Valbona Ava Levin, born in 1973 in Hamburg, Germany. Studied German and History in Hamburg. Trained as a speech, developmental and learning therapist. Runs a Practice for Child Development. Founder of GOJA®-Therapy, an approach combining sensorimotor and cognitive-linguistic development with osteopathic manual therapy. In 2019 she established a Faculty of child development and education with Peter Levin and Volker Bussmann.
© Text and Cover: Valbona Ava Levin and Peter Levin
First edition 2020
Editor: Karen Lillie
Cover design: Anja Thams
Books on Demand GmbH
ISBN: 978-3-7526-3337-5
If you apply what we know about early child development, there is good news: your child will be fine! If you know what you should do and what you would be better off not doing, your healthy child will develop well, and likely stay healthy in the long term. Your child will go through the first years of development normally, and you and your family will enjoy the many important and beautiful moments of your child’s life.
Coming to understand your child’s development can be astonishing. You have to do less than you might think! One of the secrets of child development is that a healthy child follows her inner programming. If we do not disturb this programming, she will develop according to plan.
In other words, the curiosity and biological roadmap of a healthy child will get her safely through the first year. In a supportive and non-interfering environment, a child will naturally stabilize itself in supine and prone positions and play for hours. She will roll over, discover her own hands and feet, and see the world three-dimensionally with both eyes. She will eventually arrive at an elegant and effortless sitting position, crawl and repeat sounds. And at the end of the first year, she will stand, walk sideways, and then forward. The sequence of this roadmap will not be invented by your child. It is already built in. All we have to do is provide a caring and loving environment for her. Timetable changes, shortcuts and detours are just as detrimental as driving too fast or slow on a highway.
Motor development in the first few years of life is intimately connected to the development of perception and thinking. Scientists therefore talk about “sensorimotor development”. Our scientific knowledge of sensorimotor development is an open secret. But sometimes it seems to conflict with our interests as parents. It certainly did for me. When I started digging deeper into what we know about sensorimotor development, I developed concerns. After all, I had been working with children for 10 years as a teacher and another 10 years as a therapist; I also watched my son through his first year and asked all the questions a mother would. Many of the answers I got were helpful, some were even reassuring. But I found the answers based on sensorimotor development to be irritating, both as a mother and a therapist.
The most irritating realization was that my well-meaning actions might cause problems for my children. A child has to develop stability in the first year. Some well-intended interventions actually make that task harder. That’s difficult to accept. Why would carrying my small child for too long in a baby sling hurt his ability to develop neck stability? Why might jumping on a trampoline or in a jump house undo the stability he acquired through hard work? Why does neck instability then cause linguistic, motor and even behavioral problems?
The answers to these questions are neither daring nor particularly new. Our knowledge of the significance and impact of sensorimotor development has accumulated over the last hundred years. It has also been confirmed in many recent studies. To test the validity of this knowledge, I started observing the children around me during the first years of their lives. And indeed, infants who were carried too often and didn’t have enough time in prone and supine positions had trouble lying comfortably and playing in those positions. Since they were unable to fully experience these early developmental steps, they often skipped intermediate steps. They started standing up or walking too early or too late. These children could only sit with a rounded back. They also could not stand up as well as they should: lightly, upright and with stable feet. Already in their second year of life, these children had to compensate for developmental deficits. By the age of four, they would show up in my office with linguistic and behavioral problems. Their symptoms often became worse if there was an injury. This added issues with concentration as well as emotional and sensory self-regulation. In older children, this then caused difficulties with sitting still and learning to read—as just two examples.
If a five-year-old cannot sit quietly, it is important to find out what she experiences while trying to do so. A child who lacks upright stability will usually feel unpleasant and strenuous tension. Moving back and forth on her buttocks is then an intelligent solution, a successful compensation and not a sign of hyperactivity. Such compensations are helpful, but also exhausting. Exhausted and strained children then strain their whole environment.
By understanding sensorimotor development, you can put your child’s issues in a physiological context. Otherwise, you can be left feeling like there is a mountain of problems that have no link or clear cause. We often then resort to genetic or other explanations, although it may just be that the sensorimotor development of your child is in trouble and needs your support or therapy.
As a therapist, I do not like to talk about the causes of developmental deficits. I work to improve the present situation and do not dwell on past mistakes. Asking question about why