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Helping Kids with Dyspraxia: A Parent’s Perspective

I’d like to discuss Praxsis and Dyspraxia, but I want to add a strong message here: I’m not an occupational therapist.

This sits within the gamut of occupational therapy and speech therapy. I’m going to share my definition, which I’ve developed over the last decade or more, along with my observations on how it manifests in children, how I work with it, and my perspective as a parent when I began to have my eyes opened to this.

That’s an important caveat to have. I came to this work not through the work, but through the lived experience of someone who was struggling and the change I needed to make. From an adult with no (it could be debatable) diagnosis, that caused me difficulties in learning, education, and adulting, to having to understand that world more fully so that I could parent, and now educate in that space.

I’m coming from a lived experience, not an academic one. I’d like to share my perspective and explore ways to address it, even if it seems silly.

When I was told this at the beginning, 15 years ago, I thought it was nonsense. How could they ask me to get my daughter to colour in, and that would solve the problems, because the problem seemed so much bigger than a colouring-in page?

What is Dyspraxia?

The ability to take an intention, a thought about doing something, and make it happen. Depending on where you conduct your research, several steps are involved. The steps are ideation, which is the imagined thing you’re going to do. For example, “I plan to go and get myself a cup of coffee.” Then, organising that thought, still in your head: “I’m going to get up off this chair, open the door, get to the coffee machine, and do all those things.” And then, actually doing that.

Then there’s the fourth component for me, which is the problem-solving around, “Well, I can’t get the door open,” or “There’s no coffee,” or “How am I working that?” Now, if we understand neuroplasticity at its basic level, we realise that the brain is malleable and can change in response to the interventions we put it through and the work we do. This understanding enables us to transition from being someone who cannot play the guitar to someone who can. That process is the change in the brain. If we understand that, we realise that a child who can’t bring an idea to life is almost the reverse of the development of musical skills.

Misconceptions and Labels

A skill that comes naturally, perhaps to you and me, of being able to get up and get a cup of coffee, could not come naturally to a child. If we go back 10 years ago, or even further back to 20 or 30 years ago, and before that, that child was labelled as “naughty” or “lazy.” Those are terms that we all heard. And I’m not to say, “I grew up in the 1900s” makes me feel older than what I am, but back in the 1900s, those were terms that got placed on the child as being deficient, or, yeah, and it was almost the child’s fault; it was misunderstood.

I want to talk from an understanding point of view. Imagine you’re sitting in a chair with a simple idea- to take off your jersey because you’re too hot – but you just can’t make it happen. This isn’t a child or an adult who can’t take their jersey off; it’s not a physical motion thing. There’s a disconnect between the idea and the reality.

Dyspraxia in a Broader Context

Now, if we look at that in the broader context, I always want to consider what children are struggling with, because it’s a complex issue. The brain is not just one singular thing; it’s affected by many things and involves many things. Dyspraxia can appear to be an inability to adapt or transition from one thing to another. Based on my understanding and knowledge, there are different levels of dyspraxia.

So, it’s the ability to turn thoughts into words. My mouth is moving in a certain way, my tongue, my teeth, my cheeks, my jaw, all of that is moving to make these sounds, and these sounds are coming from an idea, ideation, in my head.

I might get the term wrong, but it’s oral Apraxia, and an OT will correct me on that. It’s the ability to turn thoughts into movement of the mouth and sound. So then it’s voice box and all sorts of things as well. It’s also an eating thing. We often see this at Omatas Learning Centre. The teachers are very aware of it, and we also bring in therapists to support children who are not eating as they should. Nutrition is a crucial component of children’s health, and their brains require a healthy environment to function optimally and learn effectively.

So, if children aren’t eating, we need to start looking at the underlying causes. Some of it could be sensitivity, but interestingly enough, some of it is oral, the movement of the mouth. Children sometimes haven’t figured out their brain—and I want to say their brain hasn’t figured out, because anything a child, or anybody, learns has to filter through the brain system, because that’s the control system.

They haven’t learned how to move food. If they bite a carrot, if they haven’t learned how to move that bit of carrot to their back molars to chew it, they can’t eat a carrot. And often what they’ll say is, “I don’t like carrots,” and we take that at face value, and we go, “My kid is such a picky eater.”

That’s where the observation comes in. You sit back and you go, “Huh, he doesn’t like carrots.” So, from a parenting point of view, my advice is always, “Let’s start joining some dots that you already know.”

But as a teacher getting a child for the first time, it’s starting to create that pattern because you’re observing them fresh, and you begin to notice, “Oh, they also don’t eat apples, anything that’s crunchy.” And then you say, “Where are they placing that carrot once they’ve bitten it? Where are they placing it in their mouth?” Because if they can’t chew it. So, we can solve the wrong problem.

So we might say, “This child is a picky eater.” Now we’re looking at sensory issues. And we might blame it on a diagnosis of ADHD because they sort of want sugars all the time, or whatever. We might just say, “This is not a problem. I’m fine that he eats yoghurt all the time because he only likes soft food,” and we don’t delve further and go, “Wow, this kid can’t move carrots to their molars.”

We’ve an occupational therapist who visits Omatas Learning Centre every Monday, and she works on this, being qualified in a technique called SOS Feeding. And she shows kids how to put the carrot on their tongue. She starts with softer foods, which would be anything crunchy, such as a chip, a Rice Krispies treat, or a cornflake. “How do you put it on your tongue? How do you move it to the back? How do you crunch?” And you watch, and children are visually looking at it, and you give them their Praxis practice, and then suddenly they start eating the thing that they couldn’t eat. That’s just an oral Praxis thing.

Developing Motor Skills

Things like if you’ve got children who can’t move their tongues too well, is, “Can we give them different types of food if they can tolerate the food that gets them to exercise the tongue?” And it’s not exercise in terms of muscle, it’s that component, but it’s the right kind of movement. A speech therapist will say that the most complex sound to teach a child to produce, if they cannot make it naturally, is the “R” sound.

There are excellent videos; you can see x-rays of the profile of a person and what the tongue does when you say “R”. And if you think for a moment, if you say the letter “L,” say “L,” and where does your tongue go? And every time you say “L,” it goes to the same place in your mouth. And then say “R,” but where does your tongue go?

It hovers in the middle of your mouth. Isn’t that interesting? And we don’t even think about where our tongue goes. We have a system where Praxsis issues aren’t experienced, and our ability to speak functions as it should, resulting in clear speech. What happens when speech doesn’t come out? What do we do? So that’s just talking about speech.

And then that idea of going to get coffee would be a motor practice if I cannot figure out that my body doesn’t know the sequence of events. There are numerous factors to consider when your child is struggling with these issues. If they have difficulty with change, such as transitioning from one environment to another or getting up from the couch to do something else, it could be due to many reasons. One of the things is that their body doesn’t know how to do it. So let’s work on that. And OTs are going to, if you go to an occupational therapist, they’re going to give you work like Simon Says games and any kind of mirroring games.

They engage in other activities, such as playing on uneven surfaces, which helps the brain sense the body. However, the key to all of this is to awaken the brain to something new and to encourage children to develop a bit of inner awareness of themselves. If they have that inner stare, you know they’re concentrating, focusing, and building a connection. You want to leave that inner stare going, and I want to draw them out of that, because that’s what the brain is developing.

However, if you can develop motor movements that originate from the child’s ideation, you gradually establish that pathway. And then it’s over and over again to strengthen the path, because if you have the skill, if you’re born with the skill, every single day you practice the skill. I get out of bed, and I practice the skill. I make coffee, I’m practising the skill. So we’re laying down these pathways, and I say “we” as in, if I, without Praxis issues, lay down the path of practice every day.

If I don’t have that pathway, I’ll avoid all those things, which means I’m not only missing the connection, but I’m also not establishing that pathway. So I fall further and further behind. So many children in a learning disability space, not only don’t have the ability, but they are not practising because they’re avoiding, which means not only are they avoiding the practice, but they’re not even following their peers, so their regression is almost inevitable. The difficulty lies in asking a young child, who simply wants to have fun and enjoy life, to do something they can’t do every day, which is challenging.

Integrating Therapy into Daily Life

One of the reasons I started the school is because our daughter was struggling so much, and we would take her to occupational therapy, and then I can’t remember if we did speech therapy or not, but there were several things we were doing. And at one point, we got in the car, and she was about nine years old, and she said, “What’s wrong with me now?” because the focus had been on solving and this terrible word of “fixing” the things that were going wrong, and she just felt like it was just more work.

So, when I started Omatas Learning Centre, the goal was not to bombard the children with therapies, although that’s a significant component of it. The goal was to integrate therapy work into everyday life in fun and exciting ways. Hence, the child develops their Praxis in the same way that everybody else does, because they already possess it, rather than avoiding it. Games like Simon Says, hopscotch, and playing on the jungle gym all develop the body’s ability to plan movement.

So, when those children sit on the couch and spend six hours a day on screens, not only are they not engaging in the work that would naturally develop the skill, but they’re also avoiding the experiences that would naturally develop the skill in a neurotypical child. The neurotypical child develops even more, and the neurodivergent child or the child who’s struggling regresses even more. We need to talk about screens and screen time with children, neurodivergent children, and children who have special needs and remedial needs, because it is putting a pause on the system.

Brain Function and Development

It can be something that can happen to you. My understanding, and again, to say I’m not an occupational therapist, is that brain injury, traumatic brain injury, can cause not a regression in the brain, but can cause damage in the brain’s ability to process these things. Praxis can become an issue at any stage, and this also occurs in old age.

I believe that if the brain develops, it operates on a “use it or lose it” principle. So, if you could once play the guitar and then didn’t for 15 years, the ability to play the guitar would still be there, but it would be diminished over time. That’s why we want to stay as active as possible as adults. And I’m not sure if this is true or not, but I once read that one way to cope with dementia is to continue learning new things, which aligns with this concept as well. Just keep using your brain.

And the brain, I’d have to check the numbers, but we’re born with or at pre-birth, we have 563 million (billion, trillion) neurons, which is a lot, right? When we’re born, then that’s halved, and then, by puberty, it’s halved again. And what the brain is doing is pruning because it needs a vast amount of capacity to learn, to go from nothing to crawling. Then, if you never walk, the neurons for walking go, “Well, if you don’t need me…”. I’m not a musician, so the neurons in my brain for guitar have all but vanished. I’d have to put a lot of effort into learning to play a musical instrument now because I never used those neurons when I was younger.

We’re talking about additional skills and talents, but if you look at the basic function of a human being, we want those core skills within the brain to remain. We don’t like the brain to go, “We don’t need math anymore,” because, “Well, you haven’t used my math brain for the last 10 years, so let’s cut it out.” And it’s not as simple as everything going away, but we can’t be good at everything. We can’t be aware of everything. We’ve to choose, and as parents and adults, when our kids are growing up, we need to make some choices for them. And I really don’t think that sitting on the couch, playing computer games, and watching YouTube is the primary skill our brains need to focus on.