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In my last post I started writing about the adoption education course that I took over the weekend titled, “Because They Waited” by Heart of the Matters Seminars. I shared some of the general rules of thumb that were presented and my feelings overall on the course. In these next few posts, I will share some of what I learned in each of the topics.
The first topic and section (or module as they call it) is titled “Making the Connections”. This module is all about brain development, and it is divided into two part. The first part is all about the science aspect of brain development. It discusses how how babies and young children need sensory input and emotionally positive experiences to build positive brain connections. It teaches that the more often an experience happens, the stronger the brain connections become, and how experiences that are not repeated are often lost.
The information goes into the different levels of the “hierarchy” of brain development and there is a lot of good information (especially in helping teach us why many adopted children can have the affects that they do).
in the second half of this module they look at parenting strategies relate to brain development, an what types of things that parents can do to fill in the missing pieces in their child’s brain development, due to their less than optimal start in life.
The three important things I got from this part of the topic were:
- What happens on the lower levels of the brain development hierarchy affects what happens on the higher levels.
- Many adopted children have trouble processing sensory information.
- Parents need to offer their children many, many positive, sensory rich and emotionally rich experiences in every day life. An example of this would be wrapping a child in a blanket, singing him a song and feeding him a bottle while rocking in a chair.
They also repeat over an over throughout this entire course how important it is for adoptive parents to be proactive and to “hit the ground running”. Providing kids with lots of sensory rich and emotionally positive experiences is not overly difficult, is good parenting, will not hurt your child if they don’t have any sensory issues and is great stuff for bonding anyway. I thought it was great advice.
The topic from the course I will discuss in my next post is “The Cycles of Need and Unmet Need”.
