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Heal the Child Program is open to all adults who interact with children: educators, parents, social workers, counselors, day care providers, pediatricians, psychologists and therapists who are interested in acquiring proven methods to assist children.
The Problem: Decline in Infant Movement, Increase in Learning Challenges
Research since the 1960's has shown a continuing decline in our children's ability to learn and interact effectively. Contributing factors have been a steady decrease in family interaction and a drastic decline in infant movement so necessary for brain development—movement like rolling, crawling, creeping, turning, and spinning.
Experienced teachers have reported a significant observational change in kids in the last 25 years, noting a dramatic decrease in language and cognitive abilities.
- In New York City there was a 55% increase in children diagnosed with learning disabilities from 1983-1996.
- A U.S. study shows a 1000% increase in autism over the past 20 years, from one in 5,000 children in the mid-1980's to one in 150 children today.
- In 2000 close to 20% of United States children fell within the Attention-Behavioral continuum.
- In Florida there was a 49% increase in students diagnosed with learning disabilities between 1971-1996.
- 10% of American children have been diagnosed with some form of emotional disorder.
- Currently 35% teenagers in the United States fall within obesity levels. In the early 1990's it was 12%.
- From 1990 to 1997 there was a 700% increase in Ritalin use.
- The U.S. produces and consumes about 85% of the world's production of stimulant medication to treat ADHD.
- Fifteen years ago people could distinguish 300,000 sounds, today most students cannot go beyond 100,000. Twenty years ago the average person could detect 350 different shades of a particular color. Today the number is 130.
- American high school students of 1950 had a working vocabulary averaging 25,000 words. Today that level is 10,000.
- As of 1998, 85% of all academic honors in the U.S. were taken by foreign-born students.
- Typically, when the U.S. sends its very top students to international academic competition, they finish last in a group of twenty or so industrialized countries.
- In the last fifty years there has been a 70% reduction in the physical movement of American school-age children.
Jane Healy, Ph.D., summarizes what teachers say about declining verbal skills in US students:
- Declining listening skills; inability to maintain attention, to understand, and remember material presented orally
- Decreased ability to get facts and ideas into coherent, orderly form in speaking and writing
- Tendency to communicate with gestures along with, or instead of words
- Declining vocabulary knowledge above fourth-grade level
- Proliferation of "filler" words instead of substantive words ("You know, like, the thing, well, yeah")
- Difficulty hearing differences between sounds in words and getting them in order: pronunciation, spelling, etc
- Faltering comprehension of more difficult reading material
- Trouble understanding longer sentences, embedded clauses, more advance grammatical structures
- Difficulty switching from colloquial language to written form
References:
- ADD/ADHD Symposium, Robert Mellillo, DC. DACNB and the Carrick Institute for Graduate Studies, 2002
- Neurobehavioral Disorder of Childhood, Robert Mellillo and Gerry Leisman, Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2004
- I of the Vortex. Rodolfo R. Llinas, MIT press 2001
- Synaptic Self. Joseph Ledoux, Viking 2002
- Principles of Neural Science, Kandel, Schwartz and Jessell, McGraw-Hill 1991 and 2000
- Brain Asymmetry. Richard J. Davidson and Kenneth Hugdahl, MIT Press 1996
- Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, (DSM-IV)
- Survival of the Busiest. Sharon Begley, Wall Street Journal Article, 10/11/2002
- The Biology of Transcendence. Joseph Chilton Pearce, Park Street Press, 2002.
- Evolution's End. Joseph Chilton Pearce, Harper Collins, 1992
- Endangered Minds: Why Children Don't Think and What We Can Do About It. Jane Healy, Simon & Schuster, 1990.
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