Have you tried using ForbrainⓇ bone conduction headphones? This is an incredible tool that can improve your child’s sensory perception and enrich their world. Perhaps you’re not familiar with this technology, so I’d like to show you how it works and how much it could help your child.
The basic idea behind bone conduction is not new – in fact, it’s been around for thousands of years. As humans, we perceive sounds through our eardrums (air conduction) and our bones (bone conduction). Although we think of hearing as something that happens only within our ears, it’s actually a combination of listening through our ears and our bones. That’s why you can sit in an amphitheater and really feel the music deeply. It’s resonating through your bones and giving you a fuller comprehension of the sound.
When I talk about bone conduction therapy, I’m referring to methods of increasing the amount of sound that is shared with a child’s skull bones. Conduction therapy devices offer a form of headgear that can be worn comfortably to deliver audio content to the ears and skull. Please note that it’s best to use a bone conduction device with the help of a qualified therapist or educator to ensure you’re using the right techniques for the best outcomes.
The ForbrainⓇ bone conduction headphones allow your child to experience sounds more clearly and fully, stimulating their brain with input from a robust auditory source. Using them for just a few minutes each day is like a workout for the brain and audio-vocal system. For your child, experiencing sounds through bone conduction for the first time can be a thrilling experience.
You might be wondering whether you can get the same effect simply by buying high-quality headphones for your child. There are several reasons why ForbrainⓇ bone conduction is superior to ordinary headphones.
The ForbrainⓇ therapeutic device is specially-designed for use in early intervention scenarios, for example with developmental delays and hearing impairments.
This is a more adjustable and comfortable option for children who don’t like regular headphones and earbuds.
It has proven benefits for reading, writing, speech, fluency, and other aspects of a child’s communication skills.
It improves a child’s short-term memory.
It improves concentration and the ability to stay on-task.
Children get a boost to their self-confidence, self-esteem, and motivation.
It provides a gentle introduction to other beneficial therapy approaches, including the process used at A Total Approach.
Here’s a tip that will help you and your child use the ForbrainⓇ headphones successfully every time. Have your child take a moment to do the following visualization as they begin using the device:
Imagine you are a tree: Your feet are roots going into the ground, your back is the trunk that rises up straight, and your head is the top where all the leaves grow.
Now you (the parent) can mime the rain sprinkling down to make the child grow, grow, grow. Isn’t this a wonderful way to ease your child into their ForbrainⓇ session?
These bone conduction headphones could be your child’s gateway to a rich new set of sensory experiences. They give your child a sense of power in their world, so they feel like a brave and adventurous hero exploring new sensations. This is the greatest gift we can ever give anyone, and it’s something that can truly change your child’s life forever. For more information you can go to https://atotalapproach.com/ and also find a coupon code if you would like to order the ForbrainⓇ
Bone conduction therapy can be very effective for babies and children, particularly those born with sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL). This includes:
50% of children with intellectual disabilities
12% of children with cerebral palsy
10% of children with autism spectrum disorder
TomatisⓇ therapy is particularly well-suited for babies because it can benefit an infant before the fontanels are closed. This extremely early intervention is crucial in providing therapy for developmental delays and hearing impairments.
In addition, this is a workable alternative to traditional headphones for babies and children who are sensitive to them for a variety of reasons:
Anxiety
Difficulty with the fit
Discomfort with the sensation of certain features, like grommets, ear tubes
Case Study – Baby Gwen
She was born with severe to profound hearing loss in her right ear and was unable to sit up by herself, stand when held, crawl, or babble.
Gwen started TomatisⓇ therapy and within the first 1 hour and 45 minutes of treatment – which took place over 5 days – she demonstrated being able to sit up by herself, make faces, get up on her hands and knees to try to crawl, balance in various ways, and move across the room.
By day 8 she was looking in the mirror and recognizing herself and by day 12, her parent reported that she was communicating more. At day 20 she had begun to turn toward sounds, attempt more sounds, and sleep through the night.
After the first intensive session, which was 10 hours in total, she could crawl, stand with support, and babble and squeal to communicate. Gwen continued into a second intensive of 15 hours and began to explore her environment, gain weight, eat more, and say words like “dada.” By her fifth intensive, she was walking and running unassisted and as the seventh intensive was about to begin, she was jumping, singing, clapping, and talking almost nonstop.
Keeping Bone Conduction Safe for Babies
Bone conduction can be an amazing experience for your growing baby. Bone conduction is also very safe for babies, as long as you follow these best practices:
Use a careful, gradual increase of time with the guidance of a bone conduction expert.
Ensure the sound level is acceptable at all times.
Change the bone conductor’s location slightly to prevent irritation.
Monitor your baby’s reactions carefully and make adjustments along the way.
Check your environment for new dangers that are accessible to a mobile baby.
Benefits and Improvements to Expect
Parents are always eager to hear about the improvements their child could experience through bone conduction therapy. To summarize the three biggest overall benefits, they are:
Early auditory stimulation
Stimulation of childhood developmental milestones
Positive changes in vestibular function, movement, coordination, and speech
In fact, these improvements are often so fast and so deeply gratifying for parents, we recommend making video recordings to save these precious moments forever.
For More Information
To learn more about TomatisⓇ bone conduction, please contact A Total Approach. We offer a holistic developmental approach to therapy that respects each child’s individual needs.
A Total Approach offers children’s occupational therapy unlike any other therapy in the world. Using a holistic and individualized method, A Total Approach creates a family-centered, child-led therapy environment where children make significant progress fairly quickly.
If your child has attention, sensory, or learning disabilities, read on to learn how A Total Approach could help them learn how to process information more nimbly and reshape their own positive self-perception.
What Makes A Total Approach Unique?
We offer a child-led process that welcomes the family into the therapy environment. We’ve assembled a group of dedicated professionals, including occupational therapists and speech-language pathologists, to support each child’s individual needs and involve their parents in the process.
We call it “equipping the child and empowering the parent.” It’s not just a drop-off, pick-up model of therapy. We invite the parents into the sessions and use a consultative developmental therapy model, where we talk to the parents at scheduled appointments to keep everyone on the same page.
We even provide videos of your child’s sessions, including comments from the Director Maude LeRoux, OTR/L, SIPT, RCTC, DIR® Expert Trainer. This further enriches the process with additional insights to use at home.
How is Your Philosophy Different From Other Therapy Centers?
You may have heard of a different approach called the operant approach, which focuses on ending certain behaviors. However, the operant method is only about addressing a single performance problem. It’s a very limited solution.
With the holistic developmental approach of A Total Approach, we offer so much more. We go beyond one skill deficit, performance issue, or anxiety, and examine how the child is forming their total sense of self based on how they experience their world. We don’t just look at behavior; we also consider emotions.
It’s a dual approach – a balance between the performance and emotions of a child. We dig deeper to find the “why,” and then take it a step further by saying, “We can change the why.” It’s about reshaping the child’s self-perception to think, “I can do this.”
How Frequently Will Therapy Take Place?
The timing varies. At first, we might see your child daily for 2 to 5 hours a day and this may go on for a period of 2 weeks. This is known as an initial intensive meeting schedule. Research on neuroplasticity has indicated that high intensity and high frequency interventions are extremely effective in creating the pathways toward change.
Thereafter, we could move to a less frequent schedule of seeing your child once or twice a week for about 6 to 8 weeks. Then we might go back for another intensive schedule, then take another break to once a week therapy. It’s common to do a cycle of three intensives, followed by a longer-term, ongoing therapy schedule if needed.
Of course, this entire schedule depends on the unique needs of your child. Our plan will always be designed to support your child and help them find the best results possible.
Will My Child Benefit From Therapy Quickly?
Many children show significant responses just within the first intensive phase. In fact, they may gain such great results during the initial weeks that the positive effect lasts for months or years to come.
For other children, it may take longer and require careful planning over the long term. Timing matters. In order to benefit your child optimally, we may need to add certain therapies and solutions at precise points in the process.
A Total Approach is about looking at the full spectrum of each child. We will work diligently to address the areas of your main concern, and we will also address secondary issues that may be having an impact. The process could go quickly or more slowly, depending on your child’s needs.
Do You Provide Therapy Online?
If you live in Pennsylvania, the answer is yes. While we can offer certain online mentoring and consultation appointments to anyone in the world, state law requires that many therapy services must be provided in-person at our clinic in Glen Mills, Pennsylvania if you reside in the US, outside of Pennsylvania. If you live abroad, please contact us for a solution for you. Contact us for a consultation about which services we can provide online and which require in-person appointments.
What Kind of Impact Will it Have for My Child and My Family?
Rather than explaining it ourselves, we’d like to share some heartfelt words from happy parents who have seen their children blossom through A Total Approach.
“At ATA, I’m no longer alone. I no longer have to figure everything out for myself. I have open, willing collaborators who are always available to help me keep my son’s treatment program at an optimum place … Over and over I hear from teachers and other professionals that they are astounded at the amount of progress my son has made.”
-Jona
“The difference in Sam was remarkable. He was lighter, and happier, and had the tools and capacity to be kinder and more helpful with his siblings. He was also no longer nearly as reactive. If he fell or hurt himself, he would simply get up and keep going, whereas prior to his work at ATA he would have had meltdowns.”
-Ingrid
“My youngest son had major issues with his speech and hearing. He essentially was not talking, saying single words and labeling but having a very hard time communicating … I could cry talking about all the progress he has made. His speech blows me away. We now have conversations, he has a sense of humor, he tells me he wants to do it. I feel like I finally got to know my little boy.
-Nichole
If you’d like to read more about the real experiences other families are having with A Total Approach, click to see more testimonials. We also welcome you to contact us for more information about our unique approach to helping children succeed.
“This is the most wonderful time of the year”….. so the song
goes. Bright lights everywhere, white snow on the ground, shops open until late
and we rush around planning parties, attending gettogethers and shop until we
drop! Even as we may complain about the craziness, we love it! People are less
grumpy in the stores, less angry on the roads and overall it is “good cheer”! As
we enter Christmas, we also enter into the year 2020 and in moments of quiet,
we find time to reflect on 2019. I want
to challenge our readers during this time to consider the following 3 ideas.
We all love gifts and we all like feeling appreciated. What
does true appreciation mean? Is it the gift that was bought or the thought that
went into the gift? What does your gifts reflect on how you know the person you
are gifting to? What is the message you are bringing with your gift? Is there
relationship in your gift? So many times, we focus on the physical gift, but is
it the gift we value or the relationship? Do we give others the gift of
relationship? As I work with families who have special children, we frequently
have to dwell on topics such as their task performance, their strengths, their
challenges, their learning profiles. I frequently wonder if, amidst all the
craziness of schedules and “catching up on delays”, we stop to think on how
that child is perceiving life? Is life filled with the joy of living, or filled
with schedules of school and therapists? No blame or guilt trip here, we have
to do what we have to do as the future depends on it. But how much do we
reflect on the child’s experience? How does the child view us as a mother or
father, aunt or uncle? How much time is allowed for the natural relationships
that teach more about giving yourself
than the giving of gifts? How much of your enjoyment of Christmas is about
family time and how much is about the gifts? Give yourself and the family the
gift of being together this Christmas and reflect on how this joy of
togetherness could be perpetuated as a new years’ resolution for 2020!
Find a moment to sit still and reflect on all your friends
and family. Who has had a particularly “bad” year in 2019? Who do you feel
guilty about not spending enough time with? Call that person and gift yourself
and your time to a coffee date or lunch date and simply listen. Open the door
for that person to reflect and gather themselves for 2020. Give the gift of hope
through the giving of your time and listening ear. Focus on the person, not the
gift you may bring. Make that person feel worthy of being listened to.
Lastly, gift yourself this Christmas! So many consultations
I have contain tears of worrying parents and families. Sometimes we have tears
of joy, other times we are realizing perhaps for the first time how much your
child may be struggling. The families I work with will do anything to see their
child get better and would willingly sacrifice themselves in order to gain a
better future for their child. But somewhere, in the process of all this
giving, there always is a period of mourning a loss that cannot be named.
Sometimes it is as physical as giving up employment to take care of your
child’s needs. Other times it may be that along the way, amidst of taking care
of others, you lost time in taking care of yourself, your relationship with your
significant other. Give yourself the gift of time to make a wishlist of what
you would like for yourself for Christmas, for 2020, and make the plan to
achieve it. You only have one life to live and yes, you do have
responsibilities and the cost on your emotions, time and funding is high, but
somewhere, within that maelstrom, is you and your needs. It does not always lie
in having a vacation or a new car, sometimes it simply means allowing yourself
time to be you!
This issue is becoming more crucial as we speak. We all believe in early Intervention and providing a diagnosis as young as possible. In order to really explain this question, let us first look at defining the issue in simplistic terms. ASD is a neurobiological disorder impacting function on a wide front of occupational and social functioning and includes sensory difficulties as part of the diagnostic criteria. There is a wide variety of functional ability in different individuals with ASD with cross over into multiple different diagnostic categories including ADHD, OCD, ODD and multiple others. A core issue of difficulty is that social perspective taking (theory of mind) are severely impacted, causing much difficulty with emotional and symbolic thinking such as building empathy. This is not a formal description, but a description containing key elements to the topic.
SPD is a neuro-developmental impairment that may contain elements of both the central and autonomic nervous system. This causes deficiencies in activities of daily living, learning, play, and social skill. Again, here we are looking at a wide variety of profiles, but we are not looking at core deficits such as theory of mind or central coherence (ability to generalize skill from one environment to another). Yes, just as in ASD, these clients can also appear “self-centered”, exhibit stereotypical behavior or line up their toys, but as soon as the child with SPD finds balance in his / her regulatory system and are able to understand incoming sensory information, they are capable of joining the world around them and negotiating theory of mind is not a large work. The autistic child however, is a different story. Their difficulties lie beyond their sensory systems and not only does it take longer to impact on their sensory systems, but it is a long road to work through theory of mind and gaining social perspective over different individuals in their lives.
The importance of this lies in what kind of services both diagnostic categories will be offered. Let us take Barry for example. He is a 3-year-old boy recently diagnosed on the ASD spectrum. As his brain is still undergoing development with an ongoing myelination process, his sensory profile is going to look similar to Eva’s, who has SPD. Barry will be offered ABA through his service providers as in most states this would be the only option available that would be funded. ABA has no research on theory of mind and therefore does not consider this aspect and is mostly focused on any kind of skill to be learnt or behavior to be unlearnt. It plays into central coherence as it teaches skills in specific domains and it frequently does not transmit over into other domains. The whole premise of ABA is that it relies much on prompting, not on the intrinsic motivation of the child. Barry would be taught through long term memory, a particular cognitive strength in ASD, and not through working memory that requires the act of problem solving to develop the richness of being an independent thinker. ABA shows success in their data as it plays into the strengths of ASD, but it does not target the core issues of weakness as noted above. Eva will go into play sessions, OT, and SLP, and she will immediately be required to use her thinking brain. As her sensory systems settle, her ability to entertain and reach out to others will grow far more rapidly.
What if Barry was misdiagnosed and goes into a 20 hour a week program of skill training priming his yet unmyelinated brain to think in long term files, suppressing his individual preferences, and not working on social problem solving in a way that he could be capable of? How is his brain developing? Are we then creating autistic like features, instead of working on what his true capability may be? I have seen such cases. I have seen them leave my practice (private pay) for services that are government funded and after one year of ABA, I have no proof, because we are now looking at a child trained to think in autistic ways, trained in his brain to not use what was there, but to lose it. The growth of the developing mind is a true scientific fact and it is true that “what you do not use, you lose”. Typical children learn through play, through experiences, through trial and error, but a major chunk of Barry’s time will be spent in trying to get him to stay seated, to behave, to pay attention, to “sit on his hands when they flap”. And when he protests, as his psyche wakes up to himself, the reason would be that it is just another “autistic” behavior, and we try to inhibit the budding spirit even more. We are in a very sad situation as we over focus on behavior at the cost of brain development. I do not want to be right in what I am saying, but if I am, what are we going to do about this? Government officials, who mandate such funding have a responsibility to investigate and at least start thinking about providing the families with choices in funding. I love the idea of intensity and would love to have 20 hours a week funded for us to play therapeutically and really let the child’s creative juices flow. Right now, there is no such opportunity and sadly, some children are never going to get the opportunities they deserve. Please think about this.
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