Many children struggle with communication and learning issues. A major reason for these struggles is related to underdeveloped brain systems that are crucial for the development of communication and learning. For many children, it is difficult and often impossible to effectively communicate and to remember or retain classroom instruction or parents’ directions. Each individual’s brain develops at a different pace. If the brain is not prepared to receive and retain information that is developmentally appropriate, then social and emotional communication and academic learning suffers. These are the children that seem to be consistently “Out-of-Sync” with their peers.
Why the “Out-of-Sync” Child?
Research shows an almost 4000% increase (yes, that is 4000%!) in medical doctors prescribing childhood medications for various diagnoses such as ADD/ADHD, Autism, Anxiety, Depression, Oppositional-Defiant Behavior Disorders, and Bi-Polar Disorders. Why has this occurred?
Disconnect Between Child Development and Educational Curriculum Demands
The educational demands on children and their development is “out of sync”. The revised developmental milestones for children have a few startling changes. In the past, the ages of 9 to 12 months was the expected time for walking. Now it is 12 to 15 months. In the past, crawling was seen as a key milestone. There is now serious discussion of dropping crawling as a milestone. Research on developmental milestones, especially sensory-motor development, has found that children of 30 years ago were doing at age three years what children today are doing at age five years. How did today’s children fall two years behind in their sensory-motor development within one to two generations?
We know that during the past thousands of years, humans used much more physical activity to get from one place to another or working more with their hands to generate their incomes. In 1900 the majority of people were using walking and horse and buggies for transportation. My own grandmother came to Kansas in a covered wagon at the age of four. When she passed away in 1969 at the age of 83, man had walked on the moon.
By the mid 1950’s, we still, as a society, were more interactive with the natural environment. Mothers would tell their children to go outside and play. And we did. The whole day was spent exploring, laying in the grass looking at clouds, eating fresh foods grown from our gardens, playing made-up games with neighbor children, and staying out until supper. We were active kids who also had to learn to negotiate our own disputes among neighborhood kids. There were not as many organized sports leagues for children not yet in high school. Therefore, we had to be creative in our play and creative in how to settle disagreements.
Kindergarten was a half day. It was a curriculum that taught children how to share with other children, how to play interactive and physical games, how to color and how to paint and how to sing in a group. Children recited chorally rhymes and songs often while marching in a group. First grade was when we were introduced to formal alphabet and number symbols. Our bodies and brains were allowed to physically develop before we had to move to abstract symbol systems that represent reading, writing, spelling and arithmetic.
Our babies had become “containerized”. What is a containerized baby? Because of the strong consumer safety movement and the fact that the majority of families no longer have one parent remaining home to raise the children, our babies are placed in safe and convenient containers for a large part of the day. Babies are placed in an infant seat that can be transferred to a car seat that can be carried into the store while the caretaker shops or babies are carried into daycare and may remain in the container as long as they are quiet and content. When the baby is brought home it is convenient to keep the baby in the carrier while the caretaker does chores. Without realizing it our babies spend the majority of their time in a container. This results in our babies having significantly less motor movement. Without motor movement to explore their environment, the development of all seven senses is delayed. Without exploring their environment the senses of touch, sight, hearing, smelling, tasting, balance and proprioception (a sense of where one is in relationship to the environment or spatial relationships) are all delayed. We also have more toxins in our environment so many babies battle ear infections (middle ear) that delay the acquisition of speech, language and balance (inner ear).
In tandem with changes in child development, our economy and our culture has become very aware of the “global economy”. We are competing with Japan, India and China. As leaders and thinkers begin to predict the outcome of our place in the world’s economies, they look at the education systems of other countries. It is determined with the help of researchers that “earlier is better”. Early education was seen as a way to get a “jump-start” for our children in being able to compete with the other world economies. We began to replace half day kindergartens with full day kindergartens. Once a full day kindergarten was implemented, the time had to be filled; and after all, earlier is better! And because most educators are focused on written learning such as reading, spelling, writing and arithmetic, the result is that kindergarteners are now being introduced to reading, spelling, writing and arithmetic at about age five years.
We have containerized babies moving into a “containment of children” school system. The majority of these children have had limited opportunity to move about and explore their world as we did in previous generations. These children are being asked to attend school for seven hours a day, five days a week (and some children spend as much as two hours a day on buses to and from school). Research is showing us that these kindergarten children at age five are at a motor and sensory developmental level where three year olds were a generation ago. BUT, we are asking our five year old children to do academically what seven year old children did a generation ago. The past generations had much better developed sensory systems that supported academic learning. Past generations had better eye-hand coordination and visual tracking coordination and visual convergence abilities because they were exposed daily to the natural environment. Today’s children are not as experienced with navigating the natural environment or exploring and problem solving situations they may encounter. One reason is that the recreational activities are so organized. Kids today are mostly in organized sports where the adults manage how everything is played, how to negotiate disputes, how to learn a specific skill, etc. In the past, kids were told to go outdoors and entertain yourself. If there was a dispute usually the kids worked it out. Kids came up with made-up games and made their own rules. And they discovered that some kids were not good at sharing, so they learned to negotiate or make decisions about who they would or would not play with in the future. Now kids are told all of that via the coaches or teachers or daycare workers as the priority is to manage a group of kids. And we wonder why these children are inattentive? We wonder why some children are throwing tantrums? We now have a generation of children who start out at least two years behind developmentally. And when a person, no matter the age, is in a stressful situation they will look for something to comfort them. Video games are very comforting to some. Food is very comforting to some. Drugs are very comforting to some, especially adults who have to deal with a severely “out-of-sync” child.
Expectations of these children are consistently out-of-sync with their development. Why is it that Kindergarten children are expected to read and do beginning math? If their sensory systems are developed now at about where three year olds were 50 years ago, there is a grave disconnect between what these Kindergarten children’s brains are capable of processing. In Many Western European and New Zealand schools formal reading and math is not introduced until age seven. This results in fewer learning, attention and discipline problems because the brains are ready.
From the 1950’s to the 1990’s our economy, and thus our culture was making a major shift from the slower pace of previous generations to an attitude of faster, bigger, more intense was better. To achieve the new standard of living both parents often were working. Thus, children had to be placed somewhere. By the 1990’s several cultural changes had occurred. Our economy was no longer tied to the industrial-agrarian society. It was the information age. Books such as Future Shock, Megatrends, 1984, Animal Farm to name a few warned of the loss of individuality and becoming out-of-sync with our own bio rhythms and our natural environment. A cult classic video of the 1970’s provided a visual and audio story of how out-of-sync civilization was becoming. The movie was Koynasquati. Check it out for the sensation of losing touch with ourselves and our natural environment.
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