Improving Sensory Processing in Traumatized Children: Practical Ideas to Help Your Child's Movement, Coordination and Body Awareness

Does your child struggle to know how their body is feeling? Do they find it hard to balance or feel uneasy when their feet leave the ground? Early trauma and neglect can have a profound effect upon a child's development. Sensory integration theory offers a way of understanding how the brain processes and stores movement experience, and how these experiences manifest at a physical and emotional level. This book explains how early movement experiences affect brain development and gives examples of how trauma can prevent basic sensory processing pathways from being correctly established. It shows how you can identify gaps in normal sensory development and offers ideas for how you can use physical activities to help build up the underdeveloped systems. Good bodily awareness forms the foundation of motor development as well as social and emotional skills and learning. This book will help your child to be more in tune with themselves and their bodies and feel more comfortable in their environment. Highly accessible with lots of practical tips and examples, this book is written for adoptive and foster parents, and will also be useful for social workers, fostering and adoption workers and those working in primary and early years educational settings.

About the Author :
Sarah Lloyd is a specialist occupational therapist and play therapist who has worked in CAMHS for 25 years. She has worked as part of specialist therapeutic teams for looked after children. She also offers training and consultation privately and through the adoption and fostering agency PAC-UK. Sarah is particularly experienced in working with children who have experienced trauma and neglect using a neurodevelopmental approach, bringing together trauma, attachment, and sensory integration theory and practice. She lives in the UK.

Review :
I found this book fascinating as it gave such an insight into the development of the brain in babies, the importance of good early experiences and what happens when this is not the case. I am a foster carer who at present looks after two girls with quite complex needs. I found this book really helped me to understand some of the problems and difficulties that the children displayed. I had the children commando crawling around the floor and was shocked to realise one of the children couldn't do this, she just lay there. The book has lots of practical activities that you can do with children which I found really helpful. I would recommend this book to parents, carers, teachers and anybody else who works with or looks after children as it is an amazing tool. Sensory integration theory has emphasised to me that my child doesn't just do things to annoy - there is a missing or underdeveloped part of her from early childhood that needs to be expanded. There is always a reason why she acts in a particular way. Improving Sensory Processing in Traumatized Children helped me to be more playful in simple ways to improve her sense of the world in relation to her. This book is a timely reminder of the importance of early movement and sensory experience for later development. Sarah Lloyd writes clearly and evocatively about the difficulties children can have when this early experience is missing and provides helpful examples of how parents and carers can help them to recover this necessary experience. This book is a must-read for any parents and carers parenting traumatized children.