HS #279 Asperger’s Syndrome: Thriving At Home with Dianne Craft
Links and Resources:
Show Notes:
Dianne Craft, President of Child Diagnostics, Inc., is considered the leader in Alternative Teaching Strategies by several teaching universities. She has a master’s degree in special education and has over 25 years’ experience teaching bright children who have to work too hard to learn. In her quest to learn more about learning disabilities and their causes, Dianne became a Certified Natural Health Professional to better understand how an upset biochemistry can impact a student’s learning. As a nutritionist, Dianne also specializes in natural treatments for kids with sensory processing dysfunction and focus/attention issues.
She has developed the successful “Three-Pronged Approach” to reducing and eliminating learning disabilities: Brain Integration Therapy, Right Brain “Healing” Teaching Strategies, and Targeted Nutritional Interventions. Parents across the country have seen their children overcome learning struggles using these tools. Dianne has since created remedial programs for reading, writing, spelling and math, which incorporate her powerful midline therapy. Hundreds of teachers and homeschool families are using her alternative teaching strategies to successfully remediate their students. Dianne teaches educators, psychologists, speech therapists, occupational therapists, and parents these life-changing concepts directly to so that they can also work with their students and children.
Resources Mentioned:
Asperger’s Syndrome: A Guide for Parents and Professionals by Tony Attwood
Brain Maker by Dr. Dave Perlmutter
“Straight Talk” By Marisa Lapish
Biology of Behavior 3 Month Nutritional Program by Dianne Craft
Brain Balance
Brain Integration Therapy
https://diannecraft.org/product/biology-of-behavior-cd-set/
https://diannecraft.org/produc...
Show Transcript:
HS EP 279
Wendy -
Hello and welcome back to another installment of the Homeschool Solutions Show. My name is Wendy Speake, and I am one of the many hosts we have here on the podcast. Each week you'll hear from one of us inviting one of our friends to join for a conversation about this busy blessed season as we educate our children at home.
Now the title of this show is Homeschool Solutions. While we don't have the answer to every question, and we know that all the solutions to every stress and every struggle can be found in the Person and Presence of Jesus Christ and His living and active and applicable Word. We are so glad that you're here to join us for today's conversation. But before we start the show, I'd like to thank our sponsor.
Medi-Share. An affordable and Biblical healthcare alternative. Find out more at mychristiancare.org for their ongoing support of homeschooling families just like yours.
And now, on today's show.
Dianne -
Hello and welcome to the Homeschool Solutions Show sponsored by the Great Homeschool conferences. I'm Dianne Craft, former homeschooling mom, special education teacher, and founder of a consulting clinic in Denver called Child Diagnostics.
Today's podcast title will be interesting for you. It's Asperger Syndrome: Thriving at Home.
Recently I received a question from a parent. She said I just took my seventh grader out of school to homeschool him. His diagnosis was Asperger syndrome. Now they call it high functioning autism. The bottom line is that he seems to have fallen through the cracks in school and wasn't making progress, and his anxiety was getting worse. How can I help him at home? That's the end of her question.
Is your child impacted by the symptoms of Asperger syndrome, also called high functioning autism, are on the autism disorder at home? Let's briefly look at some of the most common characteristics of behavior that can complicate their lives. We know this.
We know they tend to be very schedule oriented. They hate transitions. Their nervous system is so highly strung that for them to change, a schedule is, requires an appointment ahead of time. You have that child, you know you're careful about making changes around.
What else is a difficulty for them is social cues, and they seem to have difficulty with conversations and understanding facial expressions, and nuances in body language, which are all a technique basically of the right brain. The whole global brain. They tend to want to use more of their left data brain and just go by the verbal input. Sometimes social cues are hard for them.
You know that anxiety rules their day and we're going to talk a lot about that in this podcast as we talk about the three ways that we do interventions at home to make life so much easier for these wonderful kids and teens.
Their sensory system is easily overstimulated. They seem to have a red alert button that is highly sensitive to even the wind blowing. So, noises bother them and textures bother them and people's appearance bothers them and they seem to have quirks and they only will have certain textured foods. All sorts of things bother them again because anxiety rules their day because they are so driven by their sensory system being an overload where everything is a little bit too much.
We also notice that their conversational skills are strained because, for a conversation we don't realize it takes so much give and take, so much to understanding what the other person is saying when they're pausing in the conversation. When we can interrupt what their interests would be, that is a skill that is difficult for them and make school difficult.
They also tend to perseverate on a single topic. And when they're often like there on a Johnny Carson monologue. They love to just talk about one subject and one subject alone, and they're very encyclopedic in their information. They can easily tell you all the facts. They're like our Joe Friday dragnet shows where they just said just the facts, ma'am. They love the facts, they're data-oriented, and it's different difficult for them to get into the other areas that make life easier.
Most of the time these children and teens have a parallel diagnosis, such as ADHD, sensory processing disorder, or OCD which we call obsessive-compulsive disorder. I refer to them, these kids whose nervous system is in this equilibrium. Their sensory system seems to be on red alert as we talked about. They sense a threat in many situations, which keeps them very distracted and unable often to engage in conversation or display acceptable behavior easily. Many kids and teens impacted by Asperger's syndrome suffer from what we call a hyperacusis, which means they have an overreaction to loud sounds.
This makes it hard for them to deal with school or anything, any noisy environment, particularly a middle school environment with all of its loud chatter. The fast loud chatter and conversation of the students tend to overwhelm this child or teen's sensory system. Then they can't easily process what is being said. Then, if they make a comment according to what they thought they heard and it doesn't fit the conversation they receive strange looks. And one more time experience rejection from their peers.
Now let's talk about how we can make them more comfortable. Let's consider homeschooling. Let's consider why homeschooling is the best place for these children and teens. Why is homeschooling often the best environment and even the best socializing environment for these children? Well, number one is a lot less commotion at home, no matter how many children you have, it's still not the same as a noisy classroom or mainly a noisy hall. If they have noise they're, and less noise, and they're in a smaller setting, it's not big groups. And this, just this situation alone helps keep the child's nervous system from having to filter out so many auditory assaults.
We also know that social interactions are so much more helpful for kids, when they're supervised. So, the social interactions at school are frequently not supervised, so we know what we get is either minimal bullying or maximum bullying. In other words, there's not ideal at all. So, at home, you can supervise social interactions not only with their siblings but with their friends and with the homeschool groups that you get together with. They could be monitored so that they're positive interactions. It greatly builds skills and self-esteem.
What else is the benefit of homeschooling? Well, you can make the curriculum choices that fit your child. They can be interest-driven subjects. They're the best for these curious children and teens who love to study one topic in depth before going on to another topic. And you will find that as we look at the educational ways that we're going to impact them that they really like to drill down into one topic, and you know that they're just filled with facts.
What's another benefit of homeschooling? Well, these kids often benefit tremendously from special dietary needs, then we can feed them lunches that are lower, have zero gluten, or carbs, that are fresher, that have more nutrients in them. We know that this makes a huge difference in keeping their nervous system happy. And which we're going to talk about later on when we talk about specific nutritional interventions. We're gonna learn that the important neurotransmitters that help their brain and the nervous system remain calm and organized, are manufactured in the gut or the bowel. So, whether we, whether it's comfortable or not, the diet is a big piece of how well their day goes.
Tony Atwood is a very popular clinical psychologist and expert on Asperger's syndrome, has written some of the very first writings that we've had. Which sometimes we can call it Asperger's, high functioning autism, or I like Asperger’s-like, which means that we the symptoms that look like that, but we can mitigate those symptoms so much that maybe we don't have the label or if we do it's all very easy to handle in everyday life. Well, he says that I have always found homeschooling to be a positive option that has literally saved the lives of many children. That's such an important impactful statement. I'm gonna say it again. Doctor Tony Atwood, A-T-W-O-O-D, says in his clinical studies and his surveys of his families, he's always found homeschooling to be a positive option that has literally saved the lives of many children.
Now we know, okay, we decide to homeschool our wonderful child or teen who has these types of symptoms. What do we do? Well, parents focus on three areas when they're at home and are all ways into the day as we talk about the three areas, anyone may say, oh, that's a lot. But it just, all ways into the day. They're just ways that we can make easier, learning is your memory, are much less assaults on their nervous system.
So, the three areas that we're going to talk about in this podcast, and that most parents will focus on, is number one, of course, their educational. What are we going to do academically? What's the best way to teach them? Number two is going to be, what kind of therapies can we get them involved with without spending a lot of money, or always necessarily relying on the school? Well, we can do both of those. We're gonna look at just some other simple therapies that you probably are engaging in now, or are thinking of, or have heard of. The third leg of the stool, which this very important leg, is going to be the nutritional interventions that we can do. Just little things like being maybe gluten-free and dairy-free and sugar less. Not sugar-free. That wouldn't work. For a little while and see the difference. Do a little experiment at home so if you notice the difference in the sleep and the behavior.
And so that's the three legs of our stool are going to be academic, any therapies you wanna get involved in, and what kind of simple to more complex in nutritional interventions can we be involved in?
Let's look at the educational interventions first. So, first of all, you know this probably if you know your child really well that they select interest-driven subjects. For example, they love history, and they love science, but there's some parts of it they don't like at all. Let them go with their interest because, and they will probably stay on one chapter of the history or of the science for a whole month, but they will know everything about that.
Stick with that. That's how they're comfortable learning. They are good learners, but they drill down to facts and data. Because for them right now, what isn't available to them is the whole picture, the global peace, the feelings, the emotions, the stories. Right now, that isn't available to them. Let them direct and teach only part of, like, the history book, but the important parts that you think are there, and let them drill down and enjoy that.
What's another educational intervention these parents use? Is they often use videos? Videos help to teach history and science and with the videos instead of doing writing, we're gonna do much discussion of the subjects and we're going to do a lot less written output.
Lisa Pyle, P-Y-L-E, an author, says that traditional curriculum can often be too overwhelming for these kids. Too much writing. In my experience as a special education teacher for these wonderful kids, there are four learning gates. Some of them are blocked, some of them are open. The visual, which is eye tracking. The visual motor, which is writing. The auditory, which is keeping track of syllables in a word. And then there's a focus thing and behavior ability. For these wonderful kids, the two gates that tend to be blocked for them that we can help open up quite a bit, to 80% we found anyway, is the writing gate and the focusing and behavioral, nutritional sensory gate.
So, what we learn is that when we're doing work with them, we don't require them to give us the information that they learned through writing or through typing, doesn't mixes, it's still I hand. Because they have an eye-hand block, maybe a dysgraphia. Either way, we're going to get rid of that by giving them some midline exercises that will transfer the writing and the eye-hand into the right brain. But right now, let's have them tell you everything. Rather than a workbook worksheet, have them tell you what's on that, you check it off, it's done. What we are gonna use their writing for though, their writing battery energy. You're gonna use that for actually writing paragraphs later on.
So, what's a third educational intervention or third educational strategy these parents use? They use computer programs for some things. Not for their whole curriculum at all, but for some things. Most of the time when I work with kids who have dyslexia or dysgraphia or ADD, or any one of those, we do not use computer programs because nothing teaches as good as a human being next to them. However, for our wonderful kids who are more on the Asperger syndrome, the high functioning autism, though they do love machinery, they do love the digitals, they love the computers, they do learn lots of things from there. So, you can select certain subjects. And again, it may be a history. It may be maybe their math, but they love to utilize a computer. So, you can choose your subjects carefully, but that would be, that is something that they use for these wonderful kids.
Let's up, number four, that we have in our educational interventions, are strategies as we remediate them in the areas they need. And that is what is not done in the schools because they are frequently, that place, in the regular classrooms, because of course, they're, they have their input, their receptive ability to learn is the same as their peers in school. It's the output and the social issues that they have the most difficulty with, but many times they have what we call a dysgraphia, where writing for them, they can tell you anything orally, but you put that offending utensil in their hand, and they get stuck.
And if you wanna learn more about the writing glitch, you can go to homeschoolmom.com, which is this podcast website, and you can download the podcast we just did a few weeks ago on Dysgraphia when it's painful to write and how you can remediate that at home. That's a big step. Because it isn't just writing, it is the ability to recognize left and right, and that organizes their brain and their thinking ability.
Many times, these kids, when I taught them into the school system, they were gifted with a glitch. So, in other words they had a good high IQ. They had out great vocabulary. They could read many words they frequently didn't comprehend what they read well, because the reading of many words is more of a left-brain function. It is data entry. The right brain is the picture that you and I make in our head, a movie of what we are listening to. So, but if they love to read but have dysgraphia, which is a great resistance to writing, it can be corrected at home. If their spelling is behind grade level, we can easily correct that by showing them how to use a strong photographic memory.
Right now, their photographic memory almost is inaccessible to them. Photographic memory is the one that makes pictures as they do, so, they go in, they, given the data, which is data is sounds or words or just things without any picture attached to them. What we do with, what I did with my students, my sixth, seventh, eighth graders when I had them in my classroom that had dysgraphia, they were spelling very poorly because we often teach spelling through the writing gate and that wasn't working for them. So, we would take the words and put funny stories or pictures or, you know, little emotions on a letter that they couldn't remember in a spelling word. And that told their brain, take a picture of that. They learned how to spell so much better. But the other piece is, they started to learn how to use the right picture-taking brain when they were listening to words from other people. Because of the fact that it would help to transfer.
The fifth step that we're gonna do really makes a difference in just what I told you about in transferring words to pictures. We're gonna improve the reading comprehension. Many times, these guys can read words by themselves, way above grade level. And then you ask them to read something and tell you what happened, and they are just reading the words. They're not easily transferring it into a movie. So, with my students, we spent ten minutes a day practicing converting words into a movie so they could get an understanding with this practice. Sometimes I used a joke book, a real nice joke book, I've gotten from Remedia publications, and you can too. Or something we call mini mysteries from Remedia publications. That'll be in your show notes.
What I loved about that is, otherwise, before, I would read a little mystery, it was a one-page mystery that they could solve easily. This is a quick crime. This is the evidence with like, who did it kind of thing. And they would just, you know, I would read it, and they would, I'd say who do you think did it? And they would just give me any kind of crazy answer because it was just words to them. And I'd say, okay, now, good, good job. So now let's look at that first sentence, then I'd read it to them. Let's make a picture of that. And we'd talk about the picture we see. I'd read the next line. Oh. Let's take a picture of that. Oh, now let's make that picture. And, oh, let's make it a movie.
We did that all the way through as I was training them and training their brain to convert words into movies and pictures. At the end of that whole page, I said to them, now who do you think it...? Oh yeah, I see da da da da. So when they say I see, they're moving away from Asperger’s-like symptoms because Asperger’s-like symptoms tend to be, I hear. And the I hear is only one mode. It doesn't get into the feelings, the emotions, the memory, and the whole picture. So anything I can do to get them into their rich, right-brain picture-taking understanding mode is what I did. I did that with spelling, by putting picture and emotion, and color on letters. They couldn't remember. I did it with a direct reading comprehension. Ten-minute practice a day.
And by the way, we have a podcast called Improving Your Child's Reading Comprehension. How to convert words into movies. And, well, I think just a couple of weeks ago. So again, go to homeschoolmom.com and pull up that podcast. It shows you exactly what I did with my sixth, seventh, eighth graders. I did it with second through fifth graders too, but you know just talking about that group right now. What I really loved about that is about by the middle of the year, I went from the mysteries to jokes. One of the reasons these kids are often left out, they don't understand idioms, jokes. They're very literal. So, to get them out of their literal brain into the whole brain, what we did is we, right brain, helped them with jokes.
So, I would...how do we get jokes? We hear the words, don't we? And then we convert it to a picture, and we see the movie and then we see the thing that's funny right? Well, they don't get to see that. So, what we do is we show them. We start with a joke. Oh, look at this. Okay, now I have them look up because I know the physiological movement of the eyes up. Opens up the right brain and just stimulates that. Have to look up like they're looking at a movie. Now, what do you see? And we talk about what we see. And each line of the joke, I say, oh, this is what, how my movie changed. How did yours change? Help them till pretty soon they'll be able to get jokes. Then their conversational skills really improve because they begin to convert what the words that that person is saying, if they don't say them too fast, then they can convert it into pictures.
One of the other therapies that we do is speech therapy, or I should say introducing therapies. Coming from the educational setting, we have the academics, and now what do we do for the therapies that we need? Some of our children, we take out for speech therapy. Some of the kids that you bring home from school are going to be needing speech therapy. They will have been given speech therapy in school and then you say, how do I do that when I bring them home? You can certainly find private speech therapists. You can have them go into the school setting for speech therapy, or you can do some other, you can do, even home speech therapy
There are several speech therapies. When they're younger we do articulation, which kids who need to do the TH and the W and the S's. Maybe your child was through that when they were younger. But by then, we get into what we call now...we had delayed speech also when they were little, when you maybe took them to the speech therapist, and she helped them to pull up speech in a more fluent manner.
The third type of speech therapy there is what are children with high functioning autism or Asperger's-like syndrome needs, which is practical, pragmatic, conversational, give and take speech. So, it's, again, what we were talking about is their need to get to understand what the other person is saying enough so that they can give meaningful feedback.
So again, you can see a speech therapist for that. But I'm going to talk to you about something that I like to do. I'd like to get Marisa Lapish's program. Lapish, L-A-P-I-S-H. Again, that'll be in your show notes. She has a whole series of videos called Straight Talk. She's a speech therapist. And she helps parents use these methods. All sorts of methods to help their children at home, and there's a very good feedback from that.
Some of the home resources for conversational speech are DVD's that provide various social scenarios. So, you, as a family, you sit and watch these, and then they practice conversational replies and responses. The whole family does that, and that helps the child learn to respond to stressful social events. So, they use that family approach. In other words, they present an uncomfortable situation. They say, oh, look at his face. What do you think he's saying? And if the child says I don't know. You say, okay, yeah, I see - you always tell him what you see. Don't question them cause they don't have their...their vault is empty. You show them and model to them, oh, but you see how he's wringing his hands? You see how he's looking down? That tells me he's unhappy. Oh, then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna kind of either walk away or say, okay, well, you'll be alright. You model and model and model what you see and how you interpret that. That's an excellent way to be the conversational speech therapist that they need.
They do have socialization groups, often in a local area and they're run by very good and well-meaning social workers. And, so, that's a group of children who need to be socially integrated as they call it, and they give them clues how to enter into conversations. But this is what the be, for sure, the thing that I would do first. And I would attend one of those groups myself. I wanna, kinda get the, assess the makeup of the group. And then the methods that they're going to use before I'd send my child in alone. I just want to see because sometimes, unbeknownst to anybody and then nobody's goal, but they might just pick up behaviors from other people that you think, hmm, I don't think that was a positive. So, I'll go in and say, well, okay, this is just the right place, so, be sure to attend yourself first.
So, we talked about the educational, number one, educational interventions we're gonna use. We talked about some, one of the therapies. One of the therapies of speech. Another one is occupational therapy. If they came out of the school system many times these kids were involved in occupational therapy. Very good. They help a child or teen modulate their sensory system responses to stressful situations. And so they often use, oh tools like brushing, dry brushing, to desensitize their nervous system. They use relaxing breathing. That's wonderful programs that you can get that have CD sets that help you to just sit with your child and just do some deep breathing, relaxing, breathing, relaxing techniques are tremendous for adults, kids, two-year-old’s. Everybody could use a session on breathing, relaxing. And you can get those by CDs and other on DVD's. They use, often OT's will use therapy balls to enhance the stimulus system in specific exercises.
The third thing...so you can, by the way, you can get that through your school. You can get it, again, through your, maybe your insurance company, or you can do some of the things yourself. The third therapy, which is my favorite, and is what we call either neurocognitive therapy or enhanced OT and PT therapy. Or it's just plain brain training, or I call it brain integration therapy. What it does is it increases the brain connections. You've heard about in brain balance. How they talk about how these are disconnected kids. And this is true.
We've learned this many, many years ago, long before brain balance or anything else was around. Doctors Doman and Delicato, with the crawling techniques as they started for babies who had in-utero brain bleeds. They found that later on, they could have them do crawling techniques and get many many of their functions back.
So, what we learned is that you can use the body to enhance connections in the brain and the nervous system that involved cognition, which is thinking ability and memory, and the sensory system and give them a strong midline so spatially, they're very aware. I have found just remarkable benefits in using this easy little midline therapy that you can have outsourced or you can do at home. I did it in the classroom. So I'm gonna just show you what I did.
This is the therapy that I found, to my surprise, by the way, that it has been the most effective in all the autistic, Asperger’s, ASD, whatever labels we want to give them in all the wonderful kids that I worked with who had to work too hard to learn or to keep their nervous system under control.
So, to increase brain connections, this is my favorite therapy. It can be done at home by the parent with no...just simple instructions. It's a therapy I saw work the fastest in my kids with, in the resource room setting, in which I was working with the middle schoolers.
Now it's interesting that another label that was given in the recent past to describe the characteristics that these kids struggle with has called, been called the nonverbal learning disorder. As we know in our studies of the responsibilities of left brain and right brain, we know the left brain is considered the verbal brain. So, they would say okay, the verbal brain is what they're using. We know the right brain is a more nonverbal brain. So, when they say nonverbal learning disorder, it means they're not using their right brain, which is the nonverbal brain, which is exactly what I was seeing in my class too.
What does this mean practically when a child has a nonverbal learning disorder? To me, it says that they're not easily accessing all the attributes of their right brain. Well, what are these important brain attributes? One is a process of effortlessly converting words to pictures when listening or reading. This helps tremendously, of course, with both reading comprehension and conversational appropriateness because the whole picture is seen as a speaker is speaking.
The right brain is considered the most social side of the brain. The literal side of the brain.
Think of it this way. The left brain is the audio input only. It's like listening to a CD. The right brain is watching the video. Don't you see how much more helpful it is with the video? So, the right brain is considered the more social side. It gets it. It gets all the innuendos, all the nonverbal cues, they're all available in the right brain and we just need to get a bigger bridge over the corpus callosum, which is the midline from the left to the right, and we can do that.
So, it's considered the social side of the brain cause it can get jokes. It can get visual cues. While the left brain is more rule-oriented, data-driven. Literal side of our brain. I was always amazed by using, that by using simple body movements to help my students access their right brain more easily, that my students on the autistic spectrum disorder spectrum, which is in this case the spectrum was a high functioning. I worked with all of my kids, the others that were involved too. These characteristics, I gained so much in understanding social situations and engaging in learning. They seemed to become so much more flexible in their thinking, which was just such a huge step for them.
So how did I help the students in my resource room more easily access the right brain?
I use specific midline exercises and once a week brain training. And these targeted brain trainings, which were just done once a week, and nothing was more than twenty minutes a day, and nothing was on the floor. We just, it was all just standing up. Just typical school stuff. The students would spend a minute or two looking up or left. I put on some music to access the right brain and they would cross crawl. When I looked up or left, we access and light up their right brain.
This simple but powerful, it was called a neurocognitive brain training, gradually through the year, built stronger connections between both hemispheres, creating a veritable bridge for accessing both sides of the brain. This took only twenty minutes a day out of my time that I took them in my classroom for reading or for writing or for math. Just took twenty minutes of that day.
A newspaper article was written titled The Education of Joshua. It was written about one of my eighth-grade students affected by autism spectrum disorder or Asperger's syndrome. He began conversing, after he was done with this, he began conversing with others. Before he was, everything was just a monologue and he looked at the floor while he talked. He had eye contact. He understood jokes, and he began reading for the first time. At his IEP staffing, the neighbors came with the parents because they wanted to find out what had made that big change in Joshua. So, this therapy can truly be life-changing.
So, you can choose a home therapy, or you can do a brain balance. You can outsource it. But midline therapy, I want to say is the most powerful tool I had as a special education teacher that continues to amaze me today.
The last intervention we're going to talk about, the third leg of the stool, which is vitally important if you can, if you can work with it, you'll see it, is targeted biological interventions. Or we call nutritional therapy. We all do it to a varying degree. You're involved in nutritional therapy every day when you feed him breakfast. We're just going to see if we can modify that to help this child's nervous system get under control.
So, parents have often found that targeted biological interventions can be life-changing. We know that one of the hallmarks of children and teenagers affected by high functioning autism is that their days are ruled by anxiety. So, they hold themselves very rigid and have rigid schedules so that they can predict everything so they don't get nervous. And they often struggle with sensory processing disorder. We did a podcast on sensory processing disorder and the nutritional interventions, and again you can access that through the website that we're on now.
Because their nervous system is wound too tight, they can seem very unreasonable at times. In his book, The Second Brain, Doctor Michael Gershon, talks about the integrity of the gut bacteria and its ability to make the important neurotransmitter, serotonin, which is a feel-good neurotransmitter. So, we equate those unreasonable times and meltdowns as times when they do not have enough serotonin, or that neurotransmitter. Then we'd say, why don't they have enough? So many authors refer to the same connection between the nervous system and the child's gut. You probably heard of the gut psychology syndrome. And it is, just gives us many, many ideas, again, about the whole gut and brain connected. In fact, the second brain is what they call that.
I remember working with an eleven-year-old boy named Isaiah. Isaiah had such anxiety that he would not let his mother go out of his sight. He'd isolated himself so much he wouldn't even go to a birthday party. He cried every day in frustration. Then his mother started using natural supplements, putting good probiotics into that gut, so that that began making this serotonin again. Reducing the sugar so she didn't kill off the serotonin, or, basically, the good acidophilous which gave off all the ability to make serotonin.
So, she started using natural supplements. She changed his diet to include only minimal sugar, not no sugar. These are children. But minimal sugar, minimal carbs that turned to sugar like pancakes and pop and juice and granola bars. That started to restore his intestinal balance. Remember, intestinal balance means that he's also helping with his brain balance. So, she wrote a touching report about how her son now would go shopping with her. Get into a public restroom by himself. Now even stays overnight with friends. She can't believe the difference in his reactions to everyday life. I'm a certified natural health professional besides being a special education teacher because I was fascinated by this connection between the brain in the gut. The brain and the nervous system, the food and their reactions to life.
So, we have something we call the biology behavior, the little three-month program. Or you can go to your naturopath or your, a nutritionist in town and find out how you can, step by step, begin to change your child's whole gut dysbiosis and it makes such a huge difference in behavior. And of all the talks I do as I go round in conventions, I will carry along my little still sure on paper form, I love just touching them, all the different testimonies I have, very many testimonies about brain integration therapy and how that helped them be able to access the right brain and get stories and jokes and all of that.
But the biggest file I have is what I have written out on the outside of my files called, precious biology behavior testimonies. Isaiah is one of them. With so many parents that say I can't believe the difference.
When we began giving good probiotics with all these articles on my website or certainly in all the podcasts we have here with homeschoolmom.com to help you with that. And maybe you have your own resources. But first put in good probiotic, then do a little bit of killing of a fungus that's causing a lot of the trouble is, you can get it at a health food store and then put in some of the minerals that it's missing. And we have a story in there about a little boy, four years old, who wouldn't even touch sand. And after just doing that, even that, that little three-week program, he just, he ??? picture in the Facebook showed him sitting in a sandbox fully immersed in sand.
So those are the kinds of things that God has available for us. He has, always has the answers for us. We just need to find one of them.
So, Doctor Perlmutter, David Perlmutter, he will be in your list. , P-E-R-L-M-U-T-T-E-R. He's a pediatric neurologist and he worked with a lot of children who had Tourette syndrome. And in his book, Brain Maker, he reports that he eliminated a thirteen-year-old boy's, socially debilitating tics from Tourette syndrome just by correcting his gut ecology. This is worth looking into if you have a child who is suffering with anxiety and isolationism. You can see the references we're going to have in the show notes to give you places that you know that you can look at.
So, the educational therapies and nutritional interventions. Those are the things that we look at when we bring these wonderful kids home.
Please for more ideas go to homeschooling.com or diannecraft.org, Dianne with two N's. If you have quick questions about your child, you can leave your message on our office machine 303-694-0532. I look forward to our next time in our podcast and to your questions. Enjoy homeschooling your child.
Thank you for joining us this week on the Homeschool Solutions Show. As always, you can find show notes and links to all the resources mentioned at homeschooling.mom. I hope you'll take a moment to subscribe to the podcast, and if it was especially meaningful to you, share it with your friends via email or social media. This is just another way we can all encourage and love and support one another.
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