I had a letter from a mother who wanted to share her letter.  Here it is:

Hi, Donna,
I know you do autism consulting all over the world so I wanted to share a breakthrough that we had this week with Benjamin in the hope that it might help another child somewhere. Sorry I can’t figure out how to change the background color in this e-mail.

Ben’s diagnosis is high-functioning autistic, he was severely speech-delayed but you would hardly know it now. His speech-language diagnosis now is Semantic Pragmatic Language Disorder. But I’d better keep this brief.

He’s 8 and just finishing 2nd grade at home.  He was reading at grade level, but only short passages, usually one or two paragraphs at most, with pictures. His sight vocabulary is a year ahead. When he tried to read and keep up with an audiobook, he would turn his head from side to side like he was having eye-tracking difficulties. He is also very far-sighted but the eye-doctor did not think reading glasses were necessary.

SO…last week, I bought him a “chapter book,” and he picked it up and started to read it in the car on the way home. That would have made me very carsick by the time I read the first page, but for him something about the vestibular stimulation in the car made it possible for him to focus and relax and read rapidly and with good comprehension. When we got home he tried to continue reading, but said that the print was going “all wobbly.” I asked him to try a coloured overlay (might not have been the right colour) but it didn’t help and he protested that the problem was not his eyes, but his brain (!).  Back in the car, could read fluently (silently) again.

In the past week he read four Magic Tree House books in three days and is working on one of the non-fiction Research Guides that accompany them. He is very proud of himself and wants to be very “knowledgeable.” I am hoping that with practice in the car (he says, “I didn’t know I could do it!”) that the eye muscles and the brain will be trained and he will be able to generalize this ability.

Ben has always been able to talk better, too, (well, since he started to talk) in the car seat in the back–I thought maybe it was because he didn’t have to look me in the face–but I was writing now about silent reading, not reading out loud. He does read out loud fluently when HE wants to but I have never required him to do it on demand. He was, at my suggestion, making pictures in his brain as he read…said it was like watching a movie!

When I’m driving (and maybe peeking at him in the rear view mirror), and he’s in the back seat strapped into his booster seat, is when I used to hear about what happened to him at school (for the few weeks that he went) and other difficult conversations. And also when he first started The Listening Program, he would talk and converse well while listening to classical and nature music on the headphones. He was five years old and we even had a conversation, initiated by him, about life and death and how long he wanted to live (200 years!), tough things like that. So maybe that’s it–the rhythmic sounds of the music, like the car vibrations, relaxed him enough to let him think and converse.

He did say something about feeling relaxed in the car. I would think that might be like your selective mutism issues…anxiety blocking speech, or blocking visual tracking and comprehension in his case. I thought about vestibular issues because they are so prominent–in the opposite direction–when I try to read in the car, that is, I get nauseated so quickly.

If it’s vibration I guess the rocking chair or swing may not work as well. When I was 12 years old I lived in a house with a stone wall around the back yard that came to a narrow ridge about 2 inches wide…I used to balance and walk back and forth along it while reading a book…I think maybe I’m more than a bit kinesthetic too. :-)OK, that’s it as far as observations, now here’s my theory about why it works for Ben (and probably not for all ASD kids, but maybe some).  We know that some autistic people have fewer Purkinje cells in the cerebellum of the brain, and that these cells are very much involved in vestibular functioning. So maybe the motion stimulates the vestibular part of his brain in some vital way.

Also, I just read a book last weekend about a psychologist researching infant development who found that infants held (over the shoulder) in an upright position and subjected to passive motion (“walked”) became calm, focused and alert. This seems to be something similar. Does he need this more because his mother was on bed rest for five months while she was pregnant? Possibly.

Just wanted to share, feel free to repeat this story anywhere.

Peace,
Kathlee.