What to Do About Your Brain-Injured Child?

All during the huge success of the international publication of How to Teach Your Baby to Read and Teach Your Baby Math, the staff constantly proposed the necessity of a book for the parents of children with brain injuries. Chief among these people were my mother Katie Doman and Gretchen Kerr. Gretchen was my father’s right-hand woman.

In the 1960s, Gretchen began training as a clinical staff member. She was a very sweet and quiet yet strong person. She kept herself very physically fit and loved to hike and swim. She worked hard and her responsibilities grew and grew. Eventually, she became the Vice Director of the Institutes and finally, when my father became the Chairman of the Board of Directors, she became the Director of the Institutes.

My father began to write a book for the parents of children with brain injuries. The working title was Saturday’s Child. This comes from the nursery rhyme Monday’s Child. The nursery rhyme explains the characters of children born on each day of the week. The poem says for the child born on Saturday, “Saturday’s child works hard for a living”. My father was referring to children on the program needing to work hard in order to develop and compete with their peers.

My father wrote the book quickly. Like the Read book, the information was all in his brain. No sooner had he finished the book than it occurred to him that a new part of the program that was having great results should be added to the book. This process went on and on until he had written the book seven times. Finally, when the overhead ladder program had gotten hundreds of children walking, he thought to add that to the book as well. Gretchen and my mother got together and had an important meeting. They went together to my father and told him under no circumstances was he to add anything else to the book. The publication of the book had been delayed by years. Since my father’s new successful innovations would continue to come for many decades, the book would never get finished. Gretchen and my mother ordered him out of our home in The Institutes and told him not to return until the book was ready to go to his editor. He realized that they were right. He chose to go to the Metropolitan club in Manhattan. This is an old men’s club founded by J. Pierpont Morgan. My father had been invited to join the club after Random House published the Read book.

My father took the Presidential Suite on 5th Avenue, stayed there for two weeks and finished the book. It was a miracle. My father hated to be alone and always wanted my mother, Katie, to be with him. The What to Do About Your Brain Injured Child book is about the birth of a new field of study, Child Brain Development. This is the field my father created and was his life’s work. The book is also a history of the early years of The Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential, from 1955 to 1974. It is also an autobiography of my father’s life from the second World War to the 1970s.

What To Do About Your Brain-Injured Child Book Cover.

As explained above, How to Teach Your Baby to Read was published in 1963. Virtually from the time of publication, there was a demand for the same book on the subject of math. How to Teach Your Baby Math was published in 1980. Like the Read book, it proposed a whole new paradigm for teaching math. My father had discovered with brain-injured children that tiny children had a unique ability to see quantity. Math is composed of ten symbols. These symbols have no relationship to quantity other than by definition. Babies and toddlers can identify quantities. Average adults can typically identify quantities up to eight. For example, if one dropped eight pennies on the floor, an adult could look at that and reliably be correct. But above that number, adults become increasingly inept. Tiny children can identify quantities up to 100 or more. It is important that they are taught quantity before they are taught symbols. This way, the brain relates the quantity to the symbol. As with so many of my father’s discoveries, he observed and intuited children’s great neurological potential. It would be many decades before research at some of the great universities validated what my father knew first.

After the publication of the Read and Math books there was a great demand for the book that would become the text book for the How to Multiply Your Baby’s Intelliegence course. It was clear after two decades and experience with hundreds and hundreds of children with brain injuries, that even the most profoundly brain injured children had the potential to become significantly above average intellectually. Even three-year-olds were reading independently, doing math better than their nine-year-old well brothers and sisters, and had broad general knowledge.

The general knowledge was the result of what my father called “Bits of Intelligence”. The definition of Bits of Intelligence is very specific. It is a piece of visual and auditory information that is precise, discrete, and unambiguous. For example, the picture below is a true bit of information.

Blue and Gold Macaw.

The picture is a very clear photo of a Macaw. It is not a photo of a Macaw surrounded by trees and grass. There is not a baby Macaw included in the picture. The Macaw is not eating. Any of the above additions would not make this a discrete, precise, and unambiguous piece of information. Children with brain injuries and well babies have an incredible capacity to learn hundreds, even thousands of these pictures. They can learn them very quickly. They love to learn, so it is easy for them to acquire information and knowledge that makes them significantly above average intellectually. Children with brain injuries have this capacity because they have a young neurological age. Tiny well children naturally have a young neurological age of an average one-to four-year-old.

In 1981 my father published the book, How to Multiply Your Baby’s Intelligence. This books includes the reading, math, and general knowledge programs using Bits of Intelligence. Domanlearning.com advises parents with hundreds of these cards which we call Doman Cards to honor my father. The Multiply book has the same name of the course that was launched in 1976. The book and course go hand in hand. This course has been updated and is now available at Domanlearning.com.

My father was a physical therapist who became a Child Brain Developmentalist and the founder of the Doman Method. His first love was the mobility development of profoundly and severely brain injured children. With his discoveries about early learning of reading, math, and general knowledge, his legacy has become well babies and children with brain injuries being cognitively way, way, way above average.

As a result of these successes in 1976, my father’s organization, IAHP, diversified into both an organization to vastly improve the abilities of children and adults with brain injury AND well babies and tiny children developing much faster than everyone believed before.

In the early 80s, Encyclopedia Britannica became interested in my father’s work. They understood that children needed to read well and love reading if they would grow up to read Encyclopedia Britannica. I am often shocked that publishers, librairies, and organizations that are entirely based upon reading have not become avid and generous donors to The Doman Method. Since 1963, tens of thousands of parents around the world have used the Doman Method to teach their children to read and to love to read. Encyclopedia Britannica wanted to publish and sell our kit How to Teach Your Baby to Read. In anticipation of the success of the kit, my father wrote another book, How to Give Your Baby Encyclopedic Knowledge. The title was decided upon in order to help the whole EB project move forward as a success. This new book also provided all the information about having a successful reading, math, and general knowledge program.

As a part of the whole diversification into the development of well babies, my father started the International School of The Evan Thomas Institute. This unique school enrolled babies at birth, and then educated parents as to how they could develop their babies at home cognitively, physically, socially, and physiologically. The children would gradually attend more and more classes with their parents until they were five. At five they would begin the first academic level. It was common at this age that the children could read, do math, and have general knowledge superior to an average seven or eight year old. They were also able to run long distances, swim, do gymnastics, play the violin, and read and speak two or more languages. This was not first grade and was appropriately labeled as Level One. The International School continued until the young people were 14. At that point, they were capable of going to university and skipping high school. All four of my children graduated from this school. They have lived The Doman Method since day one. This made their grandparents, Glenn and Katie Doman, very, very proud and happy. Their parents as well.

For many years, both the parents of well babies and the clinical staff for children with brain injuries insisted that a physical book was greatly needed and wanted. We all knew that the cognitive results our children were working towards were very much enhanced by the physical program. This is an intrinsic part of The Doman Method. It is also not anything new. The ancient Greeks and Romans knew that a well-rounded human being had to be physically capable in order to achieve their full potential. In 1995 my father, Bruce Hagy, and me wrote How to Teach Your Baby to be Physically Superb. This book tied together the importance of physical development to cognitive development. It also supplied parents with specific programs to develop their baby’s and children’s mobility, balance, and manual dexterity. These programs start from birth to age six.

In the 1980s, the Volmer Foundation in Caracas, Venezuela was interested in providing the Doman Method to a specific population in order to advance the capabilities of all children in an individual society. They proposed for example, to introduce the Doman Method to all newborn children in Bermuda. This would be a kind of national controlled study. After 5, 10, 15 years, all the children of Bermuda would be far advanced over other children around the world. The idea was to make a model which could then be duplicated in any country around the world. It was a brilliant idea. To support the idea and plan, my father wrote a book called The Universal Multiplication of Intelligence. Unlike his other books, it was not about enlightening and empowering parents. Instead, this book was a plan for localities and governments to begin a process to greatly expand the potential and capabilities of their children.

In the ealy 2000s, my sister Janet recognized the importance of a baby book. This book was diametrically opposed to the standard book of photos and indications of an individual child’s development. Instead it is a true 21st century book that teaches parents how to evaluate their babies neurologically and implement a neurological development program to enhance their cognitive, physical, linguistic, and manual abilities. Smart Baby, Your Baby! Was published in 2001. It carries my father’s name because he is the source of the information in the book. The book was written entirely by my sister Janet.

Written by: Douglas Doman