As a parent you are very aware of giving your toddler a balanced diet.  Five fresh fruit and vegetables a day are what we are aiming at. How many of us even consider that we need to give them a varied sensory diet as well?

Creating a sensory rich environment for your toddler will help them strengthen their bodies and their brains. Mature thinking and learning are based on neural pathways that develop as a child masters physical coordination, balance and skilled movement.  Yet many parents view “child play” as an outdated activity.  We live in a digital age- let them master computers, electronic games so they may conquer the universe!  How wrong they are!

We need to get our children back to the games we played, back to exploring a three dimensional world where they get full of mud and run and jump in puddles.

Let’s look at Emily, a four year old. She is a bossy little girl who tells her parents what to do. She is a fussy eater that would eat yoghurt all day if she could, refuses to dress herself and does not play well with other children. If they brush against her, she pushes and shoves. If she shows affection she hugs too tightly. Dad thinks she needs stronger boundaries from Mom.  Mom feels she is just expressing a strong will.

At school Emily never likes to play with blocks or draw. When she does use the crayon it is with hard strokes which often break the crayon frustrating her even more.  When Emily runs, it is with a clumsy gait and she often falls.  At the end of the day she is tired and irritable. Is Emily just being naughty or is there more to this behaviour?

Research done with children showing similar patterns indicate that this may be a sensory processing disorder. This is a common but very misunderstood problem that affects behaviour, influences the way children learn, move and relate to others and feel about themselves.   Emily needs to learn how to modulate her senses in order to cope with day to day life. She exhibits this bad behaviour when she can’t cope with what’s happening around her, when she feels overwhelmed.  So how do we help Emily and all the little ones like her?

What we need to do as parents is to focus on developing and maintaining a balanced sensory diet for our children. As they develop and grow we need to relax and think about incorporating sensory experiences in to their day to day life.

Let’s begin by looking at tactile stimulation.   A child can be hyper or hypo sensitive to touch. In both cases it will affect learning and the way we interact with people. Emily might be hypo sensitive, hence she pushes or hugs too hard.

Not everyone realises that we have internal senses as well, called the near senses. These play a vital role in our development especially in the early years. Movement is the only way to stimulate this internal sense.  Emily needs more movement to help with her balance.

Smell and taste are interlinked. Expose them to different smells and let them explore different tastes, even ones they don’t like.  Emily is sensitive to the textures of her food and that could be the reason that she is a fussy eater.

The eyes and ears are the senses that can give us the most problems later. If we don’t process what we see and hear we have auditory or visual processing problems which lead to learning difficulties at school. Emily finds the noise of the classroom too much and prefers to be on her own.

For this week don’t just think five fresh fruit and vegetables think five sensory activities to enrich their learning experience.

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Speech and Audio Inc

We are Speech Language Pathologists and Audiologists. We provide therapy at various school in the East Rand, and deal with a wide range of communication delays and disorders. Tamaryn and Simone have been friends for 10 years

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Worldwide, allergies are on the rise, and in South Africa a staggering 40% of sufferers are children, according to the Allergy Foundation of South Africa – affecting quality of life and learning potential. The problem, and solution, to common allergy symptoms, says world-renowned nutrition expert Patrick Holford, is diet.

“One in three children with behavioural problems have allergic reactions to foods. Other than overt physical reactions, individual food allergies can affect thought processing and cause irritability, agitation, aggressive behaviour, nervousness, anxiety, ADHD, autism, hyperactivity and learning disabilities,” says Holford.

A trial study conducted by Dr Joseph Egger, head of the Pediatric University Hospital in Munich, Germany, and his team in 1985, which studied hyperactive children to find out whether diet could contribute to behavioural disorders, found that 79% of the children participating reacted adversely to artificial food colourings and preservatives, but also found that different foods produced the same symptoms in different individuals.

“In the 1980s, researchers found plenty of evidence that allergies affect any system in the body and are behind a diverse range of symptoms, yet this research has largely been ignored since,” says Holford.

Patrick Holford is a pioneer in new approaches to health and nutrition, specialising in the field of mental health. Having suffered throughout his childhood and adolescence with migraines, sinus infections and ear infections, Holford sought a solution and discovered that his troubles were due to milk and yeast allergies.

“The truth is that the majority of people are likely to suffer for years not knowing that they have an allergy – but also not knowing how to treat it,” says Holford.

Not to be confused with an intolerance or sensitivity, an allergy is an exaggerated physical reaction to a substance where the immune system is involved. As our personal defence system, the immune system releases chemicals when it comes across a substance it doesn’t like. The chemicals released by the immune system in response to an allergy result in symptoms such as mood-, attention-, memory- and intellectual impairments, as well as behavioural problems, overt physical ailments and delayed reactions that make pinpointing the allergy difficult. Other symptoms of a food allergy include nausea, cramps, flatulence, fatigue, throat trouble, sweating, skin rashes, acne and boils, migraines, apathy and confusion, depression, and paranoia.

“The good news is that you can grow out of most food allergies and reduce your child’s allergic potential,” says Holford.

According to Holford, the best way to prevent and reduce allergic potential in your child is to stick to the following dietary guidelines:

1. Completely remove wheat and dairy products from their diet for a month or so and see if their symptoms improve.
2. Have an IgG ELISA food allergy test done and see a nutritional therapist.
3. Improve your child’s digestion by including plenty of fresh fruit, vegetables and seeds in their diet.
4. Ensure you keep antibiotics and painkillers to a minimum, as they damage the digestive tract.
5. Include fish in their diet to ensure that they are getting sufficient Omega 3 oil, Zinc and Vitamin A.
6. Avoid foods containing chemical food additives. The most common ones to look out for are aspartame, tartrazine and MSG.
7. Eat whole, natural foods as much as possible.
8. Choose organic food (free from pesticide residues).

For further information on food allergies, nutrition and childhood behavioural problems, visit www.holforddirect.co.za.

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Speech and Audio Inc

We are Speech Language Pathologists and Audiologists. We provide therapy at various school in the East Rand, and deal with a wide range of communication delays and disorders. Tamaryn and Simone have been friends for 10 years

Latest posts by Speech and Audio Inc (see all)

• Dangerous Decibels, Noise induced hearing loss in children - June 14, 2019
• Listening to Learn - April 17, 2019
• Listen Up! What’s the big deal with childhood hearing loss? - February 8, 2019