This study tested the safety and effectiveness of a neuroscience-based, multi-component intervention designed to improve motor skills and sensory processing of the more-affected arm and hand in infants with CP where one side is more impacted than the other (asymmetric CP).
Living with CP taught Dr. Kathleen Friel much about educating others about her disability and now about her life threatening diagnosis of Metastatic Breast Cancer.
As a mother and a pediatrician, I’ve both felt the strain of pandemic parenting directly and indirectly. I’ve made decisions about my own family and sending our kids to daycare and school, and I’ve stayed up worrying about how parents are supposed to make these difficult choices with so little support.
As a parent, when it comes to different types of interventions for infants with cerebral palsy, how do you know what you have, what you don't, and what you could get?
Exploration for an infant means discovering anything about that environment. If that infant needs an opportunity to be brought to them, that's okay. Let an infant explore through their senses, whether it's touch, or smell, or taste, or sight, or hearing.
When first meeting a parent who's had a child newly diagnosed with cerebral palsy, I really want to try and help them understand their baby. It can be difficult for parents to take it in all at once and many leave that first interview quite overwhelmed, but you're going to meet some really important and helpful people.
Babies develop about 80% of their brain growth over the first two years of life, and it's also when all the connections in the brain, what we call the white matter, which is the cables in the brain, grow and develop and connect to the cortex.
Every educator needs to make a decision about technology they need to put in place. They're not sure if they should put Option A in place or Option B in place. This can be particularly difficult in the world of disabilities because there might not always be a perfect answer. Teachers can look to this solution, using the least dangerous assumption to make good decisions about what technology might be best.
A lot of parents don't realize that their baby, all the skills that they have. So they can look at you, they can follow you. They're already starting to imitate you, and through the first few months of life, they're already starting to learn to reach and grasp toys, and to have nonverbal communication with you.
As a physician and researcher, I skeptically looked forward to learning more about mindfulness practice, because there is evidence it helps with stress management, self-regulation, focus, productivity and happiness. As a mom, I felt that weird mix of guilt that I was going to focus on “not-my-children” for a whole day, excited anticipation and anxiety that maybe I would be a complete failure at this. It turns out all the mental baggage I took into the workshop was the exact opposite of what mindfulness tries to achieve. The daily practice has since changed my life.
PTSD can be common in parents after a child with Cerebral Palsy has left the NICU. One of the hardest days of my life as a NICU parent was not what I would have expected it to be. It was the day I went home without my baby, after spending every waking moment since my emergency C-section by his incubator. I never knew I had a dream about what it would be like to have a baby until that dream was taken away.
