Hope springs eternal

Spring in England, 2014

Hope

In the many years that I have been involved in Conductive Education I have read about, and talked to many parents of children with disability about, how Conductive Education came into their lives and with it brought them a sign of hope.

It was the hope for the future that had been missing from many of their family lives since setting off on a road living with disability. Dealing with medical services, social services etc. daily struggles for information and advice, had worn away any hope that they had after the birth of a child with a motor disorder.

Suddenly, on discovering the possibilities offered by living a conductive lifestyle, many families report that they also rediscovered hope. Conductors and Conductive Education came with high expectations for an active enjoyment of life and families often reported that they became functioning families once more after embracing this new hope.

I remember well a personal experience with a family and the rediscovery of hope from many years ago, when I was with a German conductor-colleague visiting a family in Germany. This family had already had a wonderful, eye-opening experience of Conductive Education with their child with Hungarian conductors. They had then got in touch with me wanting advice on how best to continue a conductive lifestyle at home, something they so desperately wanted to do. As the family lived a long way from my home, but quite near my friend’s, we made the house-visit together hoping that one of us would be able to offer help in the future. I remember it so well as if it was yesterday.

We were chatting away to the Dad as if we had all known each other for years, discussing the difference that their knowing about conductive pedagogy and upbringing had already made to their family life, when he asked –

 “What is it about conductors, what is it that they all bring into our lives, into our home? There is almost something tangible in the air when they are about!

What is it? There is something, no matter what nationality the conductor is, that radiates from all of you, something in your souls that is so similar whether British, German or Hungarian?”

I said that I have heard many parents talk about how something different is in the air when they speak to conductors about their children. They say that conductors discuss the abilities and not the disabilities.

The father we were talking to suddenly realized that what seeped out of the souls of the conductor and into the souls of the family was the hope that goes hand in hand with conductive upbringing, a renewed hope and the assurance that as parents they could make a difference to their disabled child’s life, that they could learn to teach their children how to learn just as they do for any other children.

I have never forgotten the chat with that Dad. It was one of the experiences in my own conductive life that I learnt from. I realised then that there are different kinds of hope. Families that discover Conductive Education have often been searching for something for a long time, they have not given up hope, but have lived in hope that hope could one day be restored.

I live in hope

I live in hope – as someone said to me recently this is an odd expression. Living in hope that hope will be restored is even odder, but I think that it is this that we experience and hear about in Conductive Education, having not given up hoping to find hope – hope has been restored while practising conductive living.

That’s how it worked for me anyway.

We hear so much from the families that we work with, from parents and grandparents, carers and siblings, that finding out how to live conductively has restored their hope.

But what about when living in hope is not such a positive experience?

In the 09.05.2014 The Guardian Weekly I read a sub-heading that made me stop my search for my favourite article – Nature Watch – that is always my first read.

On the page headed – This column could change your life, I read –

‘A wonderful thing happens when you give up on hope… you realise you never needed it is the first place’

– which of course was an invitation for me to read further.

What, I thought would the families I work with think if I was to say this to them?

Giving up hope

As I read the article I realised that I was reading about a different kind of hope. Not the joyous, positive hope that our families share with us, but perhaps it’s the kind of hope that they refuse to let go of as they search, but that they really can give up when they find Conductive Education with the renewed positive hope that comes with it.

In the newspaper article Oliver Burkeman describes how someone experiencing long-term unemployment always has the hope of finding a job, always feeling permanent pressure to search for work. It is only when this pressure is removed, when retirement age comes along, that life can start to recover. When someone reaches retirement age they can let go of the hope of working again, they are released from the pressure of living the ‘norm’ and can recover and live with other hopes, positive hope.

Hope reborn

Burkeman also suggests that one recovers more fully from widowhood than from losing a job perhaps because widowhood is irreversible and there is the hope of being happy again. After losing a job there could be a long road ahead, searching and desperately hoping.  You can read more about his thoughts on this here –

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/apr/12/change-your-life-case-against-hope

The families we work with that rediscover hope through Conductive Education need time to recover too, from the period in their lives when the positive kind of hope was missing. Conductors, as that Dad told me so many years ago, pass on hope through their work and take an active part in the recovery of many lives and many families.

Only just last week I took a step back and watched the children in our afternoon conductive group radiating hope through their chats about life now and their dreams for the future. A happy atmosphere, a positive atmosphere, a hopeful atmosphere was all around me as I worked. I could almost reach out and touch it.

Notes

Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian –

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/apr/12/change-your-life-case-against-hope

Hard work, encouragement, conversation, fun and games, and friends

'Team work'

A group of friends aged 6-14

Semester break

With half-term (Carnival) holiday coming up next week our school children have received their half-yearly reports and we are all so pleased with them.

The whole group was especially pleased to hear that our two grammar-school (Gymnasium) children did really well in their first half-year, achieving a couple of As, lots of Bs and one or two Cs.

It is lovely to observe how all the children enjoy discussing their marks and how they all find it so easy to enjoy each other’s successes. Between them, these children attend primary schools, a grammar school, the school for the partially sighted, a special school, the Steiner and Montessori schools, but it makes no difference where they go, they all get excited and pleased about the achievements of their friends, whatever their ability. My observations of these children helps me describe my own meaning of the word ‘integration’, the word that we hear so much these days in Germany when talking about children with special educational needs, and adults too who need assistance at work and in everyday life.

Some of the children in our conductive afternoon group will live independently but perhaps have difficulty to find a job, others will need assistance to live independently but will able to work on the open market, others with go on to university needing differing degrees of physical and psychological help to achieve this.  

Learn, learn, learn

These children spend years attending conductive groups learning about living as independently as they can, learning how to socialise in all sorts of situations, learning about what society tolerates and what it does not tolerate, learning about the motivation that they need in life, and the need to have a will to achieve something. These children learn about what it to be accepted in communities and to be able to participate in different walks of life, they learn how they can give, to share with other people those abilities that they have but perhaps other people have not.

Tears often well up in my eyes when I observe a fourteen-year-old girl, who attends the school for partially sighted children, help a ten-year-old girl with cerebral palsy, who attends grammar school, put food on her fork or put her coat on – then vice versa as the fourteen-year-old gets help with spelling from the ten-year-old while writing a  report about all the children in the group that one of our many visitors last year said she would be delighted to receive.

On Friday afternoons we often have six children in our conductive group. They all get up between 6.00 am and 6.30 am the whole week long and when school finishes at 1.00 pm they either have music lessons, physiotherapy, speech therapy, football training, appointments to meet a friend, they have a haircut, go to the dentist or spend a few hours with brothers and sisters, or they come to us for three hours. They all also have homework to do!

Fun on Fridays

So, as well as hard work, we also try to make our Friday afternoons especially relaxing and fun.

We always prepare lots of activities that take place lying down, sitting, standing and when walking. There are games playing with bats and balls, bean-bags, basket-ball nets ping-pong balls, feathers, finger footballs, etc. etc. When preparing the activities we think about what each child finds difficult at school (we make visits to school and the school assistants visit us to share this information) and in other parts of their lives (parents meetings and home visits provide this information). We consider together what the children find difficult, what they wish to learn and which activities we think could help them.

There are of course always lots of arty-crafty activities to choose from to improve among other things fine-motor movements, eye-hand coordination, concentration and sitting posture, and to make presents for all occasions at home! This week the children had so much fun playing the prepared games, spent so much time discussing school and making up stories about the pictures collected while walking around and through obstacles, that they decided to spend the rest of their afternoon on playing bat and ball games instead of painting T-shirts or sewing pictures. Their tiredness was forgotten, it was hard to get them out of the room at the end of the session!

Awakenings

On Fridays, when the children first roll in between 13.30 pm and 13.45 pm they look exhausted. They arrive ready for their lunch, a sit down and a chat. It is amazing to watch how they slowly come back to life, how their faces slowly light up. This is especially noticeable when they get to sit next to just the right person at lunchtime. When the chemistry fits they just chat away about their week at school as if no one else is around. This is what happened this Friday – an eleven-year-old grammar-school boy spent thirty minutes discussing the difficulties of second-year primary school with a seven-year-old! He gave advice on maths and also on football.

These two are both very independent so I left them alone at the table with their manly chat and turned my attention to our shoe-man who had arrived to plaster Little Princess’s feet and lower legs, for the umpteenth time in her life. They are the best of friends, they organise these appointments with each other on their smart phones on WhatsApp!

Ever since she was two years old Little Princess’s face has lit up each time that he comes into the room, in anticipation of their lovely chats. This week, once I had helped Little Princess undress and get decent with a towel wrapped around her, ready to sit still for forty-five minutes, I left the two of them to their private conversation. 

Our shoe-man is wonderful. He is a dab-hand at splint, shoe, rolators and wheelchair preparation, but more importantly he is so good at engaging our children in such interesting conversation. They tell him everything that is happening in their lives, then they sit perfectly still in anticipation of the next story from him as he pulls net stockings on their feet and puts a gooey mess on their legs before eventually cutting off the finished plaster casts, ready to prepare for the next stage and a new fitting.

I watch with joy to see this child with severe athetoid cerebral palsy remain so calm, her eyes fixed on the face of the man who tells her stories about his daughter, his son, or of his family in the Andes. She never moves a muscle in her body as she listens, then waiting for his all clear signal, when the knife has been put away, before she begins to speak – as this she cannot do without moving.

Children who rarely speak a word chatter away to their favourite shoe-man as he works away at their feet.

We give the shoe-man and the children the help that they need in this process but I try to leave them on their own to their private time as much as I can. I sometimes stay as near as I can but still at a distance so that I do not disturb them – I do so love to watch this social experience. It is all part of growing up, learning to communicate with people, and we try to give our children as many experiences to learn this as we can. This week on Friday the social interaction with one of her favourite people gave Little Princess the motivation she needed to later take part in activities with the other children.

Integrated afternoons

Visitors to such afternoon groups, and we get many, always tell us how much they enjoy seeing conductive living and upbringing in action. They rarely see the conventional conductive programme that groups can organise when children attend the all-day sessions that take place in holiday times for three weeks.

In our afternoon groups we have a short amount of time and a very mixed group of children in ability and age. The children come to us after a long morning at school, often hungry and tired but usually motivated to take part in a fun afternoon.

The children learn to set the table if they arrive early enough or they clear up afterwards and learn how to fill the dishwasher, they comb their hair and make themselves tidy before coming to the table, they make sure that their belongings are tidily placed in the cloakroom with room for the other children to move around when they arrive, and they help their friends and chat to them as they arrive. Over lunch we all talk together or listen to a story that someone has brought along. Lunch is followed by activities that are planned to suit the children who are present on particular days, depending on what they are learning at school and what is needed for them to continue progressing in all part of their lives.

Often we are motivated by the children. They know what kind of things help them to learn and they know that we are flexible, so they share with us their own ideas about what they or the others might like to do or need to do. Such participation in planning is so important for keeping the children interested and motivated in their journey through conductive living. As they get older, more capable and more motivated their lives get busier and school life gets longer and harder. We, the conductors, have to keep on the ball, offering the children activities that motivate them to join as for one or two days a week, or for a week or two in their precious holidays.

I have been involved in this evolving work with this group since Jolly Prof and Little Princess left our integrated conductive/Montessori Kindergarten and they have now been at school for nearly five years.  We now have eleven children that join us on different days of the week, attending from one to five days, depending on their needs and circumstances. We have two conductors and sometimes a student in the group. We give the children a secure, motivating, learning environment, but we remain as flexible as we can in our small team to accommodate their ever-changing needs.

 

So glad

Today, over on her blog called Premmeditations, Mrboosmum was talking about her blog-statistics. There she described how glad she is to discover, though reading through the referral statistics, that she reaches out to so many families caring for and bringing up children who have been born prematurely, have cerebral palsy, infantile spasms and many other problems.

http://premmeditations.wordpress.com

I am glad to have found her blog too.

When I feel at a loss as what more I can say, what more I can give, I have another place where I can refer clients, conductors and professionals from other fields.

Mrboosmum, it is not only families like yours that appreciate your words, it is not only the people like you who learn from your stories of daily life. Your insights are invaluable to people like me, people who come into contact with such families in our daily work.

Thank you.

Stroke, the elderly and falling

Regensburg, 2013

Enjoying life and working out

I try to be asleep before the new postings on the blog Deans' Stroke Musings arrive in my email in-box almost daily at just after midnight. I often read them on the tram to work.

There is so much information available on this site it is unbelievable and often in between are insights into what I would describe as conductive living. This week these two postings particularly caught my eye –

http://oc1dean.blogspot.de/2014/01/bar-stool-stroke-rehab.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed:+DeansStrokeMusings+%28deans%27+stroke+musings%29

http://oc1dean.blogspot.de/2014/01/cross-country-skiing.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed:+DeansStrokeMusings+%28deans%27+stroke+musings%29

This popped up too

Also brought to my attention were these high-tech shoes designed for the elderly or injured to help prevent falls –

http://medcitynews.com/2014/01/shoes-seniors-go-high-tech-prevent-falls/

I do not think that we should hold our breath waiting for this shoe to detect imbalance, or to improve balance, but I could be wrong. I think we should keep on bringing it to the awareness of our clients how important posture and symmetry are in all activities and to practise walking in many situations, with partners and without, indoors and out, in shoes, in boots, with bare feet and in slippers – if worn. We should continue learning and teaching how to fix the feet securely, bear weight on them and learn to balance in all sitting positions, when transferring seats, when standing up or sitting down, while bending and stretching, and when relaxing and when tense.

Together clients and conductors can discover the importance of knowing where each part of the body is, what happens to it when you move a different part and what you need to do to keep it where you want it, or need it, to be.

Relying on a shoe to let us know when we are unbalanced could quite possibly bring the information too late, especially if one has not learnt how to react and what to do with this knowledge.

I had already written this far a few days ago when I discovered this –

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/protective-clothes-for-the-elderly-could-slash-hip-injuries-9100327.html

More help – this time in the help of a material not to prevent falls but to prevent injury from falls by way of a material that stiffens on impact. Possibilities for its use will be developed by teams of researchers and business entrepreneurs.

With clothes specially cut to suit wheelchair users already priced well out of reach of most people who could benefit from them I wonder how many elderly people would be able to purchase such protective garments if needed.

Or would these clothes be available as part of the rehabilitation programme?

We will see but until then let’s stick to doing a bit of conductive learning and living such as that mentioned on Deans' Stroke Musings.

Notes

Deans' Stroke Musings –

www.oc1dean.blogspot.com