Sound and Movement Therapy

Holistic Therapy for Neurodiverse Children

The human brain is continuously developing over our lifetime, with the most significant developmental milestones happening during childhood.

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Your child begins developing neural connections in the brain from birth. Involuntary movements by your baby stimulate muscle spindle messages to the vestibular system and cerebellum, which in turn stimulates connections in the frontal lobe – the part of the brain associated with planning, understanding behaviour, memory and problem-solving. The sounds that your baby hears allow the brain to create the necessary neurones to identify individual phenomes in each word.

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Movement is a critical part of brain development and body awareness. From simple reflexes in infants to learning gross motor skills such as running, walking, sitting, posture, and balance - and fine motor skills such as writing or colouring are all predictive of language outcomes in childhood development. They also lead to successful cognition and social and emotional development stages in many children.

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Like a pyramid of orderly behaviour, if a child were to skip any of these developmental stages, perhaps due to a neurodevelopmental issue or even a childhood illness, there can be consequences later in life. Therefore, assessing a child’s development milestones and retained reflexes is a potential indicator for brain immaturity, i.e. where sections of the brain are not fully developed.

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Many of these indicators can manifest at school and contribute to low academic performance, social behaviour issues, delays in language development, poor co-ordination, reading, writing difficulties and anxiety.

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Harley Row Clinic’s three-step programme is a holistic approach that integrates nutrition with movement and sound healing to support children with learning difficulties. By combining these areas, we aim to treat all aspects of your child’s health, not just their symptoms.

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There is evidence to show that making simple changes to your child’s diet can help to improve their ability to focus. It also has a positive impact on their mood and memory. Our team of nutritionists work with you and your child to understand what changes could be made to your child’s nutrition. The impact of this can help them to feel calmer and more confident, concentrate, socialise, and interact with their friends – all changes that will make their child's experience at school a more positive one.

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Physical movement exercises that may involve swinging, spinning and testing coordination can indicate a child’s brain maturity. This is because motor skills develop in a predictable trajectory, with each skill building upon the previous. Movement therapy aims to enhance a child’s cognitive, physical, social, mental and emotional wellbeing. Physical exercises can improve brain plasticity and influence cognition. Therefore, movement therapy can be effective in addressing delays in any of these areas.

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Sound therapy is also highly effective for addressing learning difficulties and can be beneficial for successful listening and learning. Sound therapy stimulates the nerve pathways into and within the brain which benefit the areas dealing with language, in particular. These language centres speed up making the processing of language more efficient. Concentration and understanding improves as information is dealt with more quickly, in turn increasing the volume of information that can be processed at a time. Literacy skills such as reading and spelling are often seen to improve as the child becomes more proficient at analysing the sound structure of words.