Post #3 in category. We recommend reading posts in numerical order.

Note: Ideas expressed here are not meant to be given in report form, but rather to describe mindsets and methods in Organizing Minds blog posts.

Ideas and procedures in the post below can be tried and discussed with the child’s parents and each of the child’s adult mediators on the child’s development team during regular ongoing meetings.

Input, questions and specific examples are exchanged, elaborated, modified, improved and advanced during collaborative interactions and meetings.

Topic areas: Lessons from Early Childhood, Parallel Assessment, GPPSP, Developmental Domain (sensory), Attention, Mediation

Seeing the Neurodivergent Child Through the Lens of Early Development

I believe all children are better understood when we consider the processes and progressions of earlier chapters of typical, “normative,” development in infancy and toddlerhood.

Fragile attention, global movements, sensory fascination, cautious social awareness remain in many children whose development unfolds slowly or along alternate neurological routes.

Parallel Assessment and Parallel Development take into account the necessity of establishing early childhood prerequisites for communication and learning that typically form in utero and during the first few years of infancy and toddlerhood.

Most parenting, assessment, teaching and treatment programs begin working with the child on skills and understandings with the incorrect assumption that the child’s very early prerequisites are already in place or have little chance of being learned at this later chronological age.

The Persistence of Sensorimotor Meaning-Making

Infants learn through their mouth, hands, and body. Their world is primarily sensory, tactile, fleetingly visual, auditory, olfactory, motor, rhythmic and vestibular. Many neurodivergent children continue to rely on these early channels long after infancy. Mouthing, spinning, rocking, tapping, scattered incomplete attention, sensory overload, sensory defensiveness and frequent repetition may still be functional for them.

Fleeting attention and sensory issues like sensitivity to sounds, lights, textures frequently co-occur, taxing the child’s delayed emotional, social, and executive functions, making focus, emotional regulation, and intentional and purposeful attention, transitions, and task-switching difficult. The child and the adult with sensory and attention issues can be easily distracted and overstimulated, seeking avoidance or isolation, or understimulated, seeking constant input, whether relevant or irrelevant.

Touch an infant lightly on the shoulder, and their whole body may respond, legs kicking, arms flailing, torso twisting. Their sensory perceptions and motor system responses have not yet differentiated.

Some neurodivergent children, especially when excited, respond with similar global movements as much younger children: jumping, flapping, whole-body bouncing, wide motor discharge.

Our developmental perspective prefers not to label these actions as deviant behavior, but rather as signs of the child’s continuation of earlier sensory and motor stages of development. We view the child’s behaviors from developmental, interpersonal and learning perspectives that, unfortunately, are too often pathologized in most clinical settings.

Our mindset helps us see the child not as “deviant” but as an individual who continues to navigate developmental milestones that other children passed through earlier.

The Child is Not Deviant, but Delayed in Specific Foundations

When framed medically, these behaviors become “symptoms”: impaired attention, stereotyped movements, sensory-seeking, selective social withdrawal. But when framed developmentally, skills generally expected to be acquired at earlier stages are considered stepping stones that the individual child is still traversing. This reframing changes the label and the interpretation, and therefore the approach.

The child is not seen as “deficient.” Rather, the child is “delayed” in certain developmental sequences, which can change and improve under the right conditions.

Maturation and Learning

Child development is shaped by the combined influence of physical growth, neurological maturation, motivation and experiential learning. None of these elements act in isolation.

Consider toilet training. Praise, instruction or practice will not produce success until the child’s neural, sensory, perceptual, muscular, motor, social and cognitive systems are sufficiently developed. Attempting toilet training without the proper prerequisites only fosters misunderstanding and failure for the child and frustration and disappointment for the parent.

Some areas of development simply require time. A two-year-old cannot ride a two-wheeled bicycle, no matter how deeply motivated or well-coached. Maturation must precede mastery.

When biological and learned development are delayed or atypical, the natural unfolding of abilities is slowed or disrupted. For many children with special needs, the passage of time, physical maturation, and passive experience alone are not sufficient.

Children with significant developmental delays require intentional, focused, mediated instruction and practice that construct needed prerequisite scaffolding for ongoing development.

Echoes of Infancy may linger in the Neurodivergent Child

Early Attention

A young infant’s attention is brief and shifting. They only look at or listen for a few seconds. Their ability to track moving stimuli is inconsistent and easily lost. External and internal sensations come and go without sufficient processing or coherence.

Many older neurodivergent children show similar attentional characteristics. Viewed developmentally, this is not considered “pathological attention or inattention,” but rather that early attention is still fragile, still forming and needs special assistance.

Our development mindset helps us to support and instruct the child through empathic and thoughtful communication and learning relationships; a Parallel Assessment and Parallel Development framework involving GPPSP: Goals, Prerequisites, Priorities, Strategies and Progress.

Attention GPPSP for this Specific Child:

• Goal: develop more relevant, sustained, selective attention.
• Priorities: reduce sensory flooding, introduce compensations, reduce fear and distraction, build shared attention, create meaning to help organize attention.
• Prerequisites: A safer and more predictable sensory environment until this child is better able to deal with increasing stimulation; co-regulation; rhythmic, repetitive presentation. Learn more adaptive and more effective coping strategies. Introduce interesting and playful cause-and-effect activities.
• Strategies: Slowing the pace, offering brief, engaging modeling and cues; use what already captures the child’s attention in the mediation; aim to gradually increase attention by seconds, not minutes. Introduce simple sensory defensiveness strategies to help calm the child’s nervous system and modulate over-responsive reactions: deep pressure, proprioceptive input, environmental adjustments (familiarity, distance, time, lighting, loudness, surprise), meaningful sensory diets, building tolerance and providing calming input that enable better regulation.
• Progress: Is measured in this child’s increasing ability to maintain more focused and sustained attention (measured in time on task and in the quality of their focus on communication, play and learning), attention to relevant stimuli, to instructions, to follow-through, to re-engagement after loss of attention, to increasingly persist a little longer in shared activities which require increasingly more attention and concentration, with some repetition and slight variations, and generalization to other activities.

Parallel Assessment GPPSP for this Child’s Adult Mediators, focusing on this child’s Sensory Defensiveness and Sensory Modulation

The Parallel Assessment of Goals, Priorities, Prerequisites, Strategies and Progress for the child and for the child’s adult mediators has immediate repercussions for the Parallel Development of this child and for their adult mediators.

Occupational therapists who have had training, experience and success with young toddlers involving sensory issues such as Sensory Processing Disorders can be enlisted to work directly with this child several times a week.

I strongly suggest that a qualified and successful occupational therapist working with this child bring the child’s parents and the child’s other teachers and therapists into her sessions and instruct them in ways to incorporate sensory and attention-based assessments and treatments into their activities with this child.

This child’s speech pathologist has also found ways to increase this child’s attention to her signals and verbal messaging. I suggest she informs and demonstrates her methods with the child’s parents and with other mediators and members of the child’s development team.

One of this child’s parents seems to enlist the child’s focused attention and has much to offer the other mediators, including their spouse.

This child’s small adaptive changes during the last several months are evidence that the adult mediator’s learning and interventions are helping the child to feel better, to function better, to connect, to play and to learn better.

It is not the child alone who must adapt, integrate or learn. The adults in the child’s world must reshape their own rhythms, expectations, and sensory presence so that they can become true mediators, modulators of the world’s intensity, translators of its demands, softeners of its sharp edges, supporters of the child’s growing ability to cope.

Children with sensory defensiveness, sensory modulation difficulties, and attention problems live in a world where sensations arrive too quickly, too loudly, or too unpredictably. The grown-ups around them must become capable of adjusting themselves before asking the child to adjust. Adults must change themselves to become more understanding, more attuned and more effective mediators.

GPPSP for this child’s Adult Mediators (expanded)

(G) Parallel GOALS for this child’s adult mediators: Become a calmer, more effective communicator and instructor.

The adult’s body, voice, tempo, and emotional tone become a stabilizing force. This child startles at a sudden sound. This child needs to receive instruction from all of his adult mediators on how to increase his social referencing, taking into account the adult’s steadiness or more regulated responses, and their cues for how to cope.

Model regulation before asking for it from the child. The goal is not simply for this child to avoid or escape discomfort, but for him to better understand it, and learn to better manage it and learn more adaptive coping strategies.  

Communicate safety through predictability. The adult mediator learns to move and to communicate in a more steady, more transparent way, free of abrupt shifts. Harmless variation for neurotypical children is destabilizing for this sensory-vulnerable child.

Shift from commanding to collaborating. Instead of doing things to this child, the adult does things with this child, inviting rather than insisting, pacing rather than pushing.

(P) PRIORITIES regarding this child’s sensory and attention issues: What the Adult needs to focus on First

Slow down your own pace. Don’t speak too quickly. Don’t shift activities too suddenly. Be aware of flooding the environment with too much stimulation.

The child’s confusion and misunderstandings and mistakes increase this child’s anxiety. His growing anxieties then further increase his sensory defensiveness. The first priorities are to be sure you and the environment are physically and emotionally “safe” for this child. Slow down to the child’s processing speed, increasing their ability to predict, to anticipate and to prepare.

Reduce your own sensory noise. The adult first modifies their own sensory footprint before adjusting the room. Recognize when you approach this child too quickly, too close, too big, too strong, too loud. The adult needs to smooth their jerking movements and gestures and rapidly changing facial expressions. It is still too difficult for this child to filter and to process rapidly changing “inputs.” This child needs signs or signals to prepare for transitions, for changing tasks or instructions.

Learn the child’s sensory language. Notice this child’s slight recoil when touched, his automatic and fixed glance at overhead lights, his increasing fidgeting that may be signaling sensory overload, his sudden stillness that precedes his avoidance and withdrawal, or the biting of his collar or sleeve when his stress is building. Helping the child avoid or decrease his general sensory arousal will help him to focus longer and better on what is more relevant.

Prioritize connection over task completion. Attentional challenges often reflect a nervous system that is not yet settled enough to engage. Adults learn to suspend the agenda in favor of building this child’s personal connection with them during joint activities, which then increases this child’s readiness to attend to the activity and to the communication. Smile more. Focus more on the child’s willingness to try, and to evaluate their own work, to attempt corrections, and to persist on the task in spite of difficulties, rather than their initial errors.

(P) PREREQUISITES: Your own emotional regulation. This child’s difficulties and defensiveness can trigger frustration or anxiety in his adult mediators. The adult mediator must learn their own triggers and seek advice when they are having difficulty with their own patience and understanding or knowing how to calm themselves before addressing the child’s issues.

Sensory curiosity and humility. Adults must genuinely wonder: What is it like to hear the world as this child hears it? To feel touch as a threat? To experience a supermarket, a classroom, a change as chaos, discomfort and panic? To have so much confusion and anxiety, and to make so many mistakes?

Consistent, rhythmic presence. Children with sensory modulation challenges rely on adults who behave the same way today as they did yesterday. This means cultivating persistent predictability, similar tone, similar timing, similar affect and approach.

A commitment to preparation. The adult learns to never enter a treatment session, a classroom, or a home interaction, instruction or activity unprepared. For this child, too much spontaneity without forethought on the part of the adult mediator can become a threat. Build a personal connection and a shared communication and interactional system and spontaneous joint attention before giving an instruction, an explanation or engaging in a shared activity.

A sensory-aware environment mindset. Try to become this child. Feel what he feels. See what he sees. Hear what he hears.

(S) STRATEGIES: How the Adult Actively Mediates

Modulate your voice and movements, adjust yourself for this child. Soften the volume. Extend pauses. Use gentle starts. Avoid sudden gestures. Give advance signals of changes.

Offer graded, predictable sensory input

Before moving toward this child, approach him from his line of sight, narrate his actions, and allow him to lean in rather than be pulled in, to move toward you when he feels safer and more connected. Don’t force eye contact. But gently encourage and motivate it by increasing his interest, connection and trust with you. He makes far more eye contact when he is at home with his parents and siblings.

Use routines. More predictable sensory patterns, same greetings, same warm-up activity, same rhythm of transitions create templates the child can rely on when novelty overwhelms. When the child feels safer and more trusting, you can gradually introduce mild, interesting surprises and see how he reacts.  

Break tasks into sensory-safe steps.

Instead of saying “Time to stop playing. No, don’t keep playing now. Listen to me. Put your toys away.” The mediator says to him: “Ok. We had a lot of fun. Pretty soon we will need to eat lunch.” A minute later, “In three minutes, we will need to start straightening up the room.” “OK, Now it is time to put your toys back in the toy bin.” “We can do it together if you want?” “I will put your ball in the bin like this.” Now it is your turn.” “That’s great. You put your doodle board away.” “My turn again.” Clear, simple, patterned.

Adjust the environment by adjusting yourself. Sometimes the child does not need a quieter room; they need a quieter adult. A well-timed pause, a soft hand-over-hand guide, a gentle smile, clear instructions, but not intrusive, showing appreciation for trying.

Use shared attention as a bridge. The adult uses a steady finger point with verbal instruction to clarify the specific relevant object, a small familiar toy the child likes, placed next to your mouth when you are speaking and want the child to watch your lips, slow rhythmic repeated movements and simple repeated instructions to pull scattered attention back into coherent, cooperative interactions.

Introduce Mediated Learning Experiences (MLE) created by Reuven Feuerstein, specifically designed to help this child focus his attention on academic and cognitive tasks. The adult mediator teaches this child how to notice, value, and connect with relevant stimuli identified by the mediator and by this child, rather than just passively receiving them.

The mediator highlights “why” and “how,” emphasizing meaning and fostering self-regulation. This child’s attention to learning tasks is mediated by meaning and by increasingly more conscious and more intentional thinking processes.  

The mediator helps this child to connect the specific task to broader contexts, future goals, moving beyond the immediate task to apply the attention and thinking skills elsewhere. This child learns cognitive strategies like task analysis, planning, and self-monitoring, enabling him to eventually guide his own attention.

*I found that children with an overall developmental age of at least 6 or 7 and above received the most benefit from Feuerstein’s Basic Instrumental Enrichment, and ages 9 or 10 for Feuerstein’s Standard Instrumental Enrichment. Of course, Feuerstein’s principles of Mediated Learning Experience could be adapted to much younger children by skilled mediators.

(P) PROGRESS: How the Adult Observes and Learns. The adult is now noticing and remembering more of the child’s small signs of interest and progress, and is more automatically conscious of their own.

Reduced startle or withdrawal. This child, who regularly recoiled from touch, now tolerates brief hand-over-hand mediation and gentle hugs from this mediator.

Longer moments of engagement. A few more seconds of shared attention signal that this child (and this child’s nervous system) is increasingly more able and willing to try, and to stay, in enjoyable mediated play and learning activities.

Greater flexibility during transitions. This child now tolerates more shifts, more changes, more transitions and inconsistencies with less external support. This child’s growing acceptance of changing patterns and activities is made increasingly possible by the adult’s calmness and the predictability of their safe and interesting interpersonal relationship.

Quicker return to regulation. The child is having less “melt downs” and seems to recover more quickly and more completely.

Emerging curiosity. This child’s increasing interest and exploration is a sign of his trust in his mediator, his increasing sensory safety, increasing understanding, improved motor skills and more successful outcomes.

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