NeuroDevelopmental Movement® Consultants is based in Seattle, Washington, and has provided in-person services not only in Western Washington since 1987, but has also, since 2009, provided services in California, Chicago, SE Michigan, Indiana, and Charlotte, NC. We have brilliant colleagues who work in other areas of the country and you can feel free to contact us for a referral.
Since the start of the COVID-19 Pandemic we have also made many more assessments available online, and have found it to be a meaningful, personalized, and very effective approach. Please do not hesitate to ask about online assessment.
We believe that informed parents make better partners for their children on this journey. To that end, we ask that you watch the video on the Getting Started page of this website. Keep paper and pen handy so you can note what issues relate to your child’s situation.
Read articles about this work, starting on this website.
Join the Facebook groups What is NeuroDevelopmental Movement and also NeuroDevelopmental Movement with Bette Lamont.
Write to Bette Lamont at developmentalmovement@gmail.com to make a contact and schedule an appointment. Bette will send you the documents you need to get started.
Maintain hope. There is a meme that “false hope” is the enemy of patients’ realistic planning for the future. We believe that far more damaging than false hope, is false despair. In fact, even the brain itself functions less effectively in the presence of despair. Hope triggers the Nerve Growth Factor in the base of the brain and gives us the energy and will to move forward.
NeuroDevelopmental Movement® provides stimulus to the brain in the way that nature originally intended. And for that reason, we ask that parents do a program of activities every day, seven days a week. This is what it takes to be successful. Taking on an NDM® program can change your lifestyle for a while. When a child is struggling with spectrum disorders, attention, learning, and behavior problems, we want to use the brief time that is their childhood to help them mature fully and overcome their challenges. We WILL push you to success.
The best way to get to our goals, and the most economical, is to make parents responsible for a program of about an hour every day. Most parents are aware that O.T. interventions of 30 minutes twice a week will not help their children overcome significant neurological issues. This in-home program puts a lot of responsibility on parents, but it is the best way for our children to get what they need to overcome their challenges.
Initial resistance on the part of the child can be another downside. However, many parents have commented that the focused attention they give to their child often helps their relationship in the long run. Some children are very resistant and need to be convinced that the parents are serious, but once they realize that they cannot opt out, most children accept the awesome responsibility of helping their own brain mature through these exercises.
NeuroDevelopmental Movement® will not direct our work to your child’s symptoms, nor to their diagnosis. Rather, we will do a full assessment of sensory and motor skills at seven levels of the central nervous system. With the understanding that we get from our assessment, we are able to treat the brain as a whole, rather than treating a symptom or a label.
For instance, a child with Oppositional Defiance Disorder might test out as having a high pain threshold, poor inter-hemispheric communication (leading to impulse control), poor crawling (an activity that helps the pons and amygdala levels of the brain mature), and poor visual convergence (perhaps leading to anxiety when people approach the child quickly).
As the brain matures and the pain threshold normalizes, the child may no longer feel a need to punch and bite because they understand pain.
The two sides of the brain may begin to communicate more efficiently across the midline so the more rational left brain can bring control to the more impulsive right brain, with a resulting diminution of impulsiveness.
The child may develop better crawling that helps them use their strong and connected lower body, sending better signals from the soles of the feet to the brain, thus improving proprioception and vestibular skills, so they no longer feel so anxious.
The eyes might converge more effectively so the child no longer feels anxious about quick movement near them.
As we help the brain mature in these and hundreds of other ways, the previous anxiety or rageful or dysregulated behaviors that have arisen from the immature brain begin to become more regulated.
In this maturation process, the symptoms that may be the basis for labels such as ADD, Dyslexia, or Dyspraxia, begin to disappear.
Parents will see, over time, new and improved behaviors that we discuss at each subsequent assessment. These changes can happen quickly, or so slowly that many assume it is part of a natural maturation process. But by the end of two to three years, many of the children with whom we work no longer meet the criteria for their previous diagnosis.
However, we do not treat symptoms, nor do we treat a diagnosis. NeuroDevelopmental Movement® treats the brain itself. When there is a central source of the problem, we believe that a central solution is the most effective approach.
NeuroDevelopmental Movement® stands out as a winning approach against a background of many proffered therapies for children with developmental challenges. It is the ONLY body/brain-based approach that uses the entire Developmental Sequence to address behavioral, social, and learning challenges.
NDM® does not isolate reflexes or sensory issues or motor challenges, but rather works in the way that nature does: spiraling, in effect, the child’s growth up through ever more mature layers of reflexes, leading to whole body movement patterns, that usher in new mobility activities, which in turn help the sensory system mature. When a therapy treats just reflexes, or just sensory problems, or just motor coordination issues, they are not utilizing the wondrous and effective progression of growth that moves from Reflex to Movement to Sensation that ushers in brain maturation.
This is the most researched of the body/brain approaches, based as it is on a global research project in the 1940s that analyzed the developing brains of children on every continent.
NeuroDevelopmental Movement® has stood the test of time, with the first successful cases recorded in the mid 1950s.
So, we can say that NeuroDevelopmental Movement® is the original, the oldest, the broadest, and deepest of the body/brain therapies that are used to help children and adults overcome learning and behavior challenges.