Some time ago, a parent friend consulted me and said:
The child participated in a period of sensory system training, and there was a great improvement in the overall ability, but it felt more and more disobedient and more and more difficult to manage, what is going on?
In fact, this is a normal performance, parents do not have to worry. Let me take this question and start with a simple analysis of the principle of sensory integration.
There are five stages of children's capacity development
Children's capacity development must go through five stages:
The establishment of sensory pathways → the development of sensory movements→ the recognition of body image→ the formation of perceptual movements→ the generation of cognitive learning.
It can be seen that if children are to have the ability of cognitive learning (cognitive intelligence), the development of the first four stages must be perfected.
The basis for the development of these four stages is to construct sensory pathways. Because children want to learn new things, they must have the ability to accept external stimuli.
Although this ability depends on sensory receptors such as sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell, these alone are not enough.
Because if the sensory nerve pathways that transmit stimuli to the brain are not normal, the child still cannot correctly understand the outside world.
For example, a child with normal vision and problematic visual nerve pathways cannot correctly transmit what he sees to the brain, although he can see things from the outside world.
Therefore, there will be b/d indistinguishment, copying the wrong number, and not being able to distinguish the near word.
In addition, sensory neural pathways have the ability to select stimuli so that we can hear what we want to hear even in extremely noisy environments; in extremely quiet conditions, we can reject content we don't like.
On the contrary, if the child's sensory nerve pathway is not perfect, the filtering and selection of environmental information is relatively poor, and any information is easy to enter the child's brain, and he will have a restless and poor concentration.
At the same time, the construction of sensory pathways requires a large number of rich sensory inputs, so that children can receive external information with the help of sensory organs such as sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell, and then under the stimulation of nerve currents, the connections between cells are generated and uploaded to the brain.
The brain then performs a comparative analysis and directs the body to make feedback before entering the development of sensory movements.
This analysis and feedback is constantly repeated, and the child has a specific understanding of his body image, so that he can consciously dominate his own behavior.
That is to say, parents should prepare flexible and diverse environmental elements for their children in order to better help children develop sensory integration ability.
On the contrary, if the child does not receive a comprehensive and rich sensory input at the critical stage of growth, in the long run, he is prone to form an inertial brain network to solidify cognition, which may really become a bad habit, and there will be sensory disorder behavior.
Why didn't the child obey after training?
If a child has sensory disorders, it means that his neural pathways may not be well established.
Then after participating in a period of targeted sensory system training, his neural pathways were quickly opened, many unconnected cells were connected, and feelings that had not been felt before began to arise.
Therefore, under the guidance of the inner strength, the child explores and feels the rich information in the environment, and slowly obtains the development of ability.
But at this time, the child cannot smoothly control this "new body", so it will show some inappropriate behavior.
For example, before training, the child's physical strength is insufficient, the coordination is not good, and he is more resistant to games such as swings and slides.
But after the sensory training, his control of his body has increased, and he now dares to play games that he was not interested in before, climbing, running, moving things, swinging, playing basketball, and so on.
The child will have a lot of exploratory behaviors because of the improvement of ability, and these behaviors may not have been seen before.
Parents may not be accustomed to this change, but it is not that the child is "disobedient", but that he is developing his ability, so we should adjust the educational method in time to adapt to the development of the child's ability.
Another possibility is the emergence of sensitive periods in children.
Many parents in the process of raising children, easy to overprotect, doting on labor, etc., resulting in many sensitive periods of children's development needs have not been met.
Therefore, after a period of sensory training, the child will begin to appear in various sensitive periods, which is also a witness to the improvement of the child's ability.
For example, children's self-awareness is improved, their ability to perceive the information of the surrounding environment is enhanced, and they gradually have their own ideas in terms of belonging and order.
Then he will want to meet his inner needs more, so there will be disobedience to the instructions of parents, and in the eyes of adults, he will feel that children are "disobedient".
As parents, our most important thing is to "respect the child" and let the child pass this period smoothly.
It should be noted that the individual situation of each child is different, and parents should communicate with the child's training teacher in time, find the reason in time, and optimize the training program in order to make the child's ability better improve.