Why Movement is So Important for Kids with Learning Struggles
Doman International Co-Authored Blog Series with Spencer Doman
by Darci Hawxhurst,
Doman Method® Neurological Evaluator, MAF Certified Health Coach, Teacher and Adult Literacy Trainer
Foreword, by Spencer Doman.
In the below blog, Darci Hawxhurst speaks from her experience as a professional and parent, as she recounts her experiences with her daughter Haylie, and watching neuroplasticity at work as Haylie recovered from a life-threatening illness and brain injury. Darci is a MAF Certified Health Coach and holds a Master’s Degree in Literacy, Culture and Language Education from Indiana University. As a professional, she describes the challenges that result from a brain injury, and treatments that deliver real results for kids with special needs. As a parent, she talks about the path she has taken that has helped Haylie have major successes in life. It’s rare, and special, to hear from someone with this combined experience. Darci has achieved great things on her journey with her daughter, and you’ll no doubt be inspired by the story she has to tell.
For those who are not already familiar with me or my blog, let me introduce myself. I’m Darci Hawxhurst, the mother of a child I nearly lost to bacterial meningitis at only twelve days old. You can read more about that dramatic story that forever changed my life here. You’ll be relieved to know that Haylie made it (spoiler alert). She is currently a successful college student at a Big Ten University, despite the developmental problems that plagued her early years – cerebral palsy, epilepsy, gross and fine motor delays, learning disabilities, just to name a few. It was a difficult life that I was not equipped, by nature of my stubborn idealism, to resign her to. By the time she was four years old, we had exhausted the resources in the mainstream medical system without any significant improvements. In fact, as she got older, she got worse in every way. Then, I found the Doman Method® Program and plunged into the intensive treatment program that would lead my daughter to her happy, healthy, independent life.
In the meantime, we devoted years of work to her neurological rehabilitation. Like a miracle in slow motion, we crept and crawled and patterned her way up the Developmental Profile as day by day, week by week, month by sometimes monotonous month, Haylie’s brain grew faster, developed more fully, and she gradually caught up with her peers. It was enthralling to watch her outgrow her previous problems, problems that I was determined would not define her as a human being or the outcomes of her life. My dream was that she have full access to her own dreams, whatever they may be, and the Doman Method Program was her ticket to achieving them.
Because we did this program full time and Haylie did not attend school, I have no idea what might have become of her in that setting. I do know that her visual problems and learning struggles would have been huge barriers to success in academics if we had left them untreated. At five years old, she was completely cross-eyed all the time, which was a major problem for her reading development. She was also hyperactive, unable to focus, and had big memory problems, which I came to understand were simply symptoms of the root issue – the disorganization in her brain caused by damage from the meningitis. As we worked on eliminating the cause, these symptoms began to disappear.
For example, I remember the summer that Haylie was training for her first triathlon. She was swimming, biking, and running for miles each day. She was eating only whole foods – boatloads of organic veggies, grass fed meats, and healthy fats. She was spending hours outdoors in the fresh air and sunlight. That summer was her first without seizures. She became vibrant, articulate, and intensely focused. She mastered some difficult math concepts and began to read fluently, with full comprehension, at grade level, after having previously been years behind. Coincidence? Not at all.
You see, there was an important reason that Rosalind Doman assigned Haylie to train for that triathlon. She knew all that running would organize her cortex with the long-distances of cross-pattern movement. She knew that all the deep respiration at an optimum aerobic heart rate would provide nutrient and oxygen-rich blood to the neurons that so desperately needed it. She knew that the abundance of Vitamin D from the natural sunlight, the diverse microbiome she was breathing in all that fresh air, and the detoxification that would occur from it, would improve her overall health, stimulate an appetite for nutritious foods, and allow her synapses (the connections between neurons that allow them to form networks for learning and memory) to grow and connect with each other in important ways. Rosalind also knew that the visual stimulation from biking at higher speeds would cause Haylie’s visual pathway to mature, improving both her visual acuity as well as the brain’s ability to use both eyes together effectively.
During this process, I learned just how important movement is to cognitive development and I came to understand, in a very practical way, that the brain grows by use and that movement is the foundation of a healthy brain. You see, human beings evolved to have these big, beautiful brains with a sophisticated cortex - the part that reads, writes, and does language - by walking miles outdoors every day. But now, look at our modern culture. Kids are entranced by the addictive pseudo-realities of too much screen time, denied opportunities to develop the way nature intended, and we have skyrocketing rates of childhood diseases and neurological disorders as a result. With our modern lifestyles, we are literally denying them the opportunity to develop brains that can reach their full potential, which is reading and learning with ease, with joy, at high levels.
But it’s never too late. And the proof of that comes from the story of the other brain-injured child in my life – my mother.
When she was a young girl, my mom was hit in the head by a baseball. It struck her in the forehead, knocking her out cold as she fell backward onto the sidewalk. She doesn’t have many memories after that of her first few years of school, except that it was difficult and she struggled to learn to read. This impacted her self-esteem, because she thought that she just wasn’t as smart as the other kids. Though she was never given an official diagnosis, she did require summer school and extra help to keep up with her peers. Until, that is, the summer that her father put her on the swim team. All that deep respiration from miles in the lap lanes, and bike rides to and from the pool to get to practice, helped her brain grow faster and catch up. During the next year she began to read.
However, throughout her school years and into adulthood, my mother still struggled to read well. Although she ran her own successful business to support our family, she was never someone who loved to read or who chose to do it for pleasure. She often brought home the wrong products from the grocery store because she didn’t read the labels, she would enter a store by the wrong door because she didn’t attend to the “enter” and “exit” signs, and she lacked the confidence to drive to new places. Reading road signs quickly was not something she could do well because of the way her eyes would jump and skip words - a sign of a neurological issue, not a lack of intelligence. But she assumed that reading was just something that she was not good at. That is, until she got involved with Haylie’s Doman Method rehabilitation program.
Participating in her granddaughter’s program inspired my mom to clean up her diet by removing sugar, excess carbohydrates, and processed foods, replacing them with whole, fresh, natural veggies, meats, and healthy fats. It also encouraged her to get walking – miles a day, outdoors, no matter the weather, just like those early humans who evolved the big, sophisticated cortex that they passed on to us. At its best, this cortex should be capable of complicated visual tasks like reading with full comprehension. But we often take it for granted that this is an extremely intricate neurological function that is relatively new to human beings, who have only been reading abstract symbols for a mere five-thousand years. In order to coordinate this feat, the brain must organize messages along the vast visual pathway that runs all the way from the eyeball to the occipital lobe at the back of the brain. It is a long pathway made of millions of neurons to maintain and, if there is a bridge out anywhere along that road, then that is a potential reading problem. It happens all the time.
A long daily walk can have a powerful positive impact on the development of reading skills by:
Organizing the two hemispheres of the cortex so that they learn to work well together to produce and understand language (including printed language that we read).
Stimulating deep breathing to feed the brain a nice steady supply of oxygen that all neurons need to be able to do their jobs
Increasing the heart rate to deliver an adequate blood flow that carries nutrients from all those natural healthy foods to the neurons
Providing an opportunity for the brain to coordinate the muscles from both eyes to work together (important for depth perception as well as reading ability)
The daily repetition of this easy walking also ensures that the brain and body learn to execute these important neurological functions on a regular basis so that even when we are done walking and sit down to do some reading or problem-solving work, we have an efficient brain with an organized cortex in charge. This is the power of movement to support the other cognitive tasks we humans need to accomplish in the modern world.
But we do need to choose intentionally when providing movement opportunities for our kids with learning problems. Many parents think that just because their kids play sports, they are getting adequate movement. However, it’s important not to confuse intense activity in a competitive setting for the quality movement that can organize the brain and help it develop properly. Unfortunately, much of the world still operates under the false premise of “no pain, no gain,” which is a harmful philosophy that pushes people to exercise at a heart rate that is too intense and therefore limits the amount of oxygen available to the brain. At a heart rate of higher than 165 beats per minute, children will be in an anaerobic state that will trigger a sugar-burning metabolism, resulting in brain fatigue and high levels of stress hormones that break apart neuronal connections, impacting learning and memory in a negative way. This is the opposite of what happens during a long, easy walk where the body’s metabolism is being trained to burn fat for fuel, leaving adequate amounts of glucose available for the brain cells that require it. When kids are moving at a lower heart rate, they are also activating the parasympathetic nervous system, which will help to remove stress hormones from the bloodstream, assist with learning connections in the brain, and regulate the sleep cycle that is also critically important for brain health and development.
Today, I’m happy to report that both my mother and my daughter are strong readers who enjoy books for pleasure. They read well, with full comprehension, and remember what they read - just like me. Unlike me, they did not start out reading easily at four years old (thanks to my mother’s implementation of the Doman Method early reading principles). Like so many of the students diagnosed with learning disabilities that I work with, they endured years of struggle, thinking that maybe they just weren’t as smart as their friends. Those are painful thoughts to have. And they can stick, creating an identity rooted in feeling less-than and leading to undesirable outcomes. They are not alone in this. Nearly 1 in 4 kids is identified with a neurodiverse learning issue these days. Regardless of the exact label, well-intentioned parents and teachers want them to sit still longer and try harder, while the root cause is overlooked. All the while, these students’ self-esteem gradually erodes over years of realizing that no matter what they do, they just can’t keep up. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
What we know about the brain’s ability to grow faster and develop more fully under the right circumstances means that we have the power to create an environment in which these kids can thrive. We can help them read and learn more easily if we address the root cause of their problems in the brain. The correct kind of movement is a big piece of that puzzle. It might take some creativity to rearrange our schedules and lifestyles to make it happen, but I think our kids are worth it. Don’t you?
Postface, by Spencer Doman
Darci’s blog is a great resource for parents and professionals alike. It’s not just a story of a girl who went from a severe brain injury to university student, but also a tale of resilience, a family working together and neuroplasticity in action. Darci reveals many of the main drivers of brain development, which are parts of the Doman Method®. Aerobic running is a scientifically-proven way to help improve brain function and development. The right kinds of physical activity can help reading ability, vision, coordination, the ability to learn and recall information, speech and nearly every other ability we have. Darci also speaks about her family in terms of three generations, and how her mother taught her to read by age 4 with the Doman Method, and how she expanded on that to help her daughter’s recovery. We appreciate Darci’s contribution, both as a parent and professional, to inspire and teach other families of special needs children how to grow and thrive in every way.