4 years of Speech Therapy ... he can speak clearly enough to be understood, but still doesn't have the muscle control to close his mouth while eating.

3 years of Occupational Therapy ... he has significantly increased body awareness but still crashes into people and walls; he can ride a bike, rollerblade and scooter but can't walk heel-to-toe across a room or stand on one foot for more than 15 seconds.

7 months of Vision Therapy (aka torture) ... his eyes can converge on a tool for a test but not on paper to read; he still can't copy a group of simple pictures from one paper to another.

I started praying last fall because it appears my son has some kind of neurological delay or dysfunction that is limiting him in many areas. In November my friend told me about Anna Buck, a therapist who studied Neural Development Delay in Britain. Her NDD therapy focuses on 2 areas: correcting reflexive behaviors that are retained from infancy and improving vestibular system function.

I hope to blog about our journey with NDD therapy for my son in hopes that I can help others whose children may be in a similar situation. When all the other therapies have helped but haven't solved the problem, it's possible your child may be retaining infantile reflexes that can be corrected.

We took my son for an evaluation with Anna about 2 weeks ago, and right from the beginning, I could tell that he needed help. While he appears to have good balance and gross motor skills, his performance on many of these tests showed that he has developed compensating mechanisms that were stripped away when he was asked to perform tasks different from his normal activities. And he tired very quickly, beginning to yawn after only 10 or 15 minutes of what appeared to be simple activities.

The results of the evaluation showed that Jalen does have several retained reflexes. One is the "startle" reflex that causes an infant to suddenly spread their arms and react when surprised. Children who retain this reflex end up living in a "fight or flight" state - either extremely anxious or highly frustrated and angry. My son is one of the angry/frustrated ones - it's deeper than a discipline/self-control issue. I don't want to sound like I'm making excuses for sinful behavior, but in his case (and in a few other children I have seen), there is an automatic reaction to frustration that is far beyond simple anger. And other reflexes he has retained include those that move the head automatically along with the body as well as the baby's rooting/sucking reflex (now we understand the mouth issues).

Today he begins therapy. He and his dad will visit Anna this afternoon and learn the first of many exercises to perform daily to begin inhibiting one of these reflexes. After about a month, they'll go back and start working on another exercise. The exercises are designed around the way babies move their bodies to train the brain to overcome the infantile reflexes. It will be a long road for us - we expect 18 months to 2 years to fully complete the NDD therapy. Anna has treated many children with more serious issues (including her own daughter) and found miraculous success. (She documents many of these in her book Miracle Children.)

I'm trying not to pin great hopes on this new therapy, but we have come to the point where I don't expect lifelong success with academics or relationships without some kind of help. We are willing to make this long-term commitment to help our son become who God made him in body, mind and spirit, overcoming the physical weaknesses that have held him down for many years.