Client centered therapy and services that are individualized to your needs:
- Activities of daily living skills
- ADD/ADHD
- Aging related disorders or dysfunction
- Animal Assisted Therapy/Interventions
- Aquatic therapy
- Auditory processing
- Birth defects & genetic disorders
- Bilateral Integration
- Body Awareness
- Cognitive training
- Developmental delay
- Developmental Screening
- Delays in meeting milestones
- Development of motor & behavioral skills
- Executive dysfunction
- Fine motor needs
- Handwriting - Dysgraphia
- Memory training
- Neuro-developmental treatment
- PTSD / Anxiety
- Poor coordination & balance
- Retained Primitive Reflexes
- Self-regulating skills
- Sensory integration
- Spectrum related disorders
- Strength & endurance
- Telehealth / Home Health
- Traumatic brain injury
- Concussion rehabilitation
- Visual processing
- Visual motor & visual perceptual
- Visual tracking
Are you or your child's mental processing & memory what you want them to be?
Are you or your child struggling to focus in school, work, or with self confidence?
Are you or your child getting the sleep your brain needs?
Are you or your child feeling out of synch?
Primitive Reflexes
Primitive reflexes developed in utero and during the first 12 months of life within the brainstem. These are reactive actions developed during the stages of life that the decision making parts of the brain have not fully developed to protect and assist the infant in further neurological development and muscle control. These reflexes are essential.
Simply put,
an infant’s initial movement’s are reflexed based to incoming stimulus. Making these movements repetitive and predictable and helping the infant grow safely. As the infant matures these reflexes are no longer needed.
The integration of theses reflexes are an essential stage for typical development allowing one to perform more complex tasks and the development of higher levels of the brain and muscle control. If they aren’t integrated and milestones are missed then developmental delays and difficulties with functional skills could develop in later stages of life.
Retained Primitive Reflexes and How it can affect our Children
Traumatic pregnancy, traumatic birth, developmental restrictions, chronic ear infections, lack of tummy time, skipped crawling, failure to thrive or the development of reactive attachment disorder can cause these reflexes to be retained and dominant not allowing the nervous system to mature or react appropriately to certain stimulus. This in turn may then affect development, learning and behavior in many ways, here are some of them:
- Listening, concentration and attending skills, ability to sit still
- Motor development (fine and gross motor)
- Movement in coordinated patterns (posture, walking on toes, running, bilateral movements, clumsy, balance)
- Eye tracking problems (reading, writing, hand eye coordination, copying from board)
- Socially
- Sensory integration ( over or under responsive)
- Executive functioning development
Delays in integrating primitive reflexes can be seen in several diagnoses but are not limited to the list below all of them equaling difficulty learning:
- Learning disabilities
- Developmental delays
- Sensory processing disorders including visual and auditory processing
- Speech disorders
- Social disorders
- Executive dysfunction
- ADHD/ADD
- Hyperactivity
- Spectrum disorders (Autism)
- Dyslexia
- Dysgraphia
- Dyscalculia
Ways to help your child to integrate these reflexes:
- Get an assessment to determine which reflexes have been retained
- Work with a practitioner to develop a program to assist the child in integrating them
- This is usually a 10 minute exercise program that is completed each day for 6 weeks
- Along with play or activities done on the stomach, side lying, side sitting, long leg sitting, on all fours, on one hand and knee of the same side, squatting, kneeling, one half kneeling or standing
Click below to download a parent questionnaire
Click below to download for a chart of the primitive reflex
Define the 8 senses
The 5 that we are all aware of:
- Taste - Gustatory
- Smell - Olfactory
- Sight - Vision
- Hearing - Auditory
- Touch - Tactile
The 3 that aren't so commonly known:
(Click the '+' to expand)
Proprioception is the sense of the relative position of one’s own parts of the body regarding position, motion, and equilibrium and strength of effort being employed in movement Even if a person has their eyes closed they know through proprioception that their hand is raised or the knees are crossed (as examples).
Vestibular is the 1st system to form in the womb, is an inner ear system responsible for: routing auditory, visual, and tactile information from the environment to the appropriate areas of the brain for balance, coordination, muscle tone, reflex integration, postural control, emotional regulation, & awareness of our body in space.
And plays a very significant role in motor output, self-regulation, reading, writing, & expressive language.
Interoception is the sense of the physiological condition of the body which one perceives pain, hunger, etc., and the movement of internal organs..As humans, we perceive feelings from our bodies that relate our state of well-being, our energy and stress levels, our mood and disposition.This system constitutes a representation of ‘the material me’, and provides a foundation for subjective feelings, emotion and self-awareness.
Sensory Processing
Sensory processing is a mind-brain-body feedback loop in how our bodies intake sensations from our body, the environment and then produces an outcome from it.
The process of using this information is how our mind learns and develops adaptive interactions.
It is how we perceive, plan, prioritize, understand, recognize, organize, conceive, reason, experience and remember our experiences by.
Executive Functioning
All of life skills involve executive functions of the brain. These functions that take place in the frontal lobe and they blend together social, emotional and intellectual capacities, enabling us to use what we know in order to pursue our goals.
- Response Inhibition
- Emotional Control
- Working Memory
- Organization (creating and maintaining)
- Task Initiation
- Sustained Attention and Focus
- Reasoning and Judgement
- Planning and Prioritizing
- Mental Flexibility
- Metacognition (Higher order critical thinking)
- Stress Tolerance
- They generalize to improvements in self-esteem, self-confidence, and the ability to actively engage in goal-directed persistence. This goes hand in hand with a person's enhanced emotional stability and control.