Sand and Glitter

One mom's understanding of childhood development

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My child needs glasses. Now what?

Jan 31, 2017 by Hélène Serfontein Leave a Comment

It is a shock to find out that one’s small child can’t see properly. I somehow thought because they are still small their eyes should be very good. Well, actually I didn’t give it much thought at all. Until it happened.

The trouble is, children don’t know what things should look like. Or, if their vision deteriorated gradually, they forget. So they DO NOT COMPLAIN of bad eyesight. They might blink a lot. (Which, incidentally, also might point to a vitamin A deficiency or uptake problem). They may sit too close to the TV. They may develop a squint. They may become less attentive of their environment. They may stop paying attention in school. Their art work may not be the best – which sometimes it isn’t in any case. They may seem bored or unmotivated. In children depression can look like boredom. And it surely is depressing when one can’t see. They may seem anxious and unsure. They may suddenly fall down a lot or become car sick. And parents may very well overlook all these subtleties. Teachers too.

So well done if you realized your child has a vision problem. That was some great parenting right there! And if you are looking around for more help, even better. This is the list I wish I had. If someone could sit me down in the very beginning and say, “Listen, here’s what you do:…,” we would have had a much easier time. But when everything turns out ok, luckily we tend to forget a lot of those pesky little details. Remember that the whole body is one unit. Vision is a function of every single part of a child. This will hopefully demonstrate that. So here is my two cents’ worth:

Image courtesy Shutterstock
Image courtesy Shutterstock

STEP 1: Have your child’s eyes tested. Find the best ophthalmologist or optometrist by reputation. It is very very difficult to get a child into their ideal glasses prescription. And they may refuse to wear it, because of the big change it creates. Work with the professionals to find the prescription that your child can tolerate initially. It can be adapted once they get used to it.

STEP 2: While you are waiting for your eye appointment, start looking at frames. The optometrist’s is a good place to go. They should be small enough so the lenses don’t have to be too thick. And very sturdy for playing and rough housing in. Get your kid excited about these glasses – even though you are still struggling with the idea.

STEP 3: Get support. Yes, it helps to see you are not alone. And to ask all those many many questions. Two wonderfully useful Facebook groups are: Little Four Eyes and: Vision Therapy Parents Unite. Vision therapy is an option in some countries.

STEP 4: Have a developmental occupational therapy assessment. If your child could not see properly for however long, they are sure to need a little bit of developmental input. The occupational therapist will look at things like vestibular and proprioception or tactile issues. They will also test for gross and fine motor delays. These skills are the foundation for school skills later on. Visual-motor perception and motor planning is greatly affected by faulty vision.

STEP 5: Young children with vision problems often have retained primitive reflexes. These reflexes create movement patterns in babies before they do conscious, controlled movements. When the higher postural reflexes start taking over as babies mature, the primitive reflexes disappear. They may reappear as a result of physical stress (like lack of vision). Or they may have been retained because of lack of tummy time and movement opportunities as a baby. To check, look at a photo of your smiling child. If they have wide, staring eyes even when smiling, they may have a raging retained Moro reflex. Some paediatric physiotherapists, occupational therapists and behavioural optometrists address these reflexes and help integrate them. It is a long term process that requires dedication and daily effort, but it pays off big time. Retained reflexes interfere with vision development, gross and fine motor skills, hand-eye coordination and general school performance.

STEP 6: Inform your child’s teacher. Getting glasses is a transition. This child might have a hard time adjusting and coping. Kindness and gentle encouragement is needed. Keep the expectations at a minimum for a while and everyone will be happy.

STEP 7: This one should actually be the cornerstone of every step. Lots of love for this brave child. Patience, love, acceptance. Your child is going to be facing hard changes. Lots of challenges. They need you on their team. Loving them, cheering for every little step forward, carrying them sometimes. Your job as a parent is to know when your child needs a break.

STEP 8: Limit screen time. Too much screen time interferes with developmental movement opportunities of body and eyes.

STEP 9: Get moving, get active, get outside. Studies have shown outdoor activity has a positive impact on vision development. Work those core muscles. Head control and core stability has an effect on eye convergence. Very important for children with amblyopia (lazy eye). Ball sports are lovely and fun for improving eye tracking.

STEP 10: Nutrition. Certain foods can boost vision development. Zinc and Vitamin A deficiencies especially impact vision development negatively.

“Sucking on Sour Candies, Pickles or Lemon Pieces. Sour tastes help bring facial muscles and eyes into a more focused (aimed inward) state, called convergence. Sucking helps to bring the facial muscles, including eye muscles, into a convergent posture…After sucking on a sour food or piece of candy, encourage the child to attempt a near-vision task that was difficult for him previously, and see what happens!” – Quote courtesy of the book Eyegames: Easy and fun visual exercises by Lois Hickman and Rebecca E. Hutchins.

STEP 11: Sagging arches in the feet may affect vision development. Arch support is directly linked to eye convergence. The lumbrical muscles in the feet are responsible for arch support. They work in synergy with all the postural muscles. For children older than five with flat feet orthotics can be investigated. The physiotherapist can recommend a good orthotist to custom make these. Lumbrical exercises for feet are easy. It has been suggested that toe walking may improve the arch support in flat feet. Invest in good shoes that keep little feet more optimally aligned.

STEP 12: Reawaken the senses. You know how some people feel like they don’t hear/connect well without their glasses on? Same goes double for children. Not being able to see well does not sharpen the other senses. Rather it dulls them. With muted senses a child’s world becomes small. And they do less of the very activities that would have helped them. Practicing mindfulness on nature walks is a lovely way to help a child with visual neglect to reconnect. This could be a walk around the garden. Smells in particular raise a child’s level of awareness. Probably because the olfactory and limbic system, where emotions are seated, are enmeshed. Vestibular input helps restore proper eye movements, so running, rolling, swinging.

Enjoy this special time of rediscovering sight with your child.

 

Train your brain with jigsaw puzzles (Feva Foam)

Aug 15, 2016 by Hélène Serfontein 4 Comments

Completing a jigsaw puzzle has a number of surprising benefits. As educational toys go, this seemingly simple activity rocks. How do I buy myself 10 minutes for make up and hair when things are going pear-shaped? Give the kids some puzzles. This brightly coloured mental challenge gives a great sense of accomplishment. Keeping the number of pieces age appropriate will prevent frustration.

S&G-BrainPuzzles

What makes Feva Foam puzzles special and unique? The dense foam they are made of means that little fingers have to work a bit at inserting the pieces. Great for enhancing tactile and fine motor skills. The thicker puzzles work well on uneven surfaces, like outside on the lawn. My kids love the colourful images.
Feva Foam custom make puzzles with an image of your choice. Custom making a family photo puzzle or using an image that is meaningful to each child makes the whole experience personal and fun. Trying to find the pieces of mom and dad could be a hoot. Each of the puzzles comes in their own resealable bag/sleeve. Hallelujah! No scouring the puzzle drawer for those missing pieces.

Image via Shutterstock
Image via Shutterstock

Puzzles benefit the brain in a myriad of ways. Jigsaw puzzle building enhances short term memory. Remembering where the corner piece was, or the piece with the red dot helps train the brain.

When children build big floor puzzles together it is a helpful way to learn social skills: Teamwork, sharing, helping and taking turns.

Spatial skills: This is the ability to make sense of, change and use objects and the spaces between them. Understanding how a puzzle piece relates to the others. This skill can be viewed as a unique type of intelligence separate from other forms of intelligence, such as reasoning ability, speech, and memory skills. Completing a jigsaw puzzle provides practice in this area.

Visual skills are practiced:
Visual discrimination is the ability to spot differences in shape, form, colour, size and pattern. This is a skill necessary for reading – discriminating between different letters, words and the spacing thereof.
Figure ground: Loosely means the ability to distinguish between the object and the surrounding mess it is lying on. This ability will help find the next Lego block needed for completing the plan. Or finding that other sock in the drawer.
Visual closure: When you see part of a picture, it helps you imagine the rest. People who see half a well known brand logo should automatically know what they are looking at. This is a helpful reading fluency skill, as it aids quicker word recognition.
Good practice in visualization. This means creating a mental image of the whole picture, or imagining the completion of the task.

Image via Shutterstock
Image via Shutterstock

Jigsaw puzzles help exercise both left and right brain. Certain brain functions are more dominant in one hemisphere, even though the corpus callosum ensures interconnectedness of the hemispheres.
The left brain thinks logically and follows a sequence while the right brain is creative, emotional and non-verbal; using images rather than words. So when building a puzzle, your left brain sorts and organizes the pieces and analyzes what is needed where, while your right brain intuitively tries to complete the big picture. This working together of the two brain hemispheres on the same task establishes brain connections.

Using both sides of the brain simultaneously helps the brain to move from a Beta into an Alpha state. Beta waves are associated with logical thinking, alertness and anxiety. Whereas alpha waves are created while daydreaming or when practicing meditation or mindfulness.

Puzzle building seems to stimulate dopamine production. Dopamine is a highly complex neurotransmitter involved with attention, movement, motivation and pleasurable reward. One study showed that dopamine neurons were inhibited by aversive stimuli. Dopamine has meaning in addiction and ADHD.

“Puzzles are used for training or as an interactive tool to entertain children up to 8 years of age. Quality high density EVA foam rubber with full colour image using FEVA unique print process. The shapes can be changed to suit your requirements.” – Feva Foam

Custom make your own design.
Custom make your own design.

Feva Foam rubber products supply on order: 

15 PIECE JIGSAW PUZZLE – FFPJP01
Custom designs per puzzle. Place any personal or school photo onto the puzzle. Great for parties or events.
280 x 380 x 5mm

15 PIECE JIGSAW PUZZLE – FFPJP01
Minimum order quantity 50 units.
280 x 380 x 5mm

S&G-Puzzles

DINOSAUR JIGSAW PUZZLE – FFPJP02
Min order quantity 50 units.
290 x 200 x 5mm

Free delivery in Plettenberg Bay. For more info on these and other great products visit the Feva Foam website. With special thanks.

The princess and the pea

Mar 20, 2016 by Hélène Serfontein Leave a Comment

I grew up with a number of sensory quirks, which seemed to run in the extended family. These goings on were duly noted and mostly disregarded. I recognise similar traits in my little daughter. Quite the sensory circus over at our house sometimes.

These sensory traits meant that having my hair combed was screaming agony. It meant waiting outside the house when my brothers were eating stinky fish in the kitchen. It meant bearing the discomfort of scratchy seams of clothing that felt like it had a wooden sticks sewn into the sides. It meant gagging from smells and refusing to go into places because of it.

Some of you will understand. The people who have to smooth down the creases in the fitted sheet in order to sleep know what I’m talking about. The ones who wake up in the dead of night from clocks ticking or blinds rattling in the wind. I get how the princess could not sleep with a pea under the mattresses. Honestly. Who could sleep in those conditions?

Without the proper sensory filters too much input comes through. Or: The body and brain does not know how to tone down sensory input or integrate it properly. This has huge emotional impact. Imagine walking through a minefield of sensory input. Any step can create an explosion of overwhelming sensation. Emotional volatility is bound to ensue. Anxiety is a given. Irrational fears are not uncommon. Food of course, is a big issue. Smelly things? No way. Funny textures? Keep away.

Today these things are classified on the continuum of sensory processing. On the one end are the people who get freaked out by sensory input. Overstimulated and affected. Where everything is too much: Too loud, too smelly, too heavy a pressure, too bright. On the other end are the people craving sensory input. The sensory seekers who need more input than is the norm, to make sense of their environment. On this end of the continuum there are also the people who seem more oblivious to sensory input. Visual neglect and other sensory neglect sometimes go together (where one sense can be therapeutically used to wake up the others). These people are more shut off from their environment, and often become ‘locked in’ emotionally. In the middle of the continuum is the happy medium where sensory input is accurately perceived and properly interpreted. Here the sensory feedback correctly guides motor planning, movement and emotional responses.

Depending on a myriad of things, sensory processing issues can become less intense eventually. Sensory input can become better integrated. Sensory sensitivities and the need for more sensory input can become better modulated. How? What is helpful?

S&G-Vestibular
Vestibular input. The vestibular system provides sensory feedback about a child’s head in space. It is vital for postural control. Insecure postural control causes so much anxiety. When the body can’t orient itself properly with changes in position – chaos may ensue.

Core muscle control. A stable core provides a stable background for movement. A strong core ensures grounded, strong, purposeful movements. Read more here.

image
Proper proprioceptive feedback. This is the body’s sense of position and movement. Movements can be executed with the correct amount of force/effort when you have a good sense of where your joints are. These first three aspects are great confidence builders. When your body responds the way it should, or the way you want it to… just wow.

Primitive reflex inhibition. With a retained Fear Paralysis Reflex, children are overly sensitive to sensory stimuli. The Moro Reflex over-stimulates the sympathetic nervous system, causing continuous fight or flight response. Read more here.

Tactile stimulation helps infants to integrate sensory experiences. It stimulates healthy proprioceptive feedback. Read more here.

Down regulation of emotional states. Story time, calming music, sensory water or sand play, deep breathing, yoga and mindfulness helps to calm and soothe.

Magnesium supplementation. Magnesium deficiency causes hyperirritability. Deficiency can mimic stimming behaviours in children. Stimming is viewed as a protective response to sensory overload, or too much stimuli. Never supplement without consulting your healthcare practitioner.

Rhythmic Movement Therapy (RMT) for integrating the emotional brain (which is so connected with smells) and prefrontal cortex (conscious reasoning). RMT helps inhibit primitive reflexes and helps to establish conscious control over emotional reactions to stimuli, by establishing brain connections.

Massage over the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve is meant to bring balance between the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. To override anxiety so to speak. This nerve is connected with vision, speech, heart rate, stomach, bowel functioning and more.

Attachment parenting. Having a calm dependable primary carer to help make sense of sensory turmoil. Lots of loving support, hugs and touch. Hold your child’s hand every time they need it. They will decide when they are ready to let go.

Olfactory stimulation. Smells have powerful sensory and emotional connotations. Smells can reawaken the senses in children with sensory neglect. Essential oils are very useful.

Limit screen time. Enough said.

 

Sand & Glitter would like to thank Caitlin Truman-Baker from ctbdesign for this truly inspired blog post cover image.


WITH THANKS FOR INTERESTING LINKS

What does the Vagus Nerve do?

Massage technique for Vagus Nerve

The power of smell

How smells affect the senses and a host of other cognitive processes

 

The Magic Mat and its little secret…

Feb 1, 2016 by Hélène Serfontein Leave a Comment

The Magic Mat is a magical adventure of movement. This is such a fun activity – with huge developmental benefits. It is a truly holistic approach to physical and emotional development through movement, sound and breathing.

image“The magical tool of the book and animated DVD, (view trailer) demonstrates fun, physical stretching and relaxation techniques that develop happy, relaxed, loving and healthy children where kids get to discover their higher selves and learn to feel love, compassion and gratitude.”

The beauty of Magic Mat is this:
– The whole experience creates a wonderful mixture of movement, stretch, mobility and postural awareness combined with breathing.
– Through touch and specific movements, children develop body awareness and spatial awareness. This is part of proprioception development.
– By using very strong visual imagery and association with animals and colours, children can become aware of emotions and how they can manifest in the body.
– Children learn to celebrate different emotions and how to ‘clear out’ upsetting emotions.
– The movements incorporate easy balances and basic midline crossing techniques.
– Some of the movements are neurodevelopmental movements.
– The sequence of movement has a great combination of flexion and extension movements.
– Improvement in self-awareness, self-esteem and confidence can be brought about with regular visits to the Mat.
– The relaxation techniques, mindfulness and breathing relieve anxiety.
– It introduces mindfulness techniques in a way that little ones can easily manage. This holistic approach brings the child’s awareness to listening, thinking, breath and emotional awareness. Mind-body connections are emphasized in these easy steps.

The parent and child guides in the beginning of the book give simple, concise and clear instructions for use.

The Magic Mat is a book of 44 pages with a complimentary 26 minute length animated DVD.
It is suitable for 5-12 year olds, however younger children can participate. My 4 year old loved it, even though she couldn’t do all the movements. At age 6, my son already had an appreciation for the mindfulness exercises and emotional aspects of Magic Mat.

Website where it can be viewed/purchased: http://magicmatsecret.com/

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