How Neuroplasticity Is Impacting My Daughter - Living with Down's syndrome

I grew up around the Down’s syndrome community as a child. My sister had a traumatic brain injury at birth and her community included people living with Down’s syndrome. I had decided somethings about people with Down’s syndrome and when I had a child of my own with Down’s syndrome those stories shaped my first response.

• One of which was her quality of life is out of my control.
• Also, that she develop to a certain point and that would be it.
• Lastly, her development was in someone else’s hands.

It’s Down’s syndrome awareness month and Abigail is 4.5 years old. For 4 years of her life she has been working with a modality that has deeply impacted her life and has crushed the decisions I made 30 years ago about people with Down’s syndrome.

I document in two previous posts this month Abigail’s journey and how she was not available and not aware of herself enough to participate in ANY therapies that would be helpful to her.

Until, I prayed and asked for help. My answer came in the middle of the night while I was reading a Harvard professors paper about people living with Down’s syndrome and he mentioned neuro therapies.

This led me to a search on the internet that resulted in Anat Baniel Method.

Through this modality we have learned the truth of brain function, learning and how the brain affects Abigail’s ability to learn, change, develop and has elevated her quality of life.

Today I share the impact of neuroscience that is expressed through Anat Baniel Method - neuro-movement lessons on Abigail’s speech. We approach every angle of Abigail's learning from the “swiss cheese effect” principle. Hang with me here….

Anat says it this way, “When we want to be able to do something new, or improve on what we are already can do, we need to provide the brain with new information with which it can create additional connections and patterns, that move us beyond our current limitations.”

“These patterns, as they become grooved in, are what we know ourselves to be – our self-image, or body image. Every person’s body image is different. For example, a concert pianist will have dense brain maps associated with the wrists, hands and fingers, whereas a belly dancer will have a much fuller self-image of her pelvis than most us have.”

“I call this the swiss cheese effect. The areas of our bodies that are less mapped in our brains are like the holes in the cheese.”

When we think about learning with the swiss cheese effect in our minds eye. We have changed the way we measure success.

I reserve the right to decide what development Abigail will do next and I look for her responses to her environment. In regard to speech look for what is actually happening with Abigail. She started repeated words in songs, so we started there.

She would say a word and rather than correcting her or speaking for her, we feedback what she is saying first and then if the word has holes in it like a letter left out, we repeat it with the holes filled in. Most often she will immediately feedback what she just heard me say with all the holes filled in. Then she begins to expand on that learning and before we know we it she is saying all the letters in more and more words. Then she began to connect those words to other words.

We have eliminated the need to “hope” for change, growth, and development. We now expect it. Because we have proof that anything is possible for Abigail and we have hooked into those possibilities.

Here is the secret to Abigail’s success. My ability to change, adapt and flex with her. Once I let go of preconceived ideas Abigail, myself, my daughter, and my husband are all learning differently and changing daily.

The videos below are a series of birthday videos we send to our loved ones. You can see the progression of Abigail over 5 months of not singing to singing and filling in more holes in the song.

For more resources that further explain and demonstrate this visit: