, they tell me just what their babies are doing. I like to hear that my nephews are kicking them in the ribs, because that means that baby is ‘head down’. This is a sign that baby is responding properly to gravity. I also like to hear that the babies are whizz-popping around because I know this means they are getting an unerring feel for upside down, right way up and ‘over to the side’. The babies who don’t settle head down in the womb or don’t move a great deal are at a disadvantage. Their sense of balance, to which all other senses are tuned, is not tuned correctly itself. Everything else will therefore be ‘out of whack’ (a lovely technical phrase!).
And it continues to be whole body movement that grows the balance sense. When you hold your baby close and roll over and over, tumbling the baby like a lioness does her cubs, you are growing the balance sense. When you rock your baby while gazing into her eyes you are helping her link balance and vision.
The kinds of activities which build the balance sense are:
Rolling games like ‘There were four in the bed and the little one said, roll over, roll over’. Help your baby or child roll, and start with quarter rolls and then back again. Encourage spinning games when your child is three and older.
Hanging upside down games. When your baby has good head control, sit her on your lap, then lean back a little and bring her up again. For an older child encourage her to swing sitting up on a bar, and then slowly encourage her to hang upside down with her eyes closed.
Holding your baby close, dance in a rocking motion to music with a steady beat. Rock an older child over a gym ball, with her in charge of the rocking.
Singing to your baby and your toddler. What stimulates the ear will also stimulate the vestibular nerve. So sing, sing, sing!
Rockers, seesaws, gym balls, scooter boards, barrels and giant saucers are all excellent for older children, indeed they are far better than the kind of toys and playground equipment that doesn’t move. What you are looking for is equipment that re-creates the early experience of being rocked and carried.
The receptors for position and movement are deep within the body, in the joints and muscles. They are activated by being stretched or squashed by muscle movement and pressure from outside — by weight, in other words. Children need to push, to pull apart, to lift, to squeeze between, to slide under, to tug, to jump, to climb, to hang: all the activities that require strength and the cooperation of big muscle groups.
There is far less of these types of experiences in children’s lives now. Toys are mostly made of light-weight plastic. The backyard trampoline has been replaced with indoor toys. Parents and teachers need to deliberately return heavy work or heavy play activities to children’s lives.
Here are some ideas to help grow the movement senses:
Rock your baby from side to side, or compress her shoulder joints gently when she is rocking backwards and forwards in preparation to crawling.
Let your child fill up her backpack with rocks and wear it. Don’t say, ‘Isn’t that too heavy?’ She might be seeking that very feeling.
Wrap up your child tightly in a sheet or blanket and then play that she is a caterpillar hatching from a cocoon, or a dragon hatching from an egg made of pillows and doonas.
Make objects your child likes to shift heavier: for example, tape phone books under chairs.
Play ‘wheelbarrows’ and wheel your child along.
Look for what she seeks and help her find it in safe ways. If she is rocketing off you or the walls she is seeking touch information to help her navigate. Play blindfold games so she can really fine-tune that sense.
The clumsiness that goes with growth spurts is often a result of a child not having yet linked her new body precisely to the map in the brain. If your child becomes very clumsy and even a bit emotionally uncertain after a growth spurt, you might like to consider helping her improve her body schema by adding in some touch feedback. Push firmly and heavily down on her shoulders and head and do a heavy compressive massage along her arms and hands.
Although I’m discussing the senses individually, the important thing is that they work together to tell a coherent story. Consider the ‘Where’s your nose, where’s my nose’ game that babies love so much. Baby is learning how far to reach to grab her nose and your nose without injuring herself or you. She is matching up visual information with the internal knowledge of where she is in space and time (her balance) and movement information and touch information and verbal information too. Each piece of information is being used to confirm the other pieces.
We find great joy in ‘playing’ with our senses throughout our lives — eating weird cuisine, spinning round and round, studying the illusion of depth in a hologram — and each of these experiences re-alerts us to the world. The ghostly touch in an empty room; the smell that seems to come from nowhere; the good taste of blue ice-cream coupled with its repulsive appearance; the sound of a train travelling past us in the cinema although there’s not a train in sight. All those illusions strike at the heart of what we learned in the first months of life: that information from one sense is always supported by information through another.
We only have to open our eyes and the world streams in. However, we are not just ‘receivers’ but interpreters of information. It is very easy to overload our babies and toddlers in our very visually stimulating world. When things are kept simpler then their interpretive skills are given a head start. So keep the environment as visually simple as you can. Think about keeping the number of toys available for play down to minimum (the one toy for each child rule is very useful here). When you do this your children will be able to better attend to just one toy, building both attention and visual skills. These are some ideas for early games:
When you notice that your baby has a particular toy she loves, play ‘Where has it gone, here it is’ games.
All games where your baby gets to ‘track’ a moving object are great. Encourage her to watch it move around the room. Roll balls and have your crawler chase them.
Lie your baby on her back and have her swipe at or try to catch a suspended object, or even your hand. This can get very giggly, which is an excellent thing.
Toys that operate by blowing and bubbles are great for helping children focus close up.25
Combine balance and visual stimulation by playing catching and throwing while a child is swinging, or grab playfully at baby’s feet while someone else moves them.
Books that have pop-outs, or make noises, or have different materials to touch encourage looking and touching and listening together, which supports the development of visual attention.
At the end of their second year of life, toddlers learn to position themselves near bookshelves or a favourite toy and wait for an unwary adult to walk past. They place one hand upon your leg and the other on the pile of books, and you have been caught in the toddler trap.
This pile of books is significant. Children are beginning to compare a bear in one book with a bear in another, and this is something to encourage. Your child is able to learn that a picture of an apple isn’t the same as another picture of an apple, but that both, regardless of differences, are apples. This is the same as knowing that the letter ‘A’ in one book is the same as the ‘a’ in another.
Slowly children become more and more able to tell the differences between shapes that are quite similar. An ‘a’ and ‘p’ are not so very different, but nowhere near as different as a horse and a giraffe are from each other. With lots of looking at things and lots and lots of talking about same and different, children get better and better at seeing differences. Discussing just how the horse and giraffe are different from each other is, in fact, how children are eventually able to tell you that an ‘a’ doesn’t have a tail but a ‘p’ does, than an ‘a’ looks to the start of a sentence and a ‘p’ to the end of the sentence and so on.
This is what your child is looking for when she traps you near the book pile or her favourite toy. This is what she is looking for when she asks so obscurely, ‘Why is it a truck?’ She doesn’t want to hear, ‘That’s just what it’s called’, she wants to hear that it’s because it’s bigger than a car but smaller than a bus. That it carries all sorts of things, but that cars carry people and so do buses. And so on. Visual perceptual skills are not developed just by looking; they are developed by looking and talking and doing all at once.
Make sure that you include in the book pile some rhyming books and alphabet books. Dr Seuss’s ABC, Lynley Dodd’s Hairy Maclary books, illustrated books of poetry full of C. J. Dennis and Robert Louis Stevenson, zoo animal alphabet books, Aussie icon alphabet books, rhyming alphabet books: as much rhyme and alphabet as you can lay your hands on. It is in this time period when children will want the same books read over and over that you can most easily build an appreciation of rhyme and alphabet. Make sure that as you read you don’t just point to the pictures, but also spend some time running your fingers along the text.
The current research is heading more and more to the view that reading is not actually helped directly by rhyme.26 Rhyme is something that children absolutely love, however, and if they love the rhymes, they will be more likely to love books. It does seem that lots of practice hearing the different sounds of the alphabet does help in learning to read.27
Not only that, but when reading alphabet books we tend to point to a letter, which is bolded and highlighted and much larger on the page, and say the sound it makes. We are explicitly teaching children that the sound goes with the shape. It is not terribly different from pointing to a cat and saying ‘miaow’. When you are reading, make sure that you don’t say ‘ay’ for the letter A but the main sound the letter produces, the short ‘a’ sound in cat. And so on. Knowing the sounds a letter makes is more helpful than knowing its name in learning to read.4, 11, 28
Our smell sense is working well from early in life — and while some senses can be missing in some people, just about everyone is born with a sense of smell. Babies know the smell of their mother’s breast milk because of its close match to the smell of her placental fluid.29 Because of the way the brain develops ‘up’, a good sense of smell helps grow a good touch sense. So a good sense of smell is more important than you’d think.
And anyone who has ever had an aromatherapy session knows that smell can improve mood, attention, planning and alertness.30, 31 And that using essential oils can be very helpful with a cranky, tired toddler. In general, though, I suggest that you talk about and share your responses to smell with your child, from the stinky nappy to the smell of furniture polish.
The touch sense is what gives precision to fine-motor movements and boundaries to our ‘body map’. In fact, there are different sorts of touch. ‘Light’ touch is what teaches precision while ‘heavy’ touch engages the body position and movement senses.
Infant massage is a celebration of the touch sense, but the most important part of infant massage, according to practitioners, is ‘asking the baby’s permission’. It is not about the right techniques but responding with sensitivity to your baby. Nothing changes as our child grows up. In introducing any kind of new touch experience, such as a new food, playdough, slime, sand or foam, show your baby that you expect it to be fun, but look for any signs that she doesn’t like it. Never push them to continue with an activity that is clearly making them uncomfortable.
Talk about same and different in terms of how much something weighs or how something feels. Same and different are vital concepts. From same and different your child will build ‘more and less’, ‘bigger and littler’, ‘darker and lighter’, all the way up to ‘p not b’. If this knowledge is purely delivered through the visual sense it is not as powerful. Linking what is seen with what is felt and what is heard is the way to go.
Just as we keep the environment visually simple to help our babies learn to interpret what they seeing, we also need to keep the aural landscape simple. To hear the difference between ‘t’ and ‘k’ babies need to be able to focus on our voice. Try to keep other sounds to a minimum when your baby is awake and playing: this means to turn off the television and radio for as much of the time as possible.
Once baby is crawling and grasping and banging, remember that she needs to hear the sounds she is making. Let her be in charge of the noise in the house, let her bang away on the pots and pans, make scraping sounds with a shovel, hammer or jump on bubble wrap. Sing songs with her where she gets to ‘turn the music up or down’.
Talk about sounds with her as they happen: birdsong, vehicle noises. Play games where you try and pinpoint just where the noise has come from. Then see if you can work out together what made the noise. Finally, play games to do with the sequence in which noises happen. This is following the normal developmental sequence: Where is it? What is it? What’s the order in which it happened?
From about two years you can start to play the sound remembering games:
Singing nursery rhymes with one line missing and ask your child to spot what was missing. Further refinements in this game include missing just one word or, eventually, just a sound.
Make ‘mistakes’ when reading her well-known books. Start by missing out words at the end of rhyming sentences, because they are the easiest to spot. (Lynley Dodd’s and Dr Seuss’s books work very well for this.)
When children turn three their language skills are such that most of them can hear phonemes (the individual sounds that make up w-or-d-s) quite well. You can slowly say to them ‘c’ (pause) ‘a’ (pause) ‘t’, and they can blend those together and say ‘cat’.11
One of the best pre-reading games you can play with your kindergartener or pre-primary child is to ask them to do this. You give them the sounds separated by a brief pause: ‘i’… ‘n’. What word does that make? When your child can blend two sounds together then you can move up to three and then four. (Other good games for auditory skills can be found in Appendix V.)
A large number of the pieces for reading come together in this preschool period. Does this mean your child is ready to learn to read? Probably not. This is covered in more detail in Part Five.
In all of these interactions, remember that babies and toddlers are not passive recipients of our efforts. From very early they are shaping us into the teachers and carers they need us to be. Recently Mum saw a five-month-old baby girl. Her mother explained that the baby would not hold her bottle for herself although all her friend’s babies were able to manage holding a bottle. So Mum explored every single reason a baby might not want to hold something.
Was the baby uncomfortable with tactile stimuli? No. The baby enjoyed touching and mouthing all kinds of objects. Was the position in the pram somehow uncomfortable for the baby — was the little neck ‘out’? No. The baby tolerated all sorts of different positions without difficulty. Was there a problem with grip? No. And so it went on. Eventually Mum tumbled to it. The baby had discovered that if she refused to hold the bottle, her mother would pick her up and cuddle her during the feed. She wanted those cuddles.
At five months old this little girl was ‘advance planning’ to get what she needed. That is what our children do, and from very early on. When children love a game they reward you with their delight. That tells you that this is a game they need to play again and again.
Also remember to follow your child’s lead. Never impose upon her. Never push past her comfort zone. Stop straightaway if she isn’t enjoying the game for whatever reason. When a parent demands that a child keeps playing despite her distress they are not just damaging the relationship but reinforcing a ‘yucky feeling’ going with a particular sensation. If you are not both having fun, then stop.
In Appendix IV you will find information about what can go wrong with sensory development and how to help a child with these kinds of difficulties.