@vitalbraininstitute: This is a 6 year old boy whose parents brought him in because he is nonverbal. He had been in speech therapy for years. He understood what was said to him, he wanted to communicate, but the words would not come out. When I evaluated him, his Palmar Grasp reflex was still active on both hands. The Palmar Grasp is the reflex every baby is born with that makes them curl their fingers around anything that touches their palm. It is the reason a newborn will grip your finger the moment you place it in their hand. It should be fully integrated by 6 months of age. Most people assume a retained Palmar Grasp only affects handwriting. It does, because the fingers cannot operate with the fine precision writing requires. But the impact reaches much further than the page. When the Palmar Grasp stays active, the hand and the mouth stay neurologically linked. This is a connection every baby is born with, which is why infants stick their hands in their mouths constantly and why their tongue moves when they grip something. In a child whose Palmar Grasp never integrated, that link never breaks. The hand and the mouth are still wired together. You see it in children who chew their shirt collars, bite their nails, stick their tongue out when they are concentrating, and in the most significant presentations, in children whose tongue cannot move with the independence speech requires at all. This is one of the pieces missing in so many nonverbal children. The tongue is not free. It cannot perform the precise, isolated movements that spoken language demands because at a neurological level, it is still wired to the hand. No amount of speech therapy can fully unlock language until that wiring is addressed. His parents were told to keep doing speech therapy and give it more time. He did not need more time. He had a primitive reflex that should have integrated when he was a baby and never did. Until the reflex is addressed, the tongue cannot fully separate from the hand, and the words cannot come. #primitivereflex #childdevelopment #nonverbal #palmargrasp #nonverbal

VitalBrainInstitute

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Tuesday 19 May 2026 22:15:45 GMT