Helping Low-SES Students Thrive

• January 26, 2012 by Bill Jenkins, Ph.D.

Studies and statistics have clearly demonstrated the link between low achievement and low socioeconomic status or SES. Still, studies have also shown that given the right conditions, every student – including those from less fortunate circumstances – have the opportunity to succeed. Not only that, but the kinds of changes that can increase achievement are available to every household, regardless of SES.

Factors linked to low-SES have been shown to have an effect upon readiness for school and achievement once a child has entered school. Circumstances include a household’s lack of financial wherewithal to devote to learning resources such as books, supplies and computers. Other contributing factors include lack of parental involvement; only 36% of low SES parents read to their kindergartners, compared to 62% in the highest SES students (Coley, 2002). In addition, parents of low SES households tend to be dual-income or single parent families who have limited time and energy at home to devote to meaningful engagement with their children.

That said, many successful students do come from low-SES homes. While some of this success can be attributed to the simple innate resiliency and drive arising from within the student, research has been able to tease out a number of common factors in such homes, where certain practices are clearly contributing to student success. 

Factors for Success

In 2006, Allison Milne and Lee Plourde studied this population, selecting six second-grade students from a Central Washington elementary school who came from low-SES homes but were also high achievers. While the number of students in the study was limited, Milne and Plourde outline a number of common factors in their homes that likely contributed to their success:

• Educational content in the home: In all households, these students as early learners all had access to learning materials, such as books, writing material and structured time. All students attended preschool or Head Start.
• Placing value on education: All parents held having an education as an important value, and made efforts to ensure that their children understood this value. Of the participant families, all parents had completed at least through the 10th grade.
• Positive, supportive relationships: Regardless of family structure (single mother, guardian, two-parent, etc.), successful children’s families demonstrated patterns of support and open communication. Such parents expressed wanting open, respectful relationships with their children, and spent time with them having more adult-like conversations. They also indicated that they spent time together and had fun with one another. Finally, these families all had support systems of friends and family nearby to lean on in times of need.
• Understanding of the parental role: When it came to questions about their job as parents, all expressed “eerily similar” answers, such as providing support and guidance at home, and making sure their children understood the essential nature of a good education. They also made sure that they set examples through their own behaviors that communicated such values to their children.

Even though this study was limited in its sample size, the implications and the opportunities are far reaching. If low-SES children have the support and understanding that we see in these households, financial status does not have to be the ultimate determinant of academic achievement.

For further reading:

Factors of a low-SES household: what aids academic achievement?

Education and Socioeconomic Status, American Psychological Association

Related Reading:

Changing the Culture of Poverty by Doing Whatever it Takes

What Educators Can Do About Poverty in American Schools

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Categories: Education Trends, Family Focus, Reading & Learning

Tags: achievement gap, at-risk, early learning, elementary school learning, emotions in learning, how children learn, learning environment, motivating students, self-esteem, student growth, title i

What Does The Marshmallow Experiment Tell Us About Self-Control?

• January 24, 2012 by Bill Jenkins, Ph.D.

What is the mark of a good student? Is it innate intelligence? Is it attention span? Is it drive? Studies show that a major contributor to success might be as simple as having self-control. Take, for example, the marshmallow experiment.

Place a single marshmallow in front of a four-year old. Tell them they can eat it now or wait 15 minutes and have it along with a second marshmallow.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Walter Mischel of Stanford University performed this very experiment with over 500 nursery school children. What percentage do you think was able to control their impulses and hold out for marshmallow number two? In the end, fewer than one in three children were able to wait it out for the two marshmallows. At four years old, they simply had not developed the ability to delay gratification required for the challenge.

Paired with recent follow-up studies with 155 of the same individuals, the marshmallow experiment has come to shed fascinating insights on the inner workings of motivation and gratification, and how the two contribute to future success in school and life.

In the end, these studies have shown that children who were able to resist that first marshmallow were also more likely to be able to “avoid substance abuse, maintain a healthy body weight, and even perform better on the SAT than peers who couldn’t resist temptation.” In another study by Angela Duckworth at the University of Pennsylvania, self-control was a better predictor of academic success than IQ.

Self-control: Innate or teachable?

Given the proven connection between self-control and life success, the question arises: Is it possible to develop tools that help people enhance self-control?

As it turns out, self-control is the result of processes in two parts of the brain. Our rational thoughts, such as “If I wait, I get the second sweet,” take place in the pre-frontal cortex. More urgent decisions take place in the more primitive ventral striatum. Decisions like these that connect to deeper desire and reward depend on the environment around us. In this second case, the thought process might be, “Gee, that marshmallow sure looks soft, sweet and yummy, and I really want it. Right now.”  Research has shown that the rational thoughts can often be derailed by the primitive limbic system; this is no surprise, given the importance of these systems to the survival of our species over the eons.

So, can we strengthen the ability of the rational side to win out over the impulsive side? One solution might just lie in helping young people change how they focus on the environment around them, such as helping them differentiate between “hot” and “cool” cues.  The limbic system deals with “hot” cues, activating emotions like impulse, anger, sadness, happiness and satisfaction. On the other hand, “cool” cues are processed in the frontal lobe and activate cognitive systems that control functions like planning, problem solving, working memory and reasoning. Returning to a variant of our marshmallow experiment, studies have shown that students who were coached to focus on “cool” attributes like color or shape were better able to resist temptation than those who focused on “hot” cues like taste.

Toward impulse-control interventions

Research is now underway to figure out how educators can better harness some of these insights into the power of impulse- and self-control to help students better achieve success. At the KIPP Academy School in New York, the marshmallow experiment has been used as a way to initiate discussions about self-control with 6th graders and help them make better, more rational decisions.

Ultimately, the ability to produce concrete strategies and tools that help students learn to control their impulses will depend upon the results of investigations that are still in the works. But eventually, if we are taking the research to heart, success will likely follow.

For now, if your students seem a bit impulsive from time to time, a chat about marshmallows might be just the thing to get them thinking.

Further Reading:

Study Reveals Biology Behind Self-Control

Related Reading:

Tips for Teaching Positive Behavior

Building Your Child's Self-Confidence

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Categories: Brain Research, Family Focus, Reading & Learning

Tags: behavior, decision making, early learning, emotions in learning, Innate abilities, toddler

Poverty in American Schools: What Educators Can Do

• January 17, 2012 by Norene Wiesen

 

Many children from poverty arrive in schools with a host disadvantages, including low self-esteem, unstable relationships, and brain differences.  But with support, encouragement and the right interventions, every child can maximize their ability to learn and succeed.

Learn more about "teaching with poverty in mind" in our on-demand webinar by Eric Jensen, full of actionable ideas for getting the most from learning time with students, building learning capacity, accelerating the learning process, and getting better buy-in from educators and students.

Related Reading:

Changing the Culture of Poverty by Doing Whatever It Takes

Building a Foundation for School Readiness for Low Income Children

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Categories: Brain Fitness, Education Trends, Reading & Learning

Tags: achievement gap, at-risk, brain development, brain plasticity, cognitive skills, elementary school learning, emotions in learning, learning environment, self-esteem, student growth, teacher impact, title i

Using the Power of Optimal Timing to Improve the Brain’s Ability to Learn

• December 13, 2011 by Bill Jenkins, Ph.D.

Learning is both a behavioral and biological process that is supported by the neurons in the brain over time.

When we learn, our brain cells physically change in response to stimulation, forming pathways to facilitate the connections we use repeatedly. For example, if you meet a person only once, you might not remember their name or recognize their face if you were to run into them on the street ten years on. On the other hand, if you see that person every day for a year, you will likely be able to recognize their face and remember their name much more readily should you not see that person for a long period of time.

Learning processes like these in the brain take predictable, measured amounts of time. While these rates will vary from person to person and nervous system to nervous system, we can depend upon certain relatively constant timeframes for learning and processing an understanding of some of these timeframes can allow educators to take maximum advantage of them. That’s why the Fast ForWord® products function on each of these scales by design, using the power of optimal timing to improve the brain’s ability to learn.

Learning depends upon a specific feedback loop characterized by timing between stimulus, response and reward ^[i]. Here are some of those timescales, along with how Fast ForWord works within each:

• Milliseconds: Auditory processing happens on the millisecond timescale. Fast ForWord helps improves auditory processing rate to ensure that students are able to “keep up” with auditory input such as spoken directions from their teacher.
• Seconds: Reinforcement learning happens on a scale of seconds and is achieved by interacting with one’s surroundings.  The Fast ForWord program’s reward system is based on this time scale, delivering rewards to students at just the right moment to maximize reinforcement learning, helping students get the most benefit from the program.
• Minutes: Our actions change based on how we perceive our surroundings. This kind of adaptation can take minutes. As students move through Fast ForWord exercises, they can see their performance results changing minute by minute. Being able to see such improvement helps motivate students toward greater learning. In other words, as they perceive the positive results of their actions, students adapt and learn to generate more of those positive results.
• Days or Weeks: Consolidation and maturation of memories can take days or weeks. When a student overcomes an obstacle in Fast ForWord, their confidence is strengthened and they not only learn the material, but they learn about their own capabilities and what success feels like. The memories of such experiences and the associated feelings – gathered and built upon over the days, weeks and months – lay the foundation to spur them on to future success. Such success in the classroom can lead to a greater drive to perform well in other areas, such as doing well on a test, winning on the athletic field, or successfully completing that college application.   We cannot underestimate the power of experiencing success and the sensation that it creates.

In the classroom, having an awareness of how long it takes for a student to assimilate and process certain kinds of information can add an entirely different rhythm to our instruction. In having such an understanding of how the brains of our students work, we can time our teaching to optimize learning and help our students achieve maximum success.

References:

[i] Why Time Matters Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center. University of California San Diego

Related Reading:

The Brain Gets Better at What it Does: Dr. Martha Burns on Brain Plasticity

Video Games: A New Perspective on Learning Content and Skills

 

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Categories: Brain Fitness, Brain Research, Reading & Learning

Tags: academic success, accelerate learning, auditory processing, brain plasticity, emotions in learning, how children learn, learning environment, motivating students, processing rate, teacher impact, technology in education

Creating Safe Learning Environments: How Classroom Management Influences Student Performance

• November 15, 2011 by Sherrelle Walker, M.A.

Think back to your grade school days. Did you ever experience a class where a bully ruled the roost? Were you ever bullied yourself?  Did you ever have a teacher who frightened you or who made you feel bad for underperforming? Or was there simply a disruptive class clown who constantly broke the classroom rhythm the teacher was trying so hard to create?

To varying degrees, all of the above situations can create what we might consider an unsafe learning environment. The teacher must take unquestionable ownership of the classroom, but do so in a positive, caring, constructive manner. The class succeeds or fails on his or her decisions and management of the entire learning experience.

Why is managing that classroom and creating that safe environment where learning can happen so essential? In her article on the value of safe learning environments, Lora Desautels, Ph.D., reminds us that during adolescence, the part of the brain that controls emotional responses—the amygdala—develops faster than other centers of the brain while the prefrontal cortex, a center for logical thought and rational response, develops later. Thus, our students are more effectively wired for emotion than logic. Their systems are primed to react to situations with feelings and they have not yet fully developed the ability to apply logical thinking to keep those feelings in check.

It follows that the stimuli within and surrounding the learning environment can have great effects on these emotional responses and can serve to either support or impair the learning process. The bully, the clown, and the teacher can all have a profound effect on how well a student learns.

So what can we as educators do to bring down the levels of stress in our classrooms and make sure that our learning environments are safe places where optimal learning can take place? How can we create spaces that keep the emotional responses as positive and free of stress and anxiety as possible so that we can most effectively engage fresh young minds?

Rebecca Alber has written a wonderful list of twenty ways to create a safe learning environment for Edutopia, which I highly recommend. Her advice for educators includes building community, setting clear boundaries, smiling and laughing a lot, and getting to know each individual student, as well as allowing them to get to know something personal about you. She says we should sit with our students. We should keep our expectations for student performance and behavior high. And we should incorporate art and music into the day.

I agree with Alber’s top twenty. I find it wonderful that she strikes a balance between creating a space that is fun and welcoming and full of laughter, but also one where expectations are set and failures become learning opportunities. All of them can do wonders when it comes to creating a space where students can let go of their stresses and anxieties and free their minds to absorb all the wonderful learning we have in store for them.

In the end, the responsibility for implementing these kinds of principles and removing the stressors that can impair learning lie with us, the educators. Creating that safe learning environment is a multifaceted challenge that, when done well, allows students to flourish.

Related Reading:

Tapping the Source: Finding and Using the Innate Student Passion for Learning

Inspiring Students to Dream, Learn and Grow

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Categories: Brain Research, Education Trends, Reading & Learning

Tags: academic success, behavior, brain development, emotions in learning, health and well being, how children learn, learning environment, self-esteem, teacher impact

Shaming Some Kids Makes Them Aggressive

• November 3, 2011 by Bill Jenkins, Ph.D.

Many people believe that youth who are aggressive and violent towards other children have low self-esteem. Youth programs are often designed to boost self-esteem in kids at risk. Does the research support this belief? A team of researchers designed a study on young teens to examine their responses to feeling shame.

The subjects were asked to compete in an easy, timed task against a competitor.  Some of the youth experienced shame when they were shown a fake list of competitors’ times and saw their own times at the bottom of the list.  The group that did not experience shame was not shown competitors’ times or their own rank.  Then all participants were given an opportunity to act aggressively by blasting their opponent with loud noise through headphones.  All participants also completed self report measures of narcissism (grandiose views of self, inflated sense of entitlement) and self-esteem a few weeks prior to the competition. 

The results of this experiment showed no evidence that the kids with low self-esteem were more aggressive.  Instead, kids with narcissistic traits were most likely to react to shame with aggression.  This is interesting to think about from the perspective of educators who want to support learning through optimizing a collaborative atmosphere as opposed to promoting a highly competitive environment.

References:

The Cracked Mirror: Features of Narcissistic Personality Disorder in Children. 2009.

Related Reading:

Of Rats and Men: How Stress Affects the Brain

Adolescence: What’s the Brain Got to do with it?

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Attend one of our popular webinars with thought leaders in learning. Live and pre-recorded webinars are available. Register today!

Categories: Family Focus, Reading & Learning

Tags: behavior, emotions in learning, health and well being, learning environment, self-esteem, teacher impact

Building a Foundation for School Readiness for Low Income Children

• August 16, 2011 by Bill Jenkins, Ph.D.

As educators with experience in child development, we understand the essential nature of being responsive to a child. Children who do not receive enough attention do not develop in the same way as those who receive consistent nurturing and feedback. Research has demonstrated how, at a physiological level – their brains simply wire themselves differently as they develop. This deficit in early childhood experiences often manifests itself as developmental delays across a wide spectrum of behaviors. These behavioral delays appear in parallel with delays in brain development.

Imagine a child growing up in a home where sensitive, responsive caregiving is rare. Maybe mom and/or dad work more hours and are simply not available. Maybe they come home too tired to read or play or simply snuggle with the child. Or, this is an environment where sensitive, responsive nurturing is not valued very highly. While it is not the case in every situation like this, at its extreme, the parent or parents may be truly neglecting the child’s needs at this early stage. Even moderate differences in these important parent-child interactions have important longer-term consequences for development.

Research has shown that in these situations a child’s brain development quickly gets derailed. Children who do not receive enough of what is known as “sensitive-response caregiving” and cognitive stimulation do not develop executive function skills as readily as their counterparts in more caring, stimulating environments. (Lengua et al., 2007; Li-Grining, 2007) In other words, children may not be encouraged to be aware of and interact with the world around them (cognitive stimulation). They also may not be encouraged to engage or develop planning, decision-making or troubleshooting skills (executive function).

Executive functions, also known as “domain-general” functions, are those called upon in various types of learning opportunities; these include such functions as working memory, regulation of emotions and attentional control. On the other hand, a “domain-specific” cognitive process is one that represents a specific skill or skill area, such as reading or counting.

But what are the implications as children grow and enter school? Recently, a team of researchers led by Janet Welsh at Penn State studied readiness for school in a group of Head Start children and how certain cognitive processes were associated with the development of certain skills. Specifically, they studied the relationship between domain-general and domain-specific cognitive processes in these low-income pre-kindergartners, and tracked them through kindergarten.

Welsh‘s study showed that skills scaffolded consistently from one level to the next, and these skill levels represented good indicators of how well the child would develop the next set of skills. In other words, good working memory and attention control predicted the development of early literacy and numeracy skills, and these skills were predictors of later math and reading achievement.

Whether through experience in the home, great work in the pre-kindergarten classroom and/or support from computer-based learning exercises, it is clearly essential that we support the early development of domain-general cognitive skills as early and as strongly as possible.

While this may seem obvious, Welsh’s research underscores the essential nature of laying a foundation in those executive functions, those domain-general cognitive abilities, for each and every student – but especially for those at an economic disadvantage if we are to close the gaps and truly offer the same opportunities to every student.

Read the full study: The Development of Cognitive Skills and Gains in Academic School Readiness for Children From Low-Income Families, Janet A. Welsh, Robert L. Nix, Clancy Blair, Karen L. Bierman, and Keith E. Nelson. Journal of Educational Psychology, 2010, Volume 102, Number 1, p. 43-53.

For further reading:    

Family Involvement in School and Low-Income Children's Literacy Performance, Eric Dearing, Holly Kreider, Sandra Simpkins, and Heather Weiss. Harvard Family Research Project. January 2007.

Early Care and Education for Children in Low-Income Families Patterns of Use, Quality, and Potential Policy Implications, Gina Adams, Kathryn Tout, and Martha Zaslow. Prepared for the Urban Institute and Child Trends. January 2006, revised May 2007.

The impact of poverty on educational outcomes for children, HB Ferguson, S Bovaird, and MP Mueller. Paediatr Child Health. October 2007. 12(8): 701–706.

Related Reading:

Building Unstructured Play Into the Structure of Each Day

Lifelong Learning and the Plastic Brain

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Attend one of our popular webinars with thought leaders in learning. Live and pre-recorded webinars are available. Register today!

Categories: Brain Research, Education Trends, Reading & Learning

Tags: achievement gap, attention, brain development, cognitive skills, early learning, emotions in learning, executive function, how children learn, learning environment, literacy, math, memory, play, processing, technology in education, toddler

Leigh Ann’s Story: Making a Difference in Children’s Lives

• August 4, 2011 by Norene Wiesen

This post is the second in a series aimed at sharing the success stories, both personal and professional, that Scientific Learning employees witness every day.

Leigh Ann’s Story:

“Hi, my name is Leigh Ann.  I’m a BrainPro Representative with Scientific Learning and I have a few stories I would like to tell today about some outcomes that have really touched my heart.

The first story I want to tell is about Henry.  He’s eleven.  He lives in Michigan and his mom was really very excited to tell me this story. At eleven, he couldn’t spend more than fifteen to twenty minutes reading, and a month after he started our software he spent three hours in the hammock in his backyard reading a book from cover to cover.  And when he was finished he ran in the house and he goes, ‘That was fun!’ And his mom was just so thrilled when she told me that story.

There was a seventeen-year-old boy in Canada, and the Internet where they lived was not strong enough to deliver our software into the home.  So he had to drive forty minutes one way to his dad’s office.  So he drove an hour and twenty minutes each day.  That boy’s life completely changed.  His parents said he’s a different boy.  He saw himself catching up to the smarter kids in class.  It completely, totally changed his life.

And those are the stories, those are the things that help me get out of bed every morning and get to work with a big smile on my face and know that I’m make a big difference in children’s lives.”

Related Reading:

Jolene’s Story: “I Saw Tremendous Change”

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Categories: Family Focus, Reading & Learning

Tags: academic success, child reading development, effort, emotions in learning, employee stories, high school learning, improving reading skills, learning to read, motivating students, reading comprehension, self-esteem, student growth, success stories

Changing the Culture of Poverty by Doing Whatever It Takes

• July 28, 2011 by Cory Armes

Recently, while driving down the street, I saw this billboard:

While that may be a bit extreme, education has been evolving to better meet the needs of today's students, since many children have not been successful with the system employed in years past.  Oftentimes, the majority of these students ‘lost in the system’ were those born into poverty.

Research studies done over the last few decades on the impact of poverty on learning have established that the majority of children born into low income families enter school significantly behind their more affluent peers in language¹, cognitive skills (memory, attention, etc.) and noncognitive skills (patience, ability to follow directions, self confidence, etc.)^2, as well as general learning experiences. Even with special programs designed to develop and strengthen these skills, the improvements typically last only as long as the programs; there is little long-term impact on academic success without ongoing effort and support systems in place.

Geoffrey Canada was a child who began life in poverty, but his situation was unique--he had an educated mother who was determined to keep her children out of the typical downward spiral of failure. Canada determined to do something that would impact children in poverty and his efforts have been chronicled in the book Whatever It Takes by Paul Tough.

Canada's target area has been central Harlem.  From the start, he knew that significant changes had to be made in family practices from birth and beyond to give these children a chance at success. He believed that if he began with the final outcome he wanted to achieve, and then determined what was needed to realize that goal, he could create a process to change the cycle of poverty.  With the help of many people, he has created a continuous, cohesive and comprehensive system designed to change the overall culture of the area.  This neighborhood ‘safety net’ is called the Harlem Children’s Zone.

The Harlem Children’s Zone began with efforts to improve parenting skills that would help mothers and fathers work on educational skills with their infants and toddlers.  Over time, additional programs have been added to provide extensive support from birth to kindergarten so these children would be prepared for school in a way that few Harlem children had ever been in the past.  For children that have reached “school age”, the provision of extra time in the classroom to focus on individual needs has set the Harlem Children’s Zone apart from other well-meaning efforts.  And now, the Harlem Children’s Zone model has moved beyond Harlem, with New Jersey Governor Chris Christie announcing last week that some of his state’s cities will begin using Canada’s community-based approach.

Children who learn critical skills at an early age are better able to master more complex skills later.  The best way to escape poverty is through education, and that education must begin at birth – or before.  The Harlem Children’s Zone has shown that if you provide the key skills needed to offset the disadvantages of a child’s birthplace, you may be able to remove the seemingly insurmountable obstacles seen in the cycle of poverty of the past.  Truly, we all must be willing to do whatever it takes.

References:

Paul Tough, Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009)

1 Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley, Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children (Baltimore: P.H. Brookes, 1995). 

2 James Heckman, “Lessons from the Bell Curve,” Journal of Political Economy 103, no. 5 (October 1995).

Related Reading:

Limiting Young Children’s Screen Time for Long-Term Health

Engaging Children in the World with Words

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Attend one of our popular webinars with thought leaders in learning. Live and pre-recorded webinars are available. Register today!

Categories: Education Trends, Family Focus, Reading & Learning

Tags: academic success, accelerate learning, achievement gap, at-risk, below grade level, cognitive skills, early learning, emotions in learning, language learning, learning environment, learning through play, oral language skills, toddler, vocabulary

Ben’s Story: Intensive Intervention Helps a Young Boy on the Autism Spectrum Succeed

• July 14, 2011 by Martha Burns, Ph.D

Ben was just over two when his mother brought him to my office for a speech and language evaluation. She was a speech pathologist herself and knew he was late to start talking. She had seen another speech language professional before me but wanted a second opinion; that professional had told her she thought Ben might be developmentally delayed.

Both mom and I sat on the floor with a few toys, a car and a truck, trying to entice Ben to play with us. Ben ran around the room, very anxious, probably because of the unfamiliar environment and a new stranger, me, to contend with. He threw the car against the wall and began to cry uncontrollably. I suggested that I leave the room for a few minutes to let Ben settle down and acclimate to the surroundings with his mother. Waiting outside I could hear her attempts to calm him down being frustrated by Ben's increasing agitation.

Finally I reentered the room and mom told me sometimes Ben would settle down in new places if he could have some place to hide for awhile. I opened the door to my materials closet and in he ran, slamming the door behind him. While Ben was "hiding" I asked mom to recount his history. I had heard very similar stories many times before. Ben was a first child, a beautiful responsive baby. He began smiling when a few weeks old and sat and crawled by six months. But sometime around his first birthday he began to change. He resisted being held, threw frequent temper tantrums, and his early first words disappeared. He had several ear infections so mom and his pediatrician thought these might account for his delayed speech so he had an operation at 20 months to place tubes in his ears to reduce the fluid in his middle ear.  But when he still wasn't talking by his second birthday mom began to worry. She also noticed he had started rocking and biting his right hand when he became frustrated and screamed if she tried to take him shopping with her.

He loved riding in the car in his car seat but the second she unstrapped him and he recognized and unfamiliar locale, his back arched and he would thrash and yell. One day, she recounted, a woman who had apparently overseen such a display in the store parking lot, came over to her and told her she needed some parenting lessons. Devastated, Ben's mom said she called her pediatrician who recommended a local social worker who specialized in helping parents deal with problem toddlers. It was the social worker who recommended mom bring Ben to me.

Ben eventually emerged from hiding after I enticed him with his favorite toy from home,  Thomas the Tank Engine. He sat in the floor staring at the toy train car and quietly spun the wheels for several minutes. Mom and I sat silently because if either of us spoke Ben would cover his ears and start rocking.

I enrolled Ben in speech therapy sessions three times a week and recommended that he also receive Occupational Therapy to provide sensory integration therapy to help Ben learn ways to calm himself. After about six months of therapy Ben was talking some but most of his speech was repetitive. "Teeze an kako" was one of his favorite repeated phrases as a request for cheese and crackers that we used in therapy to reinforce his good behavior. Mom said she had stopped trying to take Ben out to dinner or to the store because everyone stared at him, and she felt, blamed her as a bad mother when he yelled or threw things.

By three and one -half Ben was very hyperactive, not yet potty trained, and walked on his toes with his hands flapping in the air. He was speaking in short sentences but his speech was still repetitive and sing-song like. A typical phrase was, "You Ben friend? You Ben Friend?" and, "Ben want Tom Tom! Ben want Tom Tom!"  At this time Ben was diagnosed with autism by a well regarded psychologist in the area.

For many years mom rejected the autism diagnosis. She and her physician husband felt Ben was very bright and that his behaviors and speech problems masked his other strengths. For example, by four years of age Ben had memorized many nursery songs, word for word.  By five Ben could name all the major dinosaurs and tell you the era in which they lived and whether they were plant or animal eaters. But Ben's parents were crushed when the expensive private school they enrolled him in for kindergarten rejected him for first grade.

By the time Ben was seven his parents had invested thousands of dollars in private therapies, private schools, parent counseling, and ABA (applied behavioral analysis) interventions. Ben's mother had hired several different daytime babysitters to help her when a new baby girl arrived, but all would quit after a few months because Ben was so difficult to manage. They had tried ADHD medications which helped calm Ben down during the day but then he could not sleep at night, so either mom or dad ended up, night after sleepless night, trying to supervise Ben as he ran around the house at two a.m.

I have worked with many children like Ben and their parents. These children are dear and very smart in many ways. Yet these children are often locked in a mental prison that keeps them in a perpetual internal turmoil when they are young. As they age and receive therapy they usually emerge, finding solace and relief in their passionate interests. But their unique interests and strengths are rarely as comforting for the parents who see their child stop being invited to birthday parties and play-dates. Parents watch with constant anguish as other adults stare as their child rocks, spins, or obsessively recites favorite poems or perhaps counts windows or red shirts, on planes, in restaurants, at the park.  As Ben's mother explained, "If Ben had a visual sign of impairment others would show compassion, I'm sure. But he looks normal, just acts oddly, so I know people think I did something wrong as a mother."

As we learn more about Autism Spectrum Disorders, we are able to identify signs earlier, and our therapy can begin sooner and have more profound effects. Ben (which is not his real name), I am happy to say, was one of an early group of children to go through an experimental computerized language program out of Rutgers University in 1996, shortly after his seventh birthday which is now available to parents as part of the BrainPro Autism service from Scientific Learning. The first change Ben’s mother and I noticed after he completed six weeks of the program was that Ben began speaking in full sentences and started to initiate conversations. One day shortly after the program ended, he told me that his sister had “opened his lose tooth,” meaning that she had knocked out a wobbly baby tooth.  His intonational contour also changed dramatically, from being rather stereotyped to emotional and natural. Within a month or so he began relaying other stories about home and for the first time started enjoying games that involved pretending. On a standardized language test administered before and after the program, he had gained almost two years growth in receptive language skills. Some of the growth on the test appeared to be attributable as much to his ability to pay attention to test questions as well as new language skills he had acquired from the language tasks within the program.

A few years ago Ben’s mother informed me that he attended a junior college program in computer technology and, as of my last communication with her, was working as a computer technician for a local computer retail outlet.  He lived at home then but had friends at work and a hobby, not surprisingly, of building dinosaur models. Mom said, Ben “seems happy now" and his parents did as well. They were encouraged by his job, circle of friends, and hobby. With the years of anguish they were trying to help other parents cope with the fears and pain that surround an autism diagnosis in the early years, but inform on the hope emanating from new research on early identification and new technological intensive interventions that can supplement therapies.

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Categories: Brain Fitness, Family Focus, Fast ForWord, Reading & Learning

Tags: attention, auditory processing, autism, cognitive skills, emotions in learning, health and well being, intervention, learning disabilities, oral language skills, phonemic awareness, self-esteem