As many of you know, Lifeway is associated with Broadman & Holman, publisher of Homeschool Methods by Paul and Gena Suarez and my own Homeschooling the Challenging Child. They have launched a message board just for homeschoolers, and I get to moderate it! Come join the conversation! Go to www.forums.lifeway.com and scroll down to Homeschool. I'll see you there!

My youngest son was born three months premature. He weighed just over two pounds. The first time I laid eyes on him he was five pounds and three months old. He came to live with us as a foster child, and then later to be ours forever.

Having been born so premature, he had many health problems. He was on oxygen and an apnea monitor. At one time he was on five different medications - Albuterol, Chromolyn, and Prednisone for asthma; Hydralazine for high blood pressure; and Propulsid because his stomach was emptying too slowly. He had to drink Pediasure because he was losing weight, not gaining. When he was returned to us for adoption, the doctors wanted to put in a feeding tube. We begged them to give us a chance first to see if being back with us would stabilize his health. Within a month we had him eating solid food and he had gained two pounds.

It was not easy. The texture of any food in my son's mouth was terrible for him. For every feeding, I sat him in his high chair in only his diaper and me in only my underwear. I would put food into his mouth, and he would spit it out and then reach into his mouth and scrape it off his tongue. Then he would rub his face or tummy or reach out for me with the goo all over his hands. Being nearly naked was just easier for cleanup purposes. We had decided that we weren't going to try to train him at this point not to do this. The sensation of food in his mouth was actually painful for him; he was not being naughty or rebellious.

Our son also had strange behaviors. He banged his head against the crib and the wall at night, he played with his own spit, he would shove his hand down his throat to make himself throw up, he would twiddle his fingers together, and he would look at things very close up, cross eyed. We had him tested for various disorders, including autism. Everything came back negative. He was a happy boy, he would make eye contact, he loved to be held, and he smiled at and laughed with others. We knew no one like our son.

We have lived in three states since our son came to stay with us, and we have dealt with three different panels of therapists. One state would encourage us to teach our son sign language, and the next state had a fit, saying he would never learn to talk if he learned sign language. The next state gave us fancy computer equipment so he could communicate. All of this was very discouraging for us! We finally just kept using our limited knowledge of sign and dumped the computer. It was such a pain to have him go over to his computer just so he could tell us something.

Nearly all of the therapists were a source of frustration to us. They were never amazed at what our son could do. They would find fault in it or just ignore it completely. One such incident was singing. Every week his speech therapist would sing "Itsy Bitsy Spider," wanting him to sing along. Every week he would sit and look at her as if she were a freak. One week we went back and told her that he had started to sing! She was thrilled and asked what had happened. "He was playing at the table and he just burst into song, singing 'Edelweiss' from The Sound of Music!" The smile left the therapist's face. She sat him down and started singing "Itsy Bitsy Spider." We couldn't believe it!

We had finally had enough and decided to drop all therapy - not because we didn't think he need special attention and help, but because we knew that this kind of help was getting us nowhere. We began to search for other options. Another homeschool mom had talked about a type of therapy she had used for her son. We invited her and her family to dinner so we could ask more about it. After our evening, my husband and I knew that we were going to give this therapy a try.

Neuro-developmental therapy is a science that organizes a disorganized brain. Basically it retrains the brain. You do this through special exercises determined on a case-by-case basis. I won't try to explain in more medical detail as I'm sure to get it wrong, but it does work. People with all kinds of medical diagnosis have successfully used ND therapy, including autism, Down syndrome, dyslexia, ADHD, and even just college students looking for a way to study better. The best thing about ND therapists is that they are very homeschool friendly and they teach you how to do everything. You only visit your ND therapist every four months.

One of the first things that had to be determined was if our son was left-side dominant or right-side dominant. It turned out that he was mixed. ND therapy teaches that a person who is, let's say, left handed and left eared but right eyed and right legged, is a mixed dominance. This causes disorganization. So you begin doing exercises to train your body to become completely one side dominant. Our son was so mixed that the ND therapist opted to train our son to become right-side dominant since most people are right sided. We began the exercises, and after a couple of weeks we began to see improvement in our son! Finally, at 6 years old, our son knew his colors and began to recognize numbers and speak in complete sentences. We weren't even working on colors anymore as it had become so frustrating to have him just keep hollering "red" for everything.

At our next appointment four months later, we told the ND therapist how our son was progressing, and she watched him do his exercises. We discussed that he was having a problem with a few areas in the exercises, and she asked us if it would bother us to train our son to be left-side dominant instead of right. We didn't care at all. What difference did it make as long as he was progressing? So we swapped the exercises for the right side to the left and went home. The change was remarkable! Our son began to run, ride a tricycle, and draw pictures that actually looked like something. The problem areas we had discussed with our ND therapist disappeared.

Many people believe that ND therapy is not an actual science or medical therapy. Most doctors will not support a parent's decision to try it, and for this reason medical insurance does not cover it. Those who have tried it have often wondered if it's possible that their child would have progressed in just the same way without it. We have had that thought ourselves, but we could not sit and do nothing, and we could not go on with the traditional therapy attempts. In fact, we later learned that many of the exercises traditional therapy teaches were actually causing our son to regress, not progress.

Today our son is 9 years old. He does not act like a 9-year-old boy. We still have a long way to go, but we have seen so much progress that we are greatly encouraged. Our son still has some of his strange behaviors, and we now know that they are called stims, behaviors done to stimulate oneself. Stims are not good behaviors, but they were encouraged by our traditional therapists. We still don't know anyone like our son. At times it has been frustrating to us to not have a name for our son's problems. It's also freeing, because he has not been put into a box or mold. Our son is a little boy who lives life to the fullest, a little boy whom a lawyer once advocated we send back to his birth mother so he could die. We believe that, during the first five years of our son's life, his body was on survival mode. It was having to work too hard to do the basics and couldn't expend the energy to actually learn much. Now he is just developmentally delayed. There is nothing developmentally wrong with his willingness to live, love, and laugh.

If you would like to learn more about Neuro-Developmental Therapy, visit the Christian Access to Neuro-Developmental Organization website at www.ican-do.net.

For another parent's experience with ND therapy, see Too Wise to Be Mistaken, Too Good to Be Unkind by Cathy Steere. You can order it here:
www.graceandtruthbooks.com.

You can also e-mail me at sagerats@starband.net. I will not diagnose anyone, only answer questions about what ND therapy is like and how it has helped our son.

Tia Linschied is a member of the HSB (HomeschoolBlogger) Front Porch Team with her weekly column, Adoption Options. Visit www.HomeschoolBlogger.com.

Christine Field practiced law for eight years before becoming a full-time Mommy. She and her husband live and homeschool their four children in Wheaton, Illinois, where her husband, Mark, serves as Chief of Police. Three of their four children are adopted, one through a private adoption and two from Korea. She is the author of several books, including Coming Home to Raise Your Children (Fleming Revell 1995), Should You Adopt? (Fleming Revell 1997) A Field Guide to Home Schooling (Fleming Revell 1998), Life Skills for Kids (Harold Shaw/WaterBrook 2000), Help for the Harried Homeschooler (Harold Shaw/WaterBrook 2002) and Homeschooling the Challenging Child (Broadman & Holman 2005). She serves as a correspondent and Resource Room columnist for The Old Schoolhouse Magazine. Her articles on life skills have appeared in Focus on the Family Magazine and Single Parent Family.

To contact her about your special learner, or to have her speak to your group or conference, you may email her at christinefield@sbcglobal.net or visit her website at www.HomeFieldAdvantage.org. Her mailing address is The Home Field Advantage, PO Box 261, Wheaton, IL 60189-0261.

Visit her blog at www.HomeschoolBlogger.com/christinefield.