Dr. and Mrs. Philip Teitelbaum have written a book that has is so right on the money. A few posts back I've mentioned retained infant reflexes and how I believe this is an important piece of the puzzle in helping many of our atypical children with neurodevelopmental issues.
Typical Development In their book, the Teitelbaums lay out exactly what typical neurodevelopment looks like physically in babies. Exactly how do typical children roll over, crawl or walk?
Then they cover how children with neurodevelopmental issues roll over walk or crawl ever so slightly differently. Right there on the page was my son, Brad, as an infant -crawling assymetrically. He crawled with in the typical window of time, but he used one leg as a 'bear walk' and the other leg a typical crawl - the very first sign we could have had that the hemispheres of his brain were not developing balanced.
Assymetry of the brain One of the issues with assymetry of the brain is that these children can be VERY intelligent. Brad scored a perfect 36 on the science portion of his ACT! When the child is too smart, you tend to discount your other red flags. Therefore, we struggled to figure him out. For over 17 yrs, he struggled much more that he needed to. With this book, we could have had the answer and be doing something about it at age 6 months!!!!!!!!!! And the book is an easy read! Just having the book for parents gives them the assurance that thier child is developing typically. Most of the book is about what these stages are suppose to look like. My new 2 month old grand daughter's parents are going to have this book on thier coffee table with in the month! (They do have this book now, but I put a new cover on the front, something like Typical Neuro Development for June - my grandbaby, with her picture plastered on the front - love the book, don't like the title ).
Utlimately, we need to figure out how to prevent the issues we are seeing in our children today, but until then, this book is awesome for it's ability to help families of babies have peace of mind that their child is developing typically, or seek help at the very earliest signs of trouble.
Sorry this wasn't an IM post, just so exciting! Please consider getting this book for those you care about with babies. You can also find this book, Does my baby have Autism, at Topeka's Public Library - published in 2008 - I think I've read about every book about autism there published since 2003. I don't read most older books - the field is changing too fast.
