Our Approach to Developmental Delays

How we approach a child with a developmental delay, a learning delay, attentional issues, or behavioral issues is much different than what you're going to get in almost every place.

This difference is because we look at how the child has developed from birth to where they are now, and we simply go back and work to redevelop through the things that should have normally neurologically developed from early on. What we will find in many cases is that neurologically, these systems aren't developed appropriately. For example, your child will likely still have primitive reflexes that should have gone away in the first year of life that never did, they won't have developed their balance centers appropriately, or they won't have developed their eye tracking centers appropriately. All three of these systems, the foundational systems, are needed to develop, to feed the higher brain centers information so those higher brain centers can develop. Those cognitive centers can then start to develop. At this point, once we get these foundational systems developed, they start feeding into our higher brain centers. That is when we can actually start doing different cognitive activities to start to develop your cognitive skills. Many times this process is looked at backwards. Others are trying to do cognitive based tasks to try to calm down or regulate the brain. We have found that it works much more efficiently to work from a bottom-up approach to the brain versus a top-down approach to the brain.

The reason for this is very simple. Your brain develops from the bottom up and from the inside out. When we are working on a child, we want to work on them in the appropriate sequence that those systems are supposed to develop.

As your brain develops, we want to follow. When we do that, we see some amazing things happen. We can work on some different primitive reflexes or balance center eye tracking issues, and we see massive cognitive changes. We see massive learning improvements. We see behavioral regulations start to happen, and we've done nothing to try to “treat” that symptomatology. We have worked to help that child to develop more efficiently. No matter what a child comes into our office with, whether it is behavioral issues or learning issues or attention issues or headaches, we begin to approach them. As we work through them, the brain will continue to mature and develop, and that makes the biggest difference in the results that we see.