Babkin reflex Archives - Primitive Reflex Integration on the Surrey/Sussex Border

The Hidden Key: Ways Retained Primitive Reflexes May Impact Your Daily Life

Trying to explain what retained primitive reflexes are in an elevator pitch- style presentation is very difficult. This requires more than a 30 second summary.

The elevator pitch version of what I do is that I work to help primitive reflexes to integrate. These are the reflexes we are all born with, which should have disappeared in the first two years of our lives, as we progress through the “typical” milestones, such as rolling, sitting, crawling, etc, within the “typical” window of development. If we do not integrate these primitive reflexes, they remain “retained” in our systems, and cause emotional, behavioural and learning challenges throughout life.

When people ask what I do, some think it’s some sort of wacky alternative therapy. Some think it’s massage. Some think I’m somehow conveying energy or something like that to “recipients”. I don’t do ANY of these things, and to me, neuro-developmental therapy is anything but alternative! In fact, it’s something that could save squillions – if our health service would only adopt it.

So, what do I actually do, then?

Neuro-developmental therapy is a very gentle, movement-based, non-talking therapy, which gradually (sometimes suddenly) reduces social, emotional, behavioural and sensory challenges.

I work with central nervous systems and brains! I give the central nervous system and brain a second chance to develop typically if there has been a glitch in development.

Integrating retained primitive reflexes

Our development is like a very complex chain reaction: If a foetus’ development is interrupted in utero or during childbirth by some kind of stress/trauma, or a new-born’s development is interrupted by restricting movement or by some trauma, the next link in the chain cannot be completed, so neural connections are not as efficient as they would be without the interruption.

What this means going forward is that a person will have challenges – some noticeable and some that they are able to compensate for. As a matter of fact, most people have several glitches in their development that are not obvious to the untrained eye, but it is worth mentioning that our behaviour and personalities are very much shaped by our reflex profiles.

Neuroplasticity

Equally, I would like to emphasise that reflexes are just what we see on the surface. It is also extremely important to work with the gut and autonomic nervous system – otherwise you can do all the work you want with reflexes, but they’ll never fully integrate.

I work towards integration using foetal and newborn movement patterns, which mimic primitive reflex patterns, giving us a second chance to create the brain connections we should have created first time around.

How to integrate retained primitive reflexes

Every client who comes to me is a unique individual. Of course, part of the appointment involves testing for retained primitive reflexes, but I also carefully observe a client, taking in their use of language, movement, postural control and how they interact with me, a caregiver and their environment.

I may get children to draw a picture for me, and notice whether they are left or right handed, how they hold a pencil, what colours they use, how their pencil control and colouring is… after observing, I will home in on a few reflexes that I want to assess. I’ll then get my client to do some work with me, which involves a series of rhythmic and pre-birth movements and pressures that I get the client to resist.

For this reason, every client will receive a unique programme of movements. With any kind of neuroplasticity work, it’s a case of little and often, so I require my clients to stick to their programme daily, come rain or shine. However, a programme will often be as little as 5 minutes per day or sometimes even less.

I use a combination of Rhythmic Movement Training and somatic movement to integrate reflexes.

Signs of retained primitive reflexes

What happens if primitive reflexes are retained?

Poor emotional regulation
Inability to focus
Sensory processing difficulties
Mixing up left and right
Difficulty with motor planning and coordination
Anxiety
Shyness
Being a hyperchondriac
Self harm
Poor core strength – especially when children (and adults) w-sit

How do you get rid of retained primitive reflexes?

Sometimes I can get a person to notice differences almost immediately. Sometimes it takes months of peeling back layers to get to the root of a problem.

In the future, it is my dream to get the NHS to recognise neuro-developmental therapy as a way to help children (and adults), but in the meantime, you can visit me at my clinic in Sussex.

They say that if you find a job you love, you’ll never work another day. For me and my colleagues specialising in neuro-developmental therapy, this cannot be more true. I feel that I’ve found my vocation: seeing people transform through movement is the most rewarding experience I could ever wish for.

The Safe and Sound Protocol for neurodivergent families

Babkin reflex FPR: Fear Paralysis Reflex retained reflexes SSP: Safe and Sound Protocol Uncategorized

The Safe and Sound Protocol – SSP for neurodivergent families: Why Move2Connect offers a family package

The Safe and Sound Protocol for neurodivergent families

You have probably found this blog post because you’re researching the SSP (Safe and Sound Protocol) for your child.

The Safe and Sound Protocol (in its standard format) is a five-hour listening therapy, which works directly with the autonomic nervous system to make the a person feel safe in the world by tuning up their autonomic function, which in turn improves social engagement. It does this by passively stimulating the vagus nerve by means of specially filtered music. It is the only auditory programme to work directly with the autonomic nervous system, and is now used widely by all sorts of healthcare and mental health professionals with a variety of conditions caused by mis-firing autonomic nervous systems.

The Safe and Sound Protocol was first launched as a way to help autistic children improve social engagement. It has been acknowledged since that the reason this is so effective is because it’s working with the trauma inherent in autism – in other words, the stress caused by being forced to function in an environment that is not accepting of autism.

For context, I have been working with the SSP pretty much since it was first available in the UK, and have probably worked with more clients than anyone else here – with a myriad of presentations and a beautiful rainbow of different nervous systems.

The Safe and Sound Protocol for neurodivergent families

The Safe and Sound Protocol used to be provided by means of an MP3 player, which I would use in-clinic. I would also sometimes rent these MP3 players out to clients once they had been through a rigorous screening session in clinic. There were huge challenges in using physical equipment, in that either clients had to attend scheduled sessions, OR schedule a rental period. Most of the time, this worked well, but occasionally, more sensitive clients needed more time or needed to miss scheduled sessions. This made providing the SSP – and using the SSP as a client – costly and a logistical nightmare.

However, from March 2020, SSP providers had to adopt a different way of working due to lockdowns and our lack of understanding of COVID19 at the time.

The licensing organisation, Unyte, released a digital version of the SSP via an app. This enabled discussion on the safest way to work with clients remotely with the SSP.

It is important to recognise that the Safe and Sound Protocol in itself is not a therapy – it is a TOOL used by therapists, and we all do it slightly differently. Some hand-hold, some budget providers only give access to the tool and let their clients get on with it – not really advisable, but it happens – caveat emptor.

My opinion, having run a clinic for neurodivergent children and adults for the last 8 years, is that it is important to engage with the Safe and Sound Protocol (and my other work) in an environment that feels safe. For most people, home is a safe space – so this makes engaging with the SSP in the comfort of your own home appealing, convenient and most effective.

Even more effective is ensuring that a child’s needs during the SSP are fully met – and the best way to do this is for a parent to go through the process themselves first.

My approach is to train parents first. They then go through the Safe and Sound Protocol themselves, and learn to understand their bodies’ cues and their own nervous systems. After that, they take their own children through the SSP, as those who understand their children better than anyone else, as well as through the eyes of someone who has completed the Safe and Sound Protocol in their own way.

When I first started working with primitive reflexes with my own child, over a decade ago, I remember our therapist telling me that parents of children with retained reflexes always benefit from going through the process themselves too. At first, I thought this was a potential money-spinner and ignored the advice. However, the more I read about primitive reflexes and the more fascinated I became, the more I realised that it was something I needed to experience – if only to understand the changes we were seeing on a daily basis in my child.

I decided to take that time out for myself – I went along, was fully assessed and did exercises daily in order to experience what my child experienced. And I changed – enormously – for the better. The experience dramatically improved my social anxiety, as well as my ability to connect so much better with my child, which is completely key to seeing positive results. A prescriptive “working on” approach when working with neuroplasticity therapies is not as effective as a “working with” approach.

The same happened when I trained in the SSP. Of course, I used it on myself before using with my children. And of course, I had the same excitement and impatience as my clients often have when they first approach me! At first, all I noticed was calm and spontaneous joy – and later came the realisation that my connection with my children, patience and ability to co-regulate effectively had all improved so dramatically that my children had CHANGED – without my children even going through the SSP themselves.

By the time it was their turn, the outcome was so noticeable that I remember being stopped at school pick-up time by the teacher, who wanted to know what we had done as there was such a marked change in my child’s focus and attention.

For example, if a parent’s motive for using the SSP is to “fix” their child, it’s unlikely they’ll notice as much of a benefit as if they work with themselves first and then with their child. When children have undesirable “reactions” to the Safe and Sound Protocol, it is because a child’s primitive brain is feeling under attack – the SSP can make this more sensitive.

Working with the Safe and Sound Protocol is like buying a beautiful piece of well-loved antique furniture – a table, for example, complete with blobs of paint and scratches, applying paint stripper and giving it a good rub down:

If you then nurture and look after that piece of furniture, perhaps applying a coat of varnish or wax and protecting it with coasters when you put a mug of tea down on it, it will gleam in it’s new setting (equating to co-regulation and providing cues of safety). If you, however, don’t look after it and stick hot mugs of tea down, or allow the children to draw on it with sharp, scratchy pencils, it’s going to quickly return to the way it was before you did all that work.

I specialise in working with the Safe and Sound Protocol with neurodivergent families. For this reason, my pricing includes a parent and child and full coaching in polyvagal theory and how to use the Safe and Sound Protocol for YOUR FAMILY. This looks completely different for each family. For example, the SSP for PDA involves ensuring that a child understands that this is going to work for them on THEIR terms – not mine. Another good reason for parents to go first!

If you would like to understand how the SSP could work for your family, please book a discovery call.

ATNR:Asymmetrical Tonic Neck Reflex Babkin reflex Neuroplasticity retained reflexes Special Needs Education SSP: Safe and Sound Protocol

Handwriting, child development and neuroscience

The ultimate reason why I have ended up working to help struggling children (and adults) is because my own child was finding school such a challenge.

My youngest child doesn’t have quite the same challenges: he was teaching himself to read aged 2, could count into the thousands by the time he started pre-school and understood exactly what times tables are and how to apply them from before reception ages.

However, his handwriting…

Last year, before lockdown, at Parents’ Evening the teacher told me very subtly that he was almost, but not quite, cause for concern.

So when “lockdown” started, I decided that we should focus closely on handwriting – but from a developmental perspective rather than repetition.

Before you can expect a child to form letters correctly, they need to have solid neurodevelopmental foundations in place.

This was his starting point, back in April. I know, it’s not bad, but it isn’t automatic or effortless by any stretch of the imagination.

Handwriting sample taken 12th April 2020

What did I do?

There was also a degree of reluctance to write: he’d seen the beautiful handwriting of the swotty girlies in his class, and had already started developing rather poor self esteem as a result. That is sadly a bit of an unavoidable by-product of being in a class of 30 and being a quiet child who just gets on with it rather than demanding attention.

The first thing we did, as soon as we had stopped going to school, was listen to the Safe and Sound Protocol. We played games and used clay to make little pots while listening. Because the situation was a little unusual, in terms of not being at school, we slowed down to half an hour per day, and just did days 3-5 as this was a repeat.

How does the Safe and Sound Protocol help handwriting? Well, in my child’s case, I know that he has quite deep-rooted anxiety and always benefits from an SSP booster. However, the incredible thing that I, and my osteopath colleagues, have noticed is how SSP can help strengthen the midline. We have noticed this on numerous occasions, so given that writing is so multidimensional and involves a lot of cross-hemisphere activity, it seemed like a good starting place.

The next thing I concentrated on was a few pivotal primitive reflexes that help develop a better relationship between intellect and body awareness. I say “pivotal” because these HAVE to be in place for a person to be able to master writing as an automatic skill, rather than something they have to labour over.

We concentrated on Babkin, TLR, STNR and ATNR. Yes, my child has all these. So many children and adults do.

Sometimes, people concentrate purely on hand reflexes for handwriting, but given that I know my child’s history intimately, I chose to start elsewhere. Handwriting is not ALWAYS about hand reflexes.

The next thing we did was some midline crossing movements, in time to music. He loves dancing, so it was pretty easy to build these movements into a dance. The dance moves became noticeably more precise and coordinated throughout the course of a few days.

Next, we progressed onto lazy 8s. This is a very important exercise for motor memory. We started lazy 8s on a large blackboard that we have nailed to the side of the playhouse, and progressed to a small old-school slate, before progressing to paper and pencil.

Here is a video showing the lazy 8 concept.

It was at this point that my child, six and a half, got his first ever wobbly tooth! I was probably more excited than he was.

Why am I mentioning wobbly teeth? If you look into Steiner education, which is 100% based on child development, children are not expected to start writing until they start to loose their teeth. This milestone is linked to brain development and myelination of the Corpus Callosum. If those connections between left and right hemisphere are not strong enough, it is pointless trying to get a child to sit and write letters because they are not developmentally ready to do so.

Next, we were ready to go onto lined paper. Lines are very important, because they show a child where the writing needs to go. This may seem obvious, but some schools hand out blank paper and expect 5 and 6 year-olds to figure this out for themselves.

The books have red guidelines to separate the very top and very bottom of letters. The next line up is for the body of the letters to go on, the next line is to set the size of the body of the letters and the top red line is to set the height of the tall letters. The bottom line is to set the length of the letters with “tails”.

I bought these books from Amazon.

At this stage, we are finally ready to start looking at letter formation. As you have now seen, skipping the earlier steps only frustrates children and can cause low self esteem.

In the UK, the majority of schools seem to learn print first and then progress to cursive. However, if your child has dyspraxia or is likely to have dyslexia, this is a very short-sighted approach, as corroborated by my Level 5 BDA Dyslexia training. Learning cursive from the start is so much easier for children. This way, they can apply the motor memory formed using the lazy 8 letters and you will see letters consistently the right way around rather than muddled bs and ds.

I split the letters into similar motor pattern groups and learn those together, followed by how to join between letter groups.

And this was the result…

Handwriting sample taken on 15th May 2020

If you would like to help your child with their handwriting, please do contact me for further information.