“The best way to predict the future is to create it.” – Abraham Lincoln

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A Better Understanding, A Better Future

How does your child experience their world? What do they see, hear, feel and think when they look at puzzle pieces or at the pictures or words on a page of a book? What do they hear when you are speaking to them in a crowded room? How do they feel when they step barefoot on grass or when ice cream drips on their fingers? What do they understand when you are speaking with them? Why do they have problems remembering? Does he love me as much as I love him?

Knowing what and how your child is perceiving their world helps us understand why they are having difficulty paying attention, understanding, remembering, making mistakes, having trouble communicating, connecting with others and learning.

How each child experiences their world, and importantly, the people in their world, through their body, their senses and their feeling states are starting points for improving our interpersonal connections and communication with the child and discovering better ways to help them to progress.

We sensitively and empathically observe and listen to the child so we can join the child, and the child will want to join us. As we engage with each other, we begin making hypotheses about what may be the child’s sense of themselves, what they may think of us, and their possible thoughts and feelings about current, past, and possible future experiences.

When we become confident and comfortable enough with the child and with ourselves, we step out of ourselves and try to experience the world from their perspective. We are part play and learning partner and part scientist/detective. We come to understand that nothing happens for only one reason, and nothing stands still, and that both the child and ourselves are always changing.

As we improve our understanding of the child, the child is also learning about us. It is an exciting, dynamic reciprocal process. Partners in development are continually changing with every experience, with every thought, feeling and action.

Our interpersonal relationship, the way we communicate with each other, the way the child and the adult mediator are playing, learning, and solving problems together, is continually evolving, constantly being constructed and reconstructed with each interactive, reciprocal experience.

Learning and Development are either Strengthened or Weakened

Few aspects of any interpersonal relationship or learning experience remain neutral, unchanging. For the most part, understanding and development are either strengthened or weakened depending on the relevance, validity, quality and depth of the assessments and the mediated activities, play and learning experiences.

Nurturing, assessments, teaching and treatments are always consequential. They either affect the child positively or negatively. The child either gains from the experience or loses. They may lose time, interest, curiosity, attention, motivation to be with this or other mediators, and affect whether the child wants to be involved in future learning experiences.

A genuine, enriching, pleasurable interpersonal human relationship is key to learning, to improved communication, development and progress. It mostly depends on each and every one of the adults on the child’s development team. On the quality of each mediator’s ongoing assessments and interventions. On their belief, empathy, understanding and commitment.

One bad apple assessor-mediator can undermine the progress the child has been making with their other, more insightful and more skillful assessor-mediators.

False Prophets

The mother of a two-year-old little girl with undiagnosed developmental delays in multiple domains contacted me. She heard that a highly regarded pediatric neurologist from abroad would be touring our Center. She asked if she could arrange a visit with this neurologist to assess her daughter at our clinic, since he did not have an office in our city.

I agreed and asked the mother if I could attend the assessment if the physician agreed.

The physician listened to a brief medical history given by the mother. He sat the child on his knee and did a cursory neurological evaluation. After a few minutes, he sighed deeply and said, “I can’t give you a conclusive diagnosis, but I can tell you this: either your child will always stay the same, or will get worse, or could even die within a few years. There is very little chance of improvement.”

The child’s mother looked shocked. She turned pale and sat motionless. She could not speak. I helped the mother pick up her child and walked them into the hall, and asked a woman in the waiting room to sit next to the mother and child for a few minutes while I re-entered the room where the physician was waiting.

I took the doctor into the office of the director of the Center and described to the director what had just happened. Then I said to the physician, “From what I just witnessed, your medical license should be revoked. You have no heart, you have no brain, and you have no soul. You are not a physician, you are not even a human being.”

He had nothing to say and walked out.

When I spoke about the physician’s disastrous assessment in our weekly staff meeting, our director of speech therapy related the terrible experience of a mother of a child with special needs that she was treating.

The child’s mother had related to our speech therapist that several months before coming to her for treatment, she had asked her daughter’s pediatrician to make a speech therapy referral for her child. The physician said to the mother, “Let me be straight with you, I think that even if you were a monkey, your child would never know the difference. Don’t waste your money on therapies.”

These two arrogant, misinformed, contemptible “experts” had not “assessed” the child. They had “cursed” the child and the child’s family under the cover of “professional” credentials and pompous, misinformed, misguided honesty and possibly good intentions for the sake of the family’s feelings, resources and wellbeing. I will give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they were thinking, “It would not be kind to give you false hope or to raise false expectations.”

Ill-informed, pessimistic prophesies of “no potential” are false, misleading, and malicious. They sap the air and the energy out of the room. Parents cannot breathe. It steals away the parents’ hopes and blocks the child’s future.

Self-fulfilling Prophesies

When there is no belief, no hope, there is little or no genuine effort made to help the child progress. The foolish words become tragic self-fulfilling prophecies. It is obvious that when belief is destroyed, when needed interventions and treatments are withheld, of course, the child will not progress. Then, years later, the “experts” can say, “See, I told you your child would not progress.”

I have heard these terrible, pessimistic prophecies for years and take these misguided opinions as a casus belli.

For many years, I have taught and treated children with serious developmental delays. I worked with their dedicated parents and with positive, talented, and dedicated teachers and therapists. Every day, we refuted these uninformed, false experts, these false prophets, and celebrated each child’s efforts and progress.

My Credo

• All children can experience ongoing, satisfying interpersonal relationships.

• All children can learn how to learn.

• All children can achieve richer, more adaptive, and more successful lives.

• All families can have many genuine and rewarding celebrations as their child learns, succeeds, and progresses.

This is not based on pie in the sky naïve optimism. It is based on our years of experience with thousands of children and their families.

The Foundations of the Relationship

Ongoing Parallel Assessment and Parallel Development, involving well-mediated interpersonal learning relationships, are the key to the advancement of children with delayed development.

1. belief, respect, understanding, effort, time, enjoyment, planning, coordination and cooperation on the part of the parents, caregivers, teachers and therapists

• interest, enthusiasm, joy, attention, joint attention, empathy, attunement, inter-affectivity, communication and collaboration on the part of the child and their adult mediators

• learning, advancement and development are reciprocal in the child and in their adult mediators

Once a strong, positive human relationship is established, learning and development become truly possible. As this bond grows, ongoing observations help assess the child’s progress. We look for signs of empathy and social connection, of purposeful attention, their bright eyes full of curiosity and knowing smiles and purposeful actions.

The adult thoughtfully prepares engaging and meaningful activities each day, fostering better two-way communication, enthusiastic and joyful collaboration, and the child’s eagerness to try even when it is difficult, their willingness to participate, their need to understand, to continue trying and wanting to come back again tomorrow.

As the child becomes better organized in their thinking and their feelings, their actions and behaviors change, become more intentional, and more successful. The child sees the adult differently, and the adult sees the child in a different way. There is a more accurate and more positive sense of who the child really is. They both gain more belief and respect for themselves and for the other.

The child is recognized as a changing, developing human being with greater human potential, a person with a meaningful future. A plan is designed. The child and their family and mediators willingly connect and learn together every day, and the interpersonal relationship, communication, thinking, and progress are continually evaluated during each interaction, and the quality of the assessments, planning, and mediation are continually enhanced based on the updated Parallel Assessments.

A more accurate, more valid, more positive, and more optimistic understanding of the child, of ourselves, and of the development process gives direction and maintains hope, imagination, enthusiasm, and energy so the child learns to do and to be what some “experts” may say can’t be done. 

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