@vitalbraininstitute: Victor Hugo is 6 years old and non verbal. When he came in, we found an active rooting reflex, a primitive reflex that should integrate by 6 months of age. The rooting reflex is what causes a newborn to turn their head and open their mouth when the cheek or lip is touched. It is meant to fade once a baby learns to feed because those same structures are needed later for speech. When this reflex stays active past infancy, the oral motor system never fully comes under voluntary control. The lips, tongue, and jaw remain tied to a primitive pattern instead of being free for intentional sound production. A child may understand everything around him, may be deeply aware, may be trying so hard to communicate, and yet the motor pathway for speech is locked inside an older, more automatic program that was supposed to turn off years ago. This is where the difference between top down and bottom up therapy matters. Top down therapies work from the outside in. They target the behavior, the word, the skill. Speech therapy that drills sounds, repeats flashcards, and rehearses articulation is top down. It assumes the foundation is intact and that the child simply needs to be taught the output. For a child whose nervous system is ready, this approach works beautifully. For a child with an active rooting reflex and an underdeveloped brainstem, it does not, because you cannot teach a voluntary skill to a system that is still running on an involuntary program. This is why so many non verbal children have been in speech therapy for years with limited progress. The work is being done at the wrong level. Bottom up therapy works from the inside out. It starts at the brainstem, the most primitive part of the nervous system, and builds upward from there. We integrate the reflexes that should have integrated in infancy. We stimulate the weaker hemisphere. We rebuild the developmental sequence the brain was supposed to move through the first time. Only once that foundation is in place does the higher level skill, the speech, the language, the intention, become truly available to the child. #nonverbal #autism #adhd #autismo #developmentaldelays

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Tuesday 21 April 2026 20:49:14 GMT