Are your child’s therapies teaching them good or bad habits?
As parents, we know instinctively that it is important for our children to form good habits.
With the intention of supporting your special needs child to progress in their development, most parents are keen to pursue the different kinds of therapies that are available.
Needless to say, you will be evaluating the effectiveness of your child’s therapies in terms of your child’s progress toward whatever goals you are trying to achieve.
BUT, have you ever really paid careful attention to your child’s physical and emotional responses during their therapy sessions?
Here are some questions that might be helpful for you to begin asking yourself:
- Is my child struggling to perform tasks that are too difficult?
- Is my child tensing their whole body, thereby tightening up the muscles that are not required for the action they are trying to achieve?
- Is my child only learning by rote with repeated drilling of the same posture or movement?
- Is my child being supported with the understanding that they do have choices or options in any given situation?
- Is my child happy, anxious or hesitating?
Many parents and therapists alike believe that children need to ‘work hard’ in order to make progress with their physical disabilities.
Often times we cheer our children on, encouraging them to try harder and praising them for their effort.
Yes, hard work might offer some apparently immediate gains in your child’s abilities. However, it could also inadvertently slow down your child’s progress in the long run by creating bad habits.
Repeated practice of any rigid movement pattern could imprint it deeply into your child’s nervous system which then becomes their go-to or default choice.
This could limit the opportunities for your child to practice a variety of movement strategies through which they can learn to be flexible and adapt to various movement challenges, be it learning to sit, stand or to balance on one leg.
As an example, is your child ‘defaulting’ to a rigid way of sitting up?
Can your child sit up from lying on their side or does your child roll onto their stomach every time in order to sit up? If your child can only come up to sitting in one specific way, you can begin to understand what I’m talking about.
In the next issue we will discuss how healthy movements can be developed and one important key to support your child with learning good habits.
In the meanwhile, notice what you notice about your child’s habits…
