Taking a Holistic Developmental Approach to Support

In Taking a Holistic Developmental Approach to Support, Amy Bodkin, EdS shares her approach to supporting families discussed in her book “Special Needs Kids Are People Too: Seeing the Possibilities Through a Neurodiverse Lens.” Too often we provide support through a diagnostic lens, but in reality, children are not their diagnoses. They are whole persons in a state of development, and as such they require holistic support through a developmental lens. Join Amy Bodkin, EdS as she takes what we have learned through the Neurodiversity Movement and applies it to what we know about Child Development and Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

Transcription:

All right, we are going to go ahead and get started. I have a microphone because I decided to record it, so if you want to have the recording later, then you will have it. They say it’s somewhere in the app, but I couldn’t find it when I looked for it, but it’s there somewhere.

So today we are talking about taking a holistic developmental approach to support. In the United States, especially in Western culture, it’s very common to not take, thanks Carlos, it’s very common to not take a developmental, well we take a developmental approach in a way, but we tend to think about things in terms of diagnosis and then treatment, but that’s really limiting because we do our diagnosis based on symptoms, and symptoms can be there for a variety of reasons. It’s not just one thing.

So you really want to take a holistic developmental approach, and what I mean by that is, first of all, a child is not just a brain. They’re not just their math. They’re not just their reading.

They’re not just their body. They’re a whole person, and we have to look at them as a whole person in order to understand what is driving what we’re seeing, and we also have to think in terms of where are they developmentally, because where you are developmentally helps us figure out, well, what’s next? What’s the next step? Because you cannot put a roof on a house without having the walls first. It doesn’t work, and one of the things that’s really influenced me in changing my perspective, I forgot to tell y’all who I am.

I know half of y’all, so I’m Amy Bodkin, and I was a school psychologist, and I’m also autistic, and I have two autistic children. They’re both teenagers now. They’re getting close to graduating, and I know it’s exciting getting to see them grow up and like do their thing.

It’s awesome. I now work with families worldwide, privately, online, and it’s a lot of fun. I write books to provide supports that people are in need of at reasonable prices, because you put special needs on anything, and the price jumps up 300%.

It really irritates me, and then on top of that, I also do private consultations where we’ll do psychological testing. We’ll look at it. I’ll ask tons of nosy questions, and I’m like, okay, what’s going on with this kid? What is it we’re missing? What’s their body asking us for? Yeah, and then I also have a membership group where I do similar things, but we also created a community where we get to support each other, so that’s a little bit about who I am and what I do, but coming back to taking a holistic developmental approach.

In our western world, we like to look at symptoms, and then the symptoms equal the diagnosis, and then that equals the treatment. That’s not a very personalized approach. It’s not taking into account the individuality of the person, and one of the things that has really influenced me taking this approach is that with all of the health conditions I have, being autistic, I have a lot of extra health conditions because turns out being autistic doesn’t mean that you don’t have health conditions.

Oh yeah, I have Ehlers-Danlos, which is a connective tissue disease. I have postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, POTS, which is your autonomic nervous system does not work properly, and I have mast cell activation syndrome, which means I’m allergic to the world, gluten, soy, corn, and the sun. That one’s great in Florida.

So anyways, I have like all those things going on, so lots of health issues, and to deal with my health issues, it kind of stinks because when you have Ehlers-Danlos, people go, well, why do you want to be diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos? There’s no treatment, and I’m like, yeah, it’d be nice to be diagnosed so people know what I have, so they don’t damage me further because sometimes people do, but the reality is though is that there’s no treatment, and that means that insurance does not pay for anything because it’s not an official treatment, but the reality is is that turns out this is this is the life I have to live, and I want to live it, so I have to come up with what is going to support my body well. So same way with my kids, it’s genetic, and I am two for two. I passed it on to both of them, so I’m like, you know, we got to figure out how we can live this life well, so one of the things that I have done a lot of for Ehlers-Danlos when we don’t have answers in the West, then I’m like, all right, who else has answers? How about in India? Ayurvedic medicine? How about Chinese medicine? Like who’s got some ideas? Let’s let’s check them all out because we’re batting, you know, zero over here.

So taking those approaches to my own personal health, I started taking that approach to my work as a former psychologist. I started approaching psychology from a holistic perspective because that’s what a lot of our alternative medicine is. It’s a holistic perspective because it’s looking at your body and then thinking, okay, what is going on in your body? And they ask you lots of questions, and they look at your tongue, and they like do all kinds of things, or they’ll say, hold this, I’m going to press on your arm, and you’re like, what in the heck are you doing? How does this work? I really don’t know.

My acupuncturist says, well, you use your cell phone and you don’t know how it works, and yet you still use it. So I’m like, okay, fine. But the point being, when we don’t have the answers, it pays to look at the whole picture and see what else is out there.

What are we missing? And so when I think about psychology now, I think about it from a holistic perspective. So this child, what is going on with them? What’s their physical health like? When I do a consult with a family, I ask tons of nosy questions. I ask them about like bowel movements, and I ask them about what they eat, and I ask them if they’ve got eczema, and I ask them if they’re hypermobile, and like all kinds of nosy questions, which you’d think, but Amy, that isn’t something that really applies with psychology because, you know, you work with like cognitive mental stuff, but the reality is, is that it is supposed to be our due diligence to make sure that there isn’t some kind of physiological health issue causing the mental health issue.

And most people will say, oh, they saw their doctor this year, so therefore it’s not physiological. Not true. Because very often if our brains aren’t wired the way people expect, our bodies are not wired the way people expect either, and there are tons of health conditions that you can have when you have a disability.

I’m particularly up close and personal with autism, being autistic myself and having autistic kids. If you have Ehlers-Danlos, you are 640 percent more likely to be autistic. That’s a large percentage.

So, I think we have to look at the whole picture. So, as I was thinking, okay, how do we look at the whole picture? One of the things that I like to use is Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Anybody remember what that is? It was in that health textbook that we may or may not remember clearly.

It’s a pyramid. The bottom row is physiological health. That’s the first thing.

If you don’t have enough food, you don’t have a safe place like a shelter to live in, if you don’t have enough fluids, like any kind of physical need or health condition. Those things you have to have, because if you are hungry, are you going to learn well? No, no, you’re not going to learn well. So, the next step is safety needs.

So, for safety needs, that’s making sure you feel secure, that you’re not afraid something bad’s going to happen to you. Do you learn well when you’re anxious? No. So, the next step is love and belonging.

Love and belonging is where we build those relationships with each other, and it’s how we learn what to expect of other people. We learn from the people that we grow up with who show us love and belonging. We learn from them how do we expect to be treated by others.

So, that one’s really important. It sets our expectations. From there, we move in to self-esteem.

Self-esteem comes from within. It’s important to point out, because a lot of times people are like, so how do I bolster my kid’s self-esteem? I’m like, you can’t. It comes from within.

There are other things that we can do to support the development of self-esteem, but it comes from within them. Okay, so all those things lead up to the top, which is self-actualization. Learning happens at the top with self-actualization.

We need all of those other things to be able to learn well, and so usually we start at the top and then go, well, this isn’t working. What if we missed? And then we might go down a step at that point. What we want to do is start from the bottom and work our way up.

So, starting with physiological health, you know, how do you know for sure that your kid is feeling good, or that you’re feeling good for that matter? You’re looking for signs. There are a lot of different signs I look for when I’m asking nosy questions of families. I’m looking for signs of inflammation, some of the classic signs of inflammation that we see in kids in different systems.

Bleeding gums, copious amounts of earwax, some kind of itchy, rashy skin sometimes. Constipation is often another sign, or the opposite of constipation. Those are some of the big ones.

Sometimes sleep is disrupted, but when we see inflammation in one system, like let’s say you have bleeding gums, but you have nothing else. Okay, well, then maybe you’re not flossing well enough, but when we see bleeding gums, and copious amounts of earwax, and we’re having trouble sleeping, and we’re anxious, and we’ve also got some eczema, rashy stuff going on. By that point, it’s more than one system, and when it’s more than one system, we know that it is systemic, and that means that it is not just that one bodily system.

It’s something bigger, and so we kind of have to figure out, all right, well, what is it? One of the problems that we run into is that a lot of times when you take a kid to the doctor, especially if it’s an autistic kid, and you go, I think there’s something wrong. They often say, no, they’re just autistic, and I’m like, turns out autistic people can be sick too. That happens a lot to me, so, but a lot of doctors are trained to work with the average person.

They see the average person. That’s what their expertise is in, but if you see a lot of autistic people, then you learn very quickly that there are certain patterns that are associated with certain health conditions that are more common among us. So, like, autoimmune conditions are at a significantly higher rate among autistic populations.

You can’t find that in research so much because they don’t really do a lot of research on how to help us live our best life. They usually do research on, how can we cure you or get rid of you? I’m like, oh, thank you guys. That’s so helpful.

Some of us are here, and we would like to learn to live our best life. So, thinking about the physiological. Next thing I look for after that, sometimes I will look for safety needs first before we go into physiological because if we don’t feel safe enough, that can end up causing physiological health issues.

When you go into fight, flight, or freeze, what your body does is it dumps all of your vitamins, minerals, neurotransmitters, hormones, electrolytes, everything in the body gets dumped into the bloodstream because it’s a red alert situation. Well, if that happens chronically, that can be a problem because what happens to all of that that gets dumped in the bloodstream when your stressor is over, it gets peed out. So, that means if we do this over and over and over again, that we are depleting our electrolytes, our hormones, minerals, neurotransmitters, all of those things.

And it can really cause a lot of issues, especially with the immune system because the immune system uses all of those things. Especially with kids that are anxious or adults too for that matter. Everything applies to kids and adults.

And honestly, I feel like anybody who’s under 40 is a kid. So, congratulations to some of y’all. You’re much younger than you thought you were.

But when that happens, we see a lot of kids that end up being dehydrated. But what’s interesting is, is most of the time when people are dehydrated, people think they need more water. But in reality, sometimes it’s that they need more electrolytes because hydration is a balance of water and electrolytes.

So, personal story. When I was pregnant with my kids, turns out I’m allergic to being pregnant. It did not go well at all.

I ended up getting dehydrated every single time I was pregnant. They didn’t understand why. Now we know I have POTS, so it made a lot more sense.

But they would say, you need to drink more water, you’re dehydrated. So, I’d go home drinking glasses of water and by evening, I’m in labor and delivery in distress because I’m severely dehydrated. It turns out I wasn’t low on water, I was low on electrolytes.

So, some of us, we are needing electrolytes and others of us, we are needing water. And the symptoms look the same. The blood work looks basically the same too.

So, you have to be able to listen to your body and know what you need. But anytime someone’s anxious, I immediately go, okay, definitely probably need electrolytes. It’s a good bet because we know what’s happening in the body.

So, when we can work to address the anxiety, one of the other things that I like to recommend families talk to their doctor about is there is a medication called hydroxyzine. It’s an antihistamine that functions as an anti-anxiety. When we have anxiety that goes rampant, that’s usually my first preference because anti-anxieties were designed for adult brains, not children’s brains.

And sometimes we do see disastrous consequences from a child taking an anti-anxiety. So, an antihistamine seems like a safer bet. Also, it tends to be more effective through puberty when hormones are changing.

But the reason that I, and I’m not really a big fan of medication in general, but when you need something, you need something. And with anxiety, one of the greatest risk factors with anxiety in childhood is their brains aren’t fully developed. And because their brains aren’t fully developed, that means that when they go into fight or flight, they don’t, it’s like they don’t have an on-off switch for fight or flight.

They don’t know when to turn it off. So, it stays on. And that level of anxiety in childhood leads to significantly higher rates of cancer, autoimmune disease, and heart disease in adulthood, even among people who are extremely healthy otherwise.

They’ve been doing research about ACEs lately, adverse childhood experiences, and it’s phenomenal. And they noticed it because they were doing research with people who were trying to lose weight. They’d lose lots of weight, and then we’d all come back.

And so, they were like, why are we not being successful? Let’s do interviews and find out. And the thing that came up in the interviews over and over and over again was some kind of childhood trauma. And what they realized is that people aren’t, you know, gaining weight or living unhealthy lifestyles because they want to be unhealthy or they don’t have enough inner fortitude.

It’s because they’ve been hurt when they were children. And those hurts, like time doesn’t heal all wounds. Time conceals wounds.

So, that’s something that is also, I feel like, very important to think about when we’re talking about development. Because you’ve got to think about making sure all of those basic needs are met. And love and belonging is the next one up on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

That one’s also really important because, like I said earlier, how you are treated in your home by your family is how you will expect to be treated by others. So, how we treat our children is teaching them how to expect to be treated by others. So, if we don’t want our children getting into situations where they can be abused or mistreated by others, we have to make sure the environment they’re growing up in, the environment that we create, the tone we set, and also the people that we expose them to create a setting where they can learn how to expect to be treated.

We want every child to grow up thinking, man, everybody loves me. They think I’m fantastic. Because when we feel that way, it changes how we treat other people.

And it changes how we see ourselves. And it has such a huge impact on those social, emotional relationships. It’s the foundation.

After that point, then we start building on that foundation with some of the other things too. But first and foremost, it’s I’m wonderful just the way I am. People love me for who I am.

Am I still growing? Yes. Do I still have things to learn? Yes. But people like me just the way I am.

What show? Oh, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. That’s what show that’s from. I’m like, why have I heard this? I love Mr. Rogers.

But honestly, who doesn’t? If people don’t love Mr. Rogers, I feel like we have to go at them with pitchforks because he’s just the best. Yeah. And you know, actually, when my kids were little, we were doing social skills at home.

So our social skills was to sit down and watch Mr. Rogers every day. Because I’m like, all right, that’s the best social skills curriculum I can give you guys. This is how to human.

But at any rate, so moving up to the next one, that’s self-esteem. Self-esteem, the stage has been set by love and belonging. Because when we have love and belonging, we feel like people think we’re great.

That is where we develop that self-esteem from partially. The other part of that, though, is by learning to try and do things for ourselves and being successful. So and it doesn’t have to be the same things for each person.

But we want to be able to find something where we can feel successful, you know, something maybe it’s that we’re really knowledgeable about a particular area. My son loved Minecraft. He learned all he could about Minecraft.

It helped him be able to make friends with people because everyone’s like, well, we love Minecraft. And he’s like, well, did you know about blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they’re like, no, tell us more.

So it was a great in for making friends. And I really love Minecraft. I play Minecraft every week with the kids in my membership online.

And we have a great time. And it’s wonderful. It gives you so many opportunities that you can’t have in real life.

I mean, I’m allergic to the sun and I can go outside in Minecraft. So it’s like the perfect option for accessibility. I tried to convince my parents to play actually the other day.

That did not go well. But I did tell my mom, I’m like, well, look, you can’t go run up a mountain with the grandkids, but you could go run up a mountain in Minecraft. And she’s like, well, that’s great, but it still sounds complicated.

So I’m going to have to just sit around with my kids for a while with nothing else in the room and see if maybe she eventually comes around. We’ll see. But at any rate, finding things where they can be successful.

I had a counselor one time tell me we were talking about my kids and she said that it was like they had grown up with the backyard being a forest. And they think that any time I send them out there, they’re going out into the forest to survive. But what they don’t know is that there’s a six foot privacy fence around this forest and it’s been curated to be safe for them.

And when we’re thinking about helping kids be more independent with different things, giving them opportunities to do something for themselves, whatever that is, we start with different things for different people. But when we’re talking about providing those opportunities, we’re trying to curate options and opportunities for them to be successful. So like when we when we this was a big one, when we first started letting the kids go into a store by themselves, that was terrifying for me because, well, I saw what they were like a few years before and I was like, this could go really bad.

And not to mention, there’s all the other people that you can’t predict and you don’t know who they are. So I set them up for success. I chose a store that had one door and I parked myself right outside that door so that I could keep an eye on where they were going and when they were coming out and I knew who was coming in and out.

And that’s what I’m talking about. We want kids to be able to be as independent as they possibly can because being able to do things for yourself helps you to realize that you are more capable than you believe. And helping them to see that is what builds that self-confidence.

But the only way that we’re able to do that is if we think ahead and try to set them up for success. Teach them skills, maybe, but a lot of times, it’s not so much the teaching skills. It’s the curating an environment that gives them the opportunity to try something for themselves.

Another thing, though, that we can do to help with that, when we would go places with the kids, especially when they were young, I would tell them this is the kind of place we’re going into. This is kind of what you might expect to see. I kind of like described it.

So they kind of got the idea of what the vibe was of the place we were going. And then when we were there, I’m like, OK, Amy, mind your mat, which is what I would always tell my parents in yoga classes because parents always want to try and help their kids do yoga better. And then but then they’re not experiencing it for themselves.

They have to experience it for themselves. And so I’m like, OK, they are growing and learning. This is not the time to micromanage them and to tell them what they’re doing wrong and to correct them.

I’m going to mind my mat. It’s going to be OK as long as we don’t knock anyone over. If we knock anyone over, then, you know, I have to step in for that and prevent that.

We don’t want to hurt anybody. But for the most part, let them have the opportunity to grow and learn where they are at. And then when we would leave, we’d have another discussion.

How’d that go? What did you notice? Did this go well for you? Did you have any trouble? Oh yeah, I noticed that you were having trouble with that kid. It’s possible that they thought this, that’s an interesting idea. You know, next time you might could try this.

That’s an idea or or yeah, that idea might work too. You can try that next time. So giving them opportunities to have someone to talk about things with without a lot of judgment or a lot of teaching because we don’t tend to listen to that well.

Even as adults, we really don’t like a lot of judgment or teaching. And kids get a lot of teaching because we’re constantly trying to teach them new things. And with all of our words and stuff, it can get overwhelming and tiring.

And sometimes we just need the opportunity to just try something. So that’s kind of my little thing on the self-esteem component. Now, then we come to the top part and that’s self-actualization.

And this is the part that everybody likes to camp out on because this is where learning actually happens. And this is where we start paying attention to how that development happens because you want to know where you are in development so that it’s like a roadmap. You can’t put your roof on without having the walls up first.

And you have to find the path forward in development. Now, sometimes you will have things that don’t develop. Like I have three out of 12 executive functioning skills.

I’m in my 40s. I don’t think the others are coming online at this point. I think they’re just not going to happen.

That’s okay. That’s okay though. I mean, honestly, at this point, we’re beginning to decline.

And I’m like, oh dear, we got to make the most of what we’ve still got. So it’s okay if some things don’t develop because we can find adaptations. I make good use of those three executive functioning skills.

I do everything with those three. So as long as we are thinking about what we do have to work with, it’s okay if some things don’t develop. But we want to try and develop as much as we can in order because the more skills we have, the easier life gets.

It’s like academics are a lot like weightlifting, okay? If you go into the gym and you exercise your right arm all day long and then you don’t do anything else to the rest of your body, you are going to get out of balance and you’re going to start to have some problems. You are not going to feel good. And when we are developing academically, if we have some really extreme strengths and we spend all of our time using our extreme strengths and we never work to develop our weaker areas, then we’re going to end up like the guy going to the gym working out his right arm.

We’re going to be out of balance. Balance is really important. Now, are we ever going to get full balance? Absolutely not, especially if you have a body like mine.

It’s not going to be balanced. And some things we won’t develop. But can we try to develop more in each area of development so that we have as much balance as we can possibly have? Yes, we can do that.

Does it mean we’re going to be amazing at it? Probably not, but that’s okay. One of my favorite examples when we’re talking about cognitive development is to talk about dyslexia and hyperlexia because they are the two most common cognitive processing weaknesses that I see. Dyslexia can be caused by a variety of things.

It could be a visual processing weakness. It could be a phonological problem. But the number one thing that I see most often, in the United States anyways, is a working memory weakness.

Because in the United States, we primarily speak English. And English doesn’t make any sense. It does not follow the rules.

We have to make up exceptions for all the rules and then exceptions for the exceptions. And it’s a pain. So that’s why we have to see words in our mind to be able to spell them.

Because if you can’t see it, then you’re trying to sound it out. Well, it doesn’t always follow the sounding out rules. So how else are you going to be able to write it? You have to be able to see it.

Then you have hyperlexia, which is the opposite end of that working memory. That is where, well, I’ll back up and describe those in a minute. But hyperlexia, we have to use working memory that allows us to make movies of what we’re hearing, what story we’re reading. It’s like when you read a book and then you go see the movie and you go, that’s not how I pictured it. That’s what you mean.

So sometimes people have problems with those areas. Personally, I’m dyslexic. When I see words in my mind, it’s light white chalk on a light gray chalkboard and someone’s erasing it as we go.

It’s great. So I can’t hold more than about five letters, digits, numbers in my head at a time. But dyslexics are also very artistic, very creative.

Usually they see patterns relatively well. Hyperlexics, on the other hand, the challenge they have is if they don’t make movies in their mind, they can’t remember what you were talking about. They can’t remember the book you were reading.

You give them instructions, go put the shoes by the door and they put them in the fridge and you’re like, how in the world did that happen? Yeah. So with that, people think, oh, well, they just can’t comprehend. It’s not they can’t comprehend.

It’s that they don’t remember. And so they have to learn to make movies in their minds. What hyperlexics are really good at, they’re really good at reading.

They’re usually very early self-taught readers. They are natural born spellers. They’re really good at music usually and foreign language.

They have a knack for being able to memorize. Dyslexics are terrible at memorization most of the time, unless you have a different kind of dyslexia than the working memory component. But when I have a dyslexic student, like my daughter, for instance, she’s also dyslexic.

We worked hard to strengthen her working memory because if she doesn’t have stronger working memory, she’s going to have less balance and that’s important. So we used a program I created. We had another program that we were using, but it was super expensive and I felt bad recommending it to parents, but there weren’t a lot of available options.

So the one we created, she ended up using it and then within three months, she had improved three grade levels in spelling on the same test, which is pretty impressive. Like that’s fast. My son is hyperlexic.

We did the same thing for him because there was a really expensive program. I’m like, I can’t recommend this to parents. And we created one and he improved five grade levels in listening comprehension in one year.

So when we find the right thing and we focus on that, and it doesn’t have to be long, both of those programs, we did it 15 minutes a day. That’s it. But because we had found the right thing, it’s the difference between using a scalpel versus an ax to do surgery.

You can do both, but I’d much rather have the scalpel because it’s quicker and less painful and better healing. Mm-hmm. And I think a lot of times when we think about education, we’re thinking about development.

We think about things in terms of, well, all right, we’ve got to support all the things because if we support all the things, we won’t miss anything. But that’s kind of overwhelming, especially to a kid. I remember it being overwhelming when I was a kid because there were all these things.

They wanted to teach you all the things. I didn’t even know what I was having problems with. And if we focus in, though, on that one little thing, one little thing at a time, then our brains don’t get overwhelmed.

And that’s one of the big problems is our brains will get overwhelmed if we work too hard at things. So actually, you could do the same program and do it three hours a day, five days a week, and you probably wouldn’t make as much progress because the brain needs downtime to be able to create new neural connections. So you can work as hard as you want, all you want, but you’ll make faster progress if you pick that one thing to focus on for a little bit.

And when you get done with that one, then go, okay, what’s the next thing? And you got to think in terms of development. So one of the first things we develop as children is social-emotional skills because that’s the first thing that we do as babies. We interact with caregivers, you know.

We look at them. We will make noises to them. That’s all social-emotional connection, and we’re building that relationship with our kids.

The next thing that we do is we’re working, fine and gross motor are next because you really start moving. You’re trying to interact with your environment more because honestly, language skills are difficult, and they take time to come online. I mean, you have to be able to understand people, and then you have to be able to make it happen with the muscles, and you need the muscles to be able to make that happen.

And a lot of our motor skills, like there’s a whole lot going on there, and especially depending on what’s going on developmentally. For instance, I have a connective tissue disease. That means that most of the time, we have relatively high arches in our palates.

Well, when you have high arches in your palates, that means that the rest of the craniofacial structure isn’t the way it’s supposed to be. So, if you don’t make adjustments to that, then it can cause other problems. You can end up with like low tone in your throat or not being able to use your muscles correctly, not knowing how to use your muscles correctly.

I found out last year that I’ve been swallowing wrong my entire life. I had no idea. The kid’s speech therapist was talking to me.

I’m like, I don’t think I do that either. Turns out that’s why I always had trouble swallowing pills. I had no idea.

One thing though that is fascinating, side rabbit trail. This is side quest. Yes, side quest.

Yes. So, with Down syndrome, the bones here grow slower. Okay.

And so, what happens is, is that as they’re growing slower, the bones end up pinching the pituitary in the brain. And when it pinches the pituitary, then it causes thyroid problems later in life. It’s not that thyroid problems are necessarily inherent with Down syndrome.

It is because of the structure and the fact that we don’t know to do anything about the structure. So, now they’ve started using palate expanders at a young age for kids with Down syndrome so that they can spread those bones further so that the bones don’t end up pinching the pituitary, which is just fascinating. And we’re learning so many things about epigenetics and development and how all of that happens.

And it’s super exciting because it opens so many doors. Epigenetics is the latest area that we’ve been researching a lot about that I’m very excited about. Because epigenetics is that area of study where you have genes and they do dictate how things work in your body, but they’re highly influenced by your environment.

So, one of the ones that most people are most commonly familiar with is called MTHFR. And that’s where you have to have folate instead of folic acid, right? Or is it the other way? Thank you all. Yeah, you have to have folate.

So, if you’ve always had folate and you’ve never had folic acid, are you going to have a problem? No. Yeah, exactly. Because it’s an environmental issue, but it’s set up by genes.

So, the more we learn about these different genes and what they do, the more we can help specially curate our environment to be able to support our body so that we can work with our body so that we can have better developmental outcomes. So, I’m super excited about it. They also think that a lot of Ehlers-Danlos people have different epigenetic genes that are all contributing together to create what we see as Ehlers-Danlos.

They just don’t know which ones they are. They’ve identified one so far. I’m very excited about it.

But because autism, you’re 640% more likely to be autistic if you have Ehlers-Danlos. And if Ehlers-Danlos is probably caused by epigenetics, I think there could be some room for some epigenetics playing a role with autism too, which is fascinating. Because that means that we are able to control some of how our life develops.

And that’s exciting. It’s frustrating when someone tells you, well, I’m sorry. There’s no treatment.

There’s no cure. This is what you have. You just have to suck it up and deal with it.

That kind of stinks. It’s also a really bad bedside manner. But when you can tell people, well, you know what? We can’t fix it.

We don’t know how to cure it. But you know what? There are things we can do to help support you and help you live your best life. That’s what we’re all about.

And we have to look at it from a holistic perspective because if we don’t look at it a holistic perspective, then we’re going to miss pieces. Like if you’re just looking at how kids learn, then you’re going to miss that whole epigenetics component. You’re going to miss the fact that there’s inflammation that’s a sign of some kind of physiological health problem.

You’re going to miss that there’s anxiety at the root of it and that that is making learning harder. And so that’s why you’ve got to take that holistic perspective. And you’ve also got to think about things from a developmental perspective.

What’s the order things go in? The brain develops in a specific order. If we think about this in terms of dyslexia, like I mentioned earlier, in order to eye read, you have to be able to see. You can’t see, you can’t eye read.

That’s how it works. Next, you have to be able to process that visualization imagery that you saw with your eyes into your brain. That’s visual processing.

Next step, you have to be able to remember what you saw long enough to process it fully. If you can’t remember it, that’s going to be a problem. And then the third, no fourth section, it has to sync up with the phonological portion of the brain, usually left temporal lobe.

But you could have a hiccup in any one of those parts. So, which part do you have the hiccup in? That’s the thing. You got to figure it out.

And so, go in order. So, all right, we’ve had our eyes checked. They’re checking out good.

Okay, great news. All right. We’ve got a problem with our visual processing.

It’s making it to the brain, but it’s like wiggling. Our eyes are getting tired. There’s some kind of a hiccup there.

Okay, we’re going to stop and do some vision therapy. Okay, we did that. All right.

So, everything should be working great now, right? No. Apparently, we also have a weakness in working memory. So, we’re going to work on learning to visualize letters and then words in our mind.

And then after that, well, maybe you are fine, or maybe you have trouble syncing it up with the phonological side. And you might want to, at that point, do a dyslexia curriculum that’s going to focus on that multisensory approach to the phonological aspect of reading and spelling. So, all of those different things, we have to think through.

And you got to think through in order. Because if you don’t go in order, there’s some things that can go out of order. But a lot of things aren’t supposed to go out of order.

And when we try to go out of order, it’s like trying to put a roof on a house with no walls. It doesn’t work. Or wheels on a bike with no frame.

It just, it doesn’t work. You have to do certain things in order. Speech, especially, like language development, that one especially, is a very specific order.

And you can actually tell by looking at all the languages of the world. Because every single language in the world has the same basic parts of speech. No matter what language you’re speaking, it has the same basic parts of speech.

So, it is hardwired into our brains to think about language in those terms. And so, you know, there’s no way I can possibly say, okay, here’s all the developmental milestones. And these are the things you should pay attention to.

Because there’s a million and one of them. And each person is a little different in where the hiccup is. I do do that for families one-on-one.

Because sometimes we do need help with that. But that’s kind of a short overview. I wrote a whole book about this.

I could go on about this for hours and hours and hours. But I tried to like cover the surface. But I wanted to finish 15 minutes early.

Because I like to take questions, especially when we’re covering topics where I can’t go into all of the details. So, that that way, if there’s something specific you do want to know about, we can talk about it. So, I’m going to get some water.

And then if you guys want to ask any questions, it’s up to you guys. I have a quick one. Yeah, go ahead.

I have a three-year-old autistic granddaughter. And they’re trying to get her to mimic. But she hasn’t wanted to mimic.

That’s a very specific request. Oh, wonderful. Please do.

I’m a speech-language pathologist. So, I love a holistic approach. Because it falls into all learning and growing.

Because one thing that, one big thing I’ve learned, I’m in a really rural area. So, a lot of my kids are missing the other therapies. Like, they’ll have me, but not an OT.

So, one big thing I’ve found is, if, say, your sensory needs are not met, the language portion of the brain isn’t accessed. So, before the steps, before we can get to mimicking, we have to back up and look at the other physiological things and the other neurological things, like our sensory systems, and say, is there other things that aren’t met? And that development isn’t necessarily going to be in the same timeline. So, yes, we want communication.

But do we need verbal communication? Or can we use gestures or sign language or home signs or AAC or some other communication? So, then you’re going back to the early development and just saying, are we doing joint attention? Are we engaging in our environment? Like, speech pathologists should know this and be doing this. But we may not be working on mimicking. You may be working on joint attention and parallel play and just being next to somebody.

So, that needs to be fully met before you can go to the next step. So, it’s just, I love, and so many, even therapists, educators, schools, the school systems, don’t look at them as a whole. I’m a music therapist before at SLP, so I’m an out-of-the-box holistic approach person.

So, but there’s so much, be careful to pull your expectations back to where she’s at, where your grandchild’s at, and not where you want her to be or where you think she should be, because maybe just playing next to somebody and looking at the same things is where she’s at, and that’s where she’ll be at for this chunk of time, and then we move to the next step developmentally. But the next step developmentally is not necessarily mimicking. Or it may be mimicking hand gestures.

You know, I use music and music therapists and SLP, you know, that we may be mimicking through just voice, or we may be mimicking through instruments, and we’re not mimicking words, and it’s still meaningful, but then you start there. Then you start there, because also it goes to a different part of the brain. So, with autism or traumatic brain injury or a lot of other disorders, when there is damage to or differences or missing neural connections in one part of the brain, music goes to a completely different part of the brain, and so you can actually access it, and then the brain plasticity, it will build those connections elsewhere.

So, look outside of that one thing and, you know, and pull back to developmentally where you need to go, and are there different modalities you need to go to to support her? We should obviously be best friends, because I agree with all of that. I will add that from a psychology perspective, there is an acronym I learned when I was in graduate school. We called it DRIP.

It’s more from a behavioral perspective, but it was for parent-child interaction, and what the idea is, is that you spend a set amount of time with your child or grandchild every day doing this. You sit down, and you play with them, but all you can do is describe what they’re doing, reflect what they’re doing, imitate what they’re doing, or offer some kind of praise of what they’re doing, something positive. You cannot tell them they’re doing it wrong.

You cannot tell them what to do. You cannot like tell them to direct anything, and the whole point is for you to join them in their space, in their world, doing what they love, and that is what joint attention truly is. It’s not joint attention to what you want them to do.

It is joint attention to what they love, and them knowing that you love them the way they are enough that you’re going to step into their world and do things that they’re doing. When my daughter was little, I was, when I was a kid, I was diagnosed with ADHD. It was like the worst in the entire school.

I was on the highest amount of medication despite being the smallest. We figured out later that, yeah, they should have just diagnosed me with autism then because that would have explained a lot of the things that were going on, but when my daughter was little, that was about the time where they made the connection because she was getting diagnosed with autism. I’m like, yeah, but she’s just like me.

I don’t understand, and I mean, I should have picked it up when I went to hear Temple Grandin speak in graduate school because I’m sitting in the room listening to her, and I’m looking around at all the parents not hanging on to every word, and I’m like, doesn’t everybody do this? Why is everyone so excited about this? I was like, oh, yeah, that’s when I should have noticed, but at any rate, when she was little, I realized I had a choice. I could choose to join her in her world or I could continue doing what I had always been taught to do and to fake it till I make it, and I realized that time with her and investing in her and having relationship with her was more important to me than anything else, and so my mom actually was complaining because she’s like, Amy, you’re becoming more autistic. I’m like, really, guys? But she was most important, and so if you want to have joint attention, she is most … I’m saying she.

I assume a she. I don’t know why, but I guess because it’s mine, but at any rate, she is most important, and having that joint attention, doing things she loves, whatever it is, I mean, it can also be really relaxing for you because play is really good for us. It helps us maintain all those skills that start to deteriorate as we age, and it also helps to reduce anxiety.

I mean, honestly, if you sat around playing with string and like water beads all day, you would feel great too, so it’s not a bad thing, but let them guide you. Let them teach you how to play again. That’s where it starts because I remember a minister one time said, people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care, and I think that’s very much so the case with any autistic child.

I’d venture to say any child with a disability, that they really don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care, and to do that, you have to step into their world. I’m sorry, but can you briefly explain that, Brooke, again? Yeah, yeah. Describe what they’re doing, so I’m going to give you an example actually to make it a little more practical.

Okay. So with my daughter, her favorite thing to do was draw. She started drawing at like 12 months old, and it’s always been her thing.

She’s got a pool, like it’s extreme. Anyway, so with her, I would sit down with crayons with her because I knew that was something she loved, and as she’s sitting there, I’d be like, oh, you’re coloring a picture. I love this picture you’re drawing.

That’s praise describing as you’re drawing a picture. Then I’m like, oh, I really like how you’re coloring that sky blue or pink or whatever it was. You know what? I like it so much.

I’m going to do that too, and I would get a crayon, and I would start copying what she was doing, so that’s imitation. Reflecting and describing kind of go together because you’re reflecting on what they’re saying. You’re describing it.

You’re not trying to make any judgment on it. You’re not trying to, you’re just being positive, not, you know, oh, well, you know, skies are actually blue, and you colored yours purple. That’s not going to help you with building that relationship, and imitation is the highest form of compliment, so if we really want to tell someone that I like you just the way you are, then we do that by imitating what they’re doing, telling them how much we like it, describing what they’re doing.

It’s very important, and you can do that with anything. That’s a great thing. It’s simple, and yet it’s also very fundamental.

Yeah, most things in life you can learn from Mr. Rogers. I’m right. Yeah, I got a question.

Yep, go for it. As far as for hydration, as we talked about earlier, I kind of feel like, I like sports, and I kind of understand that, but what would be good for the amateurs on this obsessively, but I want to find something to help them, because I feel like you drink water, but I don’t think that’s, you know, you need something else. Yeah, all right.

You can use like sports drinks, Pedialyte, stuff like that, but I’m allergic to most things, so I’m going to give you my recipe, okay? I take a quart of some kind of liquid. Usually, I choose orange juice, because it ends up tasting better once you end up adding the stuff in, and then to the quart of orange juice, I add a teaspoon of salt and a teaspoon of cream of tartar. Cream of tartar is potassium.

You need salt and potassium in equal amounts to cross the cell wall to hydrate the cells. Cream of tartar, it’s potassium. Snickerdoodles.

Yep, that too. It’s also in snickerdoodles, and if you want to get your potassium there, you add it with the salty chips, and then you got some little electrolytes coming in a different way. You can also put it in soup, too.

I mean, you can put cream of tartar and salt in your soup instead of putting it in a juice, so you got options, but the point is, is to get equal amounts of salt and potassium so that they cross the cell wall well and hydrate the cells. Now, if you are, okay, so salt and potassium are water-soluble, so since they’re water-soluble, what that means is, is that if you get too much of them, it’s going to come out, so it creates a laxative effect, so when you create a laxative effect, you know he’s got enough. You know he’s topped off, and then you should choose something other than salt and potassium to eat, because otherwise, it’s going to create more laxative effect, and you’ll be chained to your bathroom, pretty much.

Bingo, and a lot of times, you have anxiety and constipation going together, and it comes down to those electrolytes. Like, what do you recommend for, like, a really picky eater, especially the autistic that only can eat snacks and carbs? That one’s a tough one, and it’s even tougher for me, because when my kids were little, their immune system shut down, and we had to put them on a list of 20 foods, and like, there was no other choice. We had to get them to eat the foods, and I did something that I’ve never recommended since, but I would put the green beans into my son’s mouth, and then I would put my hand over his mouth, and I would just wait, and I’d wait, and eventually, he would swallow them, and then after that, he’d go, can I have some more? I was like, really? Yeah, I only did it the once with our son, because he had 20 foods.

That’s all we had. It’s not my preference. There’s a wonderful book, I’m trying to remember what it’s called, Six Steps to Something Picky Eaters, I think.

Have you heard of it? Speech therapist. Have you heard of that one? No. I have ARPID.

I do all my kids, and so I’m… That reminds me of something interesting. I do eating therapy, and I know OTs that do, but I’m very, very careful with how we do things. I was going to ask a question about ARPID.

These are better than… Now, we look for alternative, like, okay, if I know I’m not going to be able to get this in my pizza, and the wafers that I eat, and that’s all I eat, then I need to find alternative ways, and some of that’s trial and error, because I can have the same eight different brands of these protein shakes, and five of them, I can’t stand, and this one, I like the taste, but I don’t like the texture, and it’s complex. It’s actually a psych disorder, not… But also, it can be a physiological issue too, because if you have certain hormone imbalances, it can cause ARPID. Yes.

So you have to really dig into it and be like, all right, what’s causing this? And if it’s psychological, is it being… ARNFID, Avoid Restricted… And if it’s being caused by a psychological condition, is it due to anxiety? Like, is there some kind of underlying anxiety disorder that could, like, and now we’ve attached that to food, like, thinking through what’s driving it. That’s what you’re always asking yourself, and usually there’s a physiological possibility that’s connected to pretty much everything. Psychological disorders very rarely have no psychological basis.

They pretty much always have a psychological… No, I mean, physiological basis. They pretty much always have a physiological basis, because if you think about it, like, all right, ADHD, autism, and I have Ehlers-Danlos. Well, it turns out with Ehlers-Danlos, when they do brain scans, your amygdala, especially the left side, is enlarged.

So that means that’s, like, where your reactionary emotional section is of the brain. So that means that you’re attracting more, like, activity there. So you’re getting less activity in the prefrontal cortex, which is where a lot of the executive functioning happens.

So it’s like, oh, well, hello. The problem is, is that we just don’t understand the human body and brain well enough to be able to tell you exactly what it is. But if you ask the questions, if you are the detective, if you observe them and look carefully and think of the most wild, outlandish questions you can think of, and go do some research. Sometimes you can find an answer. Sometimes.

It depends. Depends on what’s out there. But there’s some really cool stuff.

Yeah, it does. Yes. Yeah, a lot of it comes back to relationship.

And I think that is why when I put the food in my son’s mouth when we were really restricted, it worked because he knew that I cared about him and that I was trying to help him and that I loved him and I wasn’t upset with him. It’s just we had a very limited diet because he was having so many immune issues and we just didn’t have a lot of options. And then I would also try to give him freedom and opportunities to do what he wanted to do.

So like he had a box of snacks and he could have access to his snacks whenever he wanted to. They were his safe snacks. And so as long as you are approaching it from a sense of I love you, I am here to sit with you through that.

And I also want to help you find new loves. It gets better with time. The risk is hard and I remember for him it was how the food looked.

If it was a different brand that looked slightly different, it was like, oh no, we don’t know what that is. We’re not putting that in our mouths. And then they know better.

That’s not the right brand. We don’t eat that one. Yeah.

So thinking about it from a partnership perspective, you can also try like chaining things in. Like, you know, maybe you use most of one pasta and then you add in a few pieces of the other pasta. Especially if it like has character shapes pasta, you know.

So you have the regular one you use and then you add some of the characters to it. Well, we were out of some of this so I just added a little extra of this one so you could have more. And just trying to remember that there is a lot of anxiety that goes with food issues.

And trying to approach it in a loving, caring, compassionate way. Yeah, I have multiple books. So the book that you found on Amazon, that is my like main book.

Like it’s the book book. It tells a lot of my philosophy for how we approach supporting kids. It talks about where I’ve gotten my ideas from, who’s influenced me, what those ideas led to, and kind of the overall approach that I take when I work with a family.

It has some practical things in there too. But it’s really like the big picture. Some of the things we talked about today.

I have four other books right now. I’ve got another one I’m working on. They are more like packets or booklets.

They are more practical in nature. One is to help with working memory issues with dyslexia. One is to help with working memory issues with hyperlexia.

Because both of those areas are ones I see all the time. Like lots of kids have those issues. And the only program that they had when my kids were little was $550 and the training was $1,000.

I was like, can you make a home version? And they’re like, no. And I’m like, fine. I’ll make my own.

Because I was tired of recommending something so expensive to parents. Because we’ve got enough expenses without adding to it. The third book is how I plan, organize, and document my home school with three out of twelve executives functioning skills.

Yeah, they are. And then the last one is allows you to create a custom curriculum for any child, no matter what disability, and tells you what we’re looking for developmentally, how to make adaptations that make sense. Because people will say, oh well, you know, you should use speech-to-text because you can’t write.

I’m like, but wait a minute, that’s oral expression skills. That’s not written expression skills. Not that we can’t use speech-to-text.

But if we have the ability to learn to create written expression skills, then we should try to develop them at least as much as we possibly can. Because that’s a whole different area of the brain than oral expression. So, but oral expression also has its place too.

Try writing to him. That was one of the things that we used to do when my son was little. We would sit in the restaurant and at first we took a little MagnaDoodle in with us and we would play a game and I would write a letter on it and I’d go, what is it? And he’d say, A. And it’s always a fun game.

Also though, I had to say, what is it? If I didn’t say, what is it? He’d just look at me. Yeah, yeah, it sounds very familiar. And we would sit, like if we’d go to a restaurant, we’d sit and take out paper and I would like write his name or my name or I draw a little picture or say hi and things like that.

Oh, we’re late. Okay, so we’re done. Sorry guys, got carried away.