The Doman Method Goes International

Actually, The Doman Method international from the early days of its existence. My father founded the Rehabilitation Center at Philadelphia on May 9th, 1955. We have already covered that his work began with adults ith brain injury. In 1955, Dr. Raymundo Veras, an Opthamologist from Brazil, contacted my father. His son, Jose Carlos, at age nine, dove into Guanabara bay, on Rio de Janeiro. He hit the bottom and became paralyzed from the neck down.

Dr, Veras took all of his available funds and moved his family to the United States to find the best treatment in the world for his son. They spent a year at the Rusk Rehabilitation Center in Manhattan, considered to be among the best in the United States. After a year his funds were exhausted and Jose Carlos was no better. In fact, Dr. Veras knew his son good get the same kind of treatment inBrazil. Lourdes Veras, Jose Carlos’s mother, went into St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan to pray for her son. She was crying because they had no money and Jose Carlos was no better. A parishioner noticed her crying and asked her why she was crying. Lourdes explained in broken English. The woman said they must take Jose Carlos to Glenn Doman at The Rehabilitation Center at Philadelphia.

And so the Veras’s, including their daughter Lourdina, arrived at The Rehabilitation Center. Dr. Veras explained their predicament. In exchange for payment Raymundo, in halting English, explained he would work for my father for a year without pay. The Veras’s moved onto our campus. Jose Carlos began the very first version of the Doman Method and Dr. Veras began his training. There was no job that was too high or low for him. He changed diapers of the adult patients. He spent a month in each department. He and Jose Carlos worked very hard. The family became very beloved by the entire staff and my family.

After a year, Jose Carlos was dramatically better. He was regaining function in the top half of his body. The Veras’s had been told that this was impossible. In the same humble way he had met with my father a year earlier, he explained that he would be forever in debt to my father and his staff. It was time for his family to return to Rio. He would dedicate his life to expanding The Doman Method throughout South America.

He and my father would become “chosen brothers”. My father fell in love with Brazil and Brazilians and the Veras family. His love was reciprocated because Dr. Veras opened the very first institute outside of Philadelphia in 1957. My father was invited to Rio de Janeiro. Both Dr. Raymundo and Lourdes were well connected in the Brazilian government. My father got to meet the President of Brazil. He was the visionary that built the capital of Brazil. In 1960, my father took our family on vacation to Brazil and the Veras family greatly feted us. As a young boy I fell in love with Brazil and the Veras family too. I had a crush on Lourdina, Jose Carlos’s little sister. My father loved her too and called her Princess. They shared the same birth date. My sister was furiously jealous of my father’s affection for Lourdina. She hated him calling her Princess. She of course considered herself a Princess.

This was a time when Rio de Janeiro and Brazil was an incredibly safe place. There was an air of optimism throughout Brazilian society. They behaved in ways that was shocking to the Americans. Mrs. Veras was an incredibly outgoing woman. We once walked into a restaurant and my father indicated that he wanted the meal of one of the other restaurant guests who was eating happily. Without a second thought, Mrs. Veras went over to the guest who was completely unknown to her, she took her plate and picked up a clean fork from one of the tables and offered my father to taste it to make sure he truly wanted that. We were amazed that the woman was not upset but rather amused!

The solid relationship with the Veras family continued with Dr. Veras’s institute growing and thriving to other Brazilian cities and other SOuth American countries. His son continued our program as it improved and became more sophisticated. He regained full function in the top half of his body but remained in a wheelchair because his lower body remained paralyzed. He went back to school then completed university. He went to medical school, became an MD, and succeeded his father as the Director of Nossa Senora Da Gloria Rehabilitation Center, the Institutes in Brazil.

My father received many awards for his work in Brazil, including being made a Knight of the Southern Cross, one of the highest honors of the Brazilian government. Mrs. Veras always considered the woman who came to her at St. Patrick’s Cathedral to be an angel, not a human being.

In the 1960s, entirely by word of mouth, families came from around the world to my father’s institute outside Philadelphia. One by one families came from all over the UK, Ireland, Europe, South America, India, and Japan. It became a problem because if the family couldn’t speak English, we couldn’t accept them. This was not acceptable for some families and they began to insist on bringing a translator with them. But the translators ranged from excellent to poor. We learnt that a poor translation meant that the family was being taught what they needed to get the best results for their child.

Glenn Doman with children.

By far, most of the non-US families came from England, Ireland, Italy, and Australia. It occurred to my father that it would be much less expensive for the families to pay for a team of my father’s staff to travel to their country. This would eliminate the expensive and difficult trip to the United States, permit the families to stay in the comfort of their own countries and time zone, and divide the costs of bringing the Institutes staff to their country as opposed to 20 families having to pay for the airfare of mother, father, child, and a caretaker for the child.

This model was first used in February of 1970 when my parents traveled with a team of staff to Ranco, Italy. Ranco is a small village located on Lago Maggiore. One of our families had a summer house on the lake and they offered it as a base for the staff to stay and see the families. The entire staff were captivated by the beauties of Lago Maggiore and the towns surrounding it. They returned after six months to reassess the children, teach the parents about Brain Growth Development, and teach the parents a new program of neurological organization. For the second visit they stayed in a small but elegant hotel on the lake, the Conca Azzurra. This hotel was founded and run by a quintessentially Italian gentleman, named Carlo Brovelli. He had been made a Cavallieri by the Italian government for his work in reconstruction after the second World War. Sir Carlo had a way of making you feel like you were the only people in his restaurant when it was jammed packed. The food was top notched Italian. Sir Carlo and his cook were fond of creating new delicious dishes. They received awards from organizations all over Italy and Europe.

My parents fell in love with the Brovellis. We have been making annual pilgrimages to the Conca Azzurra. We have witnessed three generations of the Brovelli family continuing the hospitality of the founding father. The Brovellis have watched three generations of the Doman family grow and develop the Doman Method.

In the early 70s, my father was contacted by the Early Development Association in Tokyo, Japan. The founder of this organization was the famous genius Masaru Ibuka. He was the engineer who founded the Sony Corporation right after the second World War. He was passionate about the potential of tiny children. He read my father’s book How to Teach Your Baby to Read. He invited my parents to Japan. He brought out the red carpet for them.

Years before, my father had been contacted by Shinichi Suzuki had also read How to Teach Your Baby to Read and contacted my father. Suzuki had developed the Suzuki method of teaching the violin. He was many decades ahead of his time. Like my father, he had discovered that if tiny children are taught in a enthusiastic and loving way, they can learn anything. Suzuki was thrilled to learn that someonelse had discovered this with reading and he was fascinated by my father’s program. Likewise, my father was fascinated that tiny children could learn to play such a difficult instrument as a violin. Both Ibuka and Suzuki had developed a relationship. My parents visited both the Early Development Association in Tokyo to see tiny children learning and to Matsumoto to see tiny children playing the violin beautifully.

In the same way my parents had fallen in love with the enthusiasm and affection of the Italians, they fell in love with the politeness and intelligence of the Japanese. Both cultures love and respect children which is why they have passionately adopted the Doman Method. Ibuka took my father on a tour of the Sony Museum. There is a picture taken shortly after the war of a very young Ibuka standing in front of a humble building with a galvanized metal roof. On both sides of Ibuka, there is a teenager. It shows the spirit and loyalty of the Japanese. At the time of the tour, one teenager was the CEO of Sony Japan and the other, the CEO of Sony USA. Akio Morita, the teenager who became the CEO of Sony USA, was the business and financial genius behind Ibuka’s work. My parents were very impressed to be among the top tier of Japanese business and society.

While my parents were being tourists in Tokyo, they were interrupted by Ibuka who said they had an immediate meeting with the Prince and Princess of Japan, now the current emperor and empress. They were driven directly to the royal palace where they met Ibuka. My mother was embarrassed because she didn’t even have time to change and was wearing a mini dress. Nonetheless, she looked gorgeous. My father explained to the Prince about the importance of babies having opportunities to crawl and creep. My father didn’t hesitate to get down on the floor of the palace and demonstrate crawling on his belly and creeping on his hands and knees. From this point on when he was asked about his audience with the Prince, my father would say that he taught the Prince how to crawl and creep.

This trip was the beginning of our work in Japan. As a result of the publicity, Japanese parents began to bring their children with brain injuries to the Institutes in Philadelphia. Japanese parents of well babies began to demand that my father’s books be translated and published in Japan. As soon as the books were translated and published, even more Japanese parents began to seek out our work. As we had done in Italy, my father began taking a team of clinical staff to Italy and Japan twice a year. It was much easier on the wear and tear of the parents to be seen in their native country than trying to navigate the long and difficult trip to the United States. The time difference of six hours between the US and Europe and 13 hours for Japan made it difficult for the parents traveling with young children with brain injuries to not be exhausted by the trip.

In 1976, my father diversified the work of his institute to include well babies. He designed an intensive one week course called How to Multiply Your Baby’s Intelligence. This was named after his book of the same name. The course taught parents of well babies how to teach their babies to read, do math, have encyclopedic knowledge, and to develop their mobility from crawling to creeping and walking, hopping, jumping, and running. The course introduced Suzuki violin, nutrition, and foreign language. It rapidly grew to a huge success with hundreds of parents annually coming to the Institutes to take the course. In addition, the parents demanded help with the materials to teach their babies. So the Institutes began a mail order business to sell How to Teach Your Baby to Read, Math, Encyclopedic Knowledge kits, dots for the math program. This was the beginning of creating a full line of materials for parents to teach their children with brain injuries and well babies. The demand for all the books and materials to be in Italian, Japanese, and other languages began to be a significant challenge.

As the demand for the How to Multiply course increased, we were contacted by a video production company so the entire course could travel to the parents as opposed to the parents traveling to us. In the late 1970s, this video course was presented to more than 5,000 parents in California. Parents in California can be pioneers and our work particularly drew the attention of young parents in Silicon Valley. During all these years, we continued to send teams to Italy and Japan to see our families of children with brain injuries.

The success of the How to Multiply course created a boom for the Doman Method for well babies. News teams from the three major US networks, BBC, RAI, and NHK began to appear at the Institutes for interviews with my father, the parents of the well babies, and to video the remarkable abilities of the young children. One of the most impressive aspects of the course was that parents would observe tiny children reading independently many, many years above their age level. On Tuesday, there would be demonstrations of tiny children doing highly advanced math with joy and energy. On Wednesday, they would show encyclopedic knowledge. Four to seven year olds would invite parent students to join them in a “College Bowl”. The children were asked a wide range of history, geography, math, science, Shakespeare questions. Often, educated and successful professionals were clueless about answering the questions the children answered immediately. The children found it hard to believe the parents were not pulling their legs.

On Thursday, the children would demonstrate a wide variety of physical activities, including brachiation and beautiful dance and gymnastic floor routines. On Friday, the children would play the violin with three year olds play Mozart’s Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and 13 year olds (the oldest children in the school) playing Corelli’s La Folia.

By Friday it struck the parents that all the children from two to 13 had participated in all the demonstrations. They were shocked when they realized that the children were not specialized in one area like reading but were able to do it all. My father lovingly called these children Renaissance Children. The publishing company that we created was called The Gentle Revolution. The philosophy being that all children and all cultures of the world have the potential to be way, way, way above what society believes is possible. During the demonstrations my father always showed children from a wide variety of cultures, backgrounds, and religions to prove our point.

Written by: Douglas Doman