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Neurological Growth Opportunities for Infants By Richard Kieninger What happens in the first
six years of life is what is really important. The earlier that neurological stimulation
occurs the better it is. Do not wait until age 2 to start doing good things
for your child in terms of positive stimulation. Do not wait until they are
one year old. Start right away—not a great deal of brain growth occurs after
age seven. Babies immediately after
birth need to be stroked and held and looked at and to allow them to look
back. If you look at a ten-day old baby, he will look right back into your
eyes. There is something very special about that sort of thing, and they love
looking at you—especially into your eyes. Babies need encouragement
in everything all the time and a lot of stimulation in every area. Physical
stroking relieves many tensions that must result from the Ego trying to make
a body move in ways that he hasn’t been able to train that body to move yet.
It is extremely frustrating to be in an infant body and not be able to talk
or express yourself. Any method that relieves stress is very valuable. You
cannot learn very well while you are in a stressed state regardless what age
you are. Being in a state of anxiety means that whatever you are learning at
the time from your experiences, will not be learned well. Fortunately, there
are many therapies that can relieve muscular tensions and anxieties later in
life. Learning how to achieve
your emotional needs is part of the growing-up process, and children who have
received beautiful parenting do not have to struggle much to achieve
emotional maturity. The world is their oyster, and they relate to other
people in very benign and beautiful ways. In order to have a great
civilization, we need to teach people how to deal properly with babies and
infants. It takes a lot of work on the part of the parents. But if they love
that work, then it’s no real work at all. However it’s very, very time
consuming, and parents have other things to do. It is nice if a new mother
while dealing with her child can have aunties or grandmother or somebody
around to help take care of some of the routines like scrubbing the floors
and washing the clothes and making meals. Babies do sleep every so often and
can be put to bed, but the best thing is to have the baby strapped to
mother’s front so they can enjoy each other’s intimate company while daily
activities are carried out—particularly with the baby’s bare skin against the
mother’s bare skin. The baby seems to benefit from this closeness even when
asleep while mother is moving about. Baby also needs plenty of
time to crawl and creep freely on the floor and explore the house to get
optimum stimulation of neurological and motor development. When mother is
asleep, there needs to be a roomy, safe place for the baby to move around. There is an ancient saying
that you have to creep before you can walk. We now felt safe in saying that
you have to crawl on your belly before you can creep on hands and knees and
that you have to learn how to move your arms and legs in the air before you
can move them for crawling purposes. We became firmly convinced
that no well child ever missed a stage along this road, and we became
convinced of this despite the fact that mothers sometimes reported that
their children did not creep. However, when such a mother was asked, “Mother,
do you mean that this child simply lay in his crib or pushed himself on the
floor until one day he jumped to his feet and then walked?” Mother generally
reconsidered and allowed as how the child had crept for a short period of
time. While there was no way to travel this road without passing each and every
milepost, there was indeed a difference in time factors. Some children would
spend ten months in the crawling stage and two months in the creeping stage
while other children spent two months in the crawling stage and ten months in
the creeping stage. However, always these four significant stages occurred in
the same sequence. Along the ancient road
there were no detours for the well child. So convinced did the team become of
this that we also became convinced of two other factors. First, we became convinced
that if an otherwise well child were to miss, for any reason, any stage along
this road, that child would not be normal and would not learn to walk until
given the opportunity to complete the missed stage. We were persuaded, and we
still are, that if one took a well child and suspended him by some sort of
sling device in midair when he was born and fed him and cared for him until
he was eighteen months of age and then place that child on the floor and
said, “Walk, because you’re eighteen months of age and this is the age at
which children walk,” that the child would, in fact, not walk, but would
instead first move arms, legs, and body; second, crawl; third, creep; and
fourth and last, walk—and that, therefore, this was not a mere chronology of
events but instead was a planned road in which each step was necessary to the
subsequent step. Second, we became convinced
that if any of these basic stages were merely slighted, rather than wholly
skipped, as for example in the case of a child who had begun to walk before
he had crept enough, there would be adverse consequences such as poor
coordination, failure to become wholly right-handed or wholly left-handed,
failure to develop normal hemispheric dominance in matters of speech, failure
in reading and spelling, etc. Crawling and creeping, it began to appear, were
essential stages in the programming of the brain, stages in which the two
hemispheres of the brain learned how to work together. To this day we are
convinced that when we have seen a child who did not go through each of the
major stages in the order in which they are listed, however briefly they may
have remained in a stage, we have seen a child who later on gave evidence of
having a major or a minor neurological problem. Now we had our first piece
of certain knowledge. We knew what normal was, at least so far as mobility
went. The next step would obviously be to determine how this piece of
knowledge could be used to the benefit of the brain-injured child. |
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