Lauren Edmunds explores what it really means for a child’s brain to be “switched on” rather than passive. She shares a powerful story of a 10-year-old boy on the autism spectrum who has begun to drive his own communication journey from the inside out. Through this, Lauren reflects on agency, motivation, and how parents and teachers can create the conditions for children to find their own reasons to learn, grow, and engage with the world.
Transcription
I’m going to talk about the idea of having a switched-on brain versus a switched-off brain, how we can get around this and why it is so vitally important. I can talk about it in the context of a typically developing child in a typical school system, and I can equally talk about it in a typically developing child who’s in a system that is not typical at all.
If we take that range of children and their development, let’s talk about this idea of a switched-on brain versus a switched-off brain. It’s one of the reasons I am so concerned about young children, in particular those who are struggling, because they move into screen time and a switched-off brain far too early, far too long, I believe that it’s impacting their overall ability to think and brain growth.
Moving away from the screen time thing and moving back onto this idea of switched on versus switched off, there’s a story that Anat Baniel talks about, or rather, she reflects on. A child that’s sitting on the floor, a typically developing child, a little toddler, pre-walking, so say six months old.
They’re sitting on the floor, and you’re standing next to them. You turn to them, and they notice the turning to them and replicate the movement. You bend down, you make motions to pick them up. You bend your knees slightly, you lean in towards them, you put both your hands out, and the typically developing child with a typically developing brain will anticipate what’s about to happen. They will shift their upper body towards you; they might even pull their arms out and towards you in anticipation of being picked up.
I love this idea because we’ve all seen it, we’ve all experienced it either with our own children or with ourselves, this idea of I get what you’re trying to do, and I’m moving in towards you. That is a brain that is alive, alert, awake and moving into itself and into the process. And that’s what we want when children are learning.
I’m going to talk about a little boy that we work with who sits on the autism spectrum. He’s also regarded as non-verbal, and non-verbal has a big range and comes from different aspects, so it’s not a single diagnosis that we can necessarily understand. But if I talk about his child, there wasn’t necessarily a progression towards verbal communication. He does a lot of AAC therapy, and there was a move towards autonomy, but not co-play. He struggled to relate to other children, couldn’t play or communicate, and was lost in his own world.
Understanding receptive versus expressive language was interesting to observe, and the development was, for us, developing augmentative and alternative communication. It could be AAC devices; we didn’t look at sign for him, but there were several ways we could help him understand us, and for him to be understood by us.
There’s a process going on in the background; the underlying driver needed to be created because we didn’t want him to be a passive recipient of therapy interventions, process or even social environment. Again, going back to the analogy of the baby sitting on the floor and you bend down to pick him up, and he doesn’t move at all — you’ve got to do all the work of lifting. We want engagement from the child.
So if we look at it not in terms of the story of being picked up, but in terms of communication, what we wanted was this little boy’s need to talk to come from inside him, not externally from us. We could provide therapies and opportunities, but we needed him to have a reason to work on this, and that is what’s happening at the moment.
He has found a social reason because we realised it was not going to be in an academic setting, though we are seeing that as well. Let me go back a second; it actually happened in multiple settings. There were several opportunities for him to communicate, and he couldn’t find his words. But because we held his esteem well and gave him feelings of safety — physical safety but also emotional safety — and tugged at those little edges around him, giving him opportunities, never forcing but encouraging, giving him space to move into connection with his friends, with his work, even with his adults, he started to find within himself the reason to work at this.
And he’s there. He has found a reason in himself to bring himself to the table, to turn around, lift his arms and look up as if, “Okay, you want to pick me up? I see it now. What can I do in this process?” And he is just the most mind-blowing thing.
He is bringing himself to the table, and with all the therapeutic, academic, social, emotional and connection work we’ve been doing, keeping him safe, he’s now able to find a path to developing the skill he didn’t have. The communication is coming remarkably. The communication loop is developing. He’s having actual conversations backwards and forwards with his peers, and his answers make sense to the question; he’s able to answer a second question and autonomously make decisions about what he wants to do next.
He communicates those decisions so that his communication partners understand him and can accommodate his choices and preferences. This is incredible because he wasn’t able to communicate his choices and preferences before. Now he is working incredibly hard — listening more carefully, practising mouth and tongue movements, repeating words, storing information, and using it across multiple environments. This growth, I believe, is going to explode because it is now being driven by him and not by his therapists.
The work of the therapists, teachers, peers and parents has been to make room, develop skills, and create the space for him to find who he is in this process — to lift his arms to be picked up, move forward, and stand up on his own.
If we think about this in terms of a switched-on versus a switched-off brain, if the therapies, school and parents had automated his behaviours or not engaged him — if we’d done it on our agenda instead of his — he may not have got to this point. At least not this early. It’s been about a year and a half since he realised, “Hey, I have a say in this. I can do this.”
This energy and drive are giving him more energy and drive. He’s doing really hard things, but they don’t feel hard because they’re linked with his internal goals. The progress is there, and he’s recognising it because he’s seeing our quiet enthusiasm and joy for his link to us.
If this somewhat extreme case doesn’t make the case for helping a child build their own desire for something, rather than achieving because you want them to, then what will? Can they find their own desire to achieve?
That’s when the remarkable plasticity of the brain kicks in. Children change. Their IQ rises, their abilities improve, and what we thought they would never be able to do, they start doing — not because we are moving them, but because they have an actual inner skill.
If you take that story away from a child with many diagnoses and move onto children in a mainstream environment — even children who are succeeding academically, in sport, socially — is it being driven by their needs or someone else’s? And how do we switch it into their need?
When it’s something they really want to do, they develop goal orientation, the ability to plan, good habits, and longevity. They stop procrastinating and start leaning in, they get the beautiful hormones they need to grow and build their brains and their bodies. They become a child with agency, moving into who they are.
A switched-on brain requires internal knowledge.
A switched-off brain is a child who has pushed all their locus of control outside of themselves — sitting and waiting for someone else to trigger something for them.
It’s been a beautiful journey to watch, and it continues. I hope that the story gives you some sense of where you need to be from a parent or teacher’s point of view: How do I develop in my child an inner sense of wanting?
And I have to say — it takes time. This is not a sit-down-and-have-a-talk kind of thing. It’s a push and pull: Can I pull back a bit? Can I give them space? Can I allow them to fail? If they fail, how do I process that? What kind of thought process do I want in my child that helps them to be happy, healthy, and progressing?
It’s an interesting question. I enjoy the question very much.
