Hearing children sing so beautifully when my two children couldn’t even say simple sounds was just heartbreaking.
Lisa Geng
Music is so powerful. Recent studies have demonstrated increased activity in brain regions associated with emotion and reward when listening to pleasurable music. Hearing a song you haven’t heard in years or even decades can bring you right back in time. Many researchers believe that music is encoded in the brain by the perceptual memory system, Music creates associative memory either indirectly or directly,
Every year sometime after Thanksgiving I hear the song Christmas Canon by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra and no matter where I am the first time I hear it I feel my eyes tear up. It’s such a beautiful song that came out in 1998. My boys were born in 1994 and 1996 and both of them were late talkers, essentially nonverbal.
It doesn’t appear to matter how well my boys are doing today, that song shoots me back in time to decades ago when my boys were little and struggling to talk. Where every sound they made was after, hours, weeks, months, and even years of speech therapy along with integrative therapies such as fish oils and IQed..
The Long Road
I say “late talkers” to describe my boys and The Late Talker is the name of my book, however, it is a bit more complex than that.
My firstborn son Dakota was welcomed into the world in a horrible way with traumatic life-threatening birth injuries. From birth, he was in intensive care overseen by a neurologist. As soon as he was released from the hospital he was in therapy still overseen by various neurologists. I remember when he was a baby with all the injuries to his head and neck from birth each breath he took sounded like a moan in pain, and sometimes he would just stop breathing, he was at high risk for sudden infant death. When he was out of the hospital for the first few years of his life he was never left alone.
Early on Dakota’s issues were serious and his prognosis even with all the therapy was not good. I recall sitting in the office with his one neurologist Dr. Trevor Desouza from Morristown Neurology in NJ after 2 years of therapy when Dakota was 2 years old when Dr. Desouza told me that nobody could say at this point if the cognitive delays that Dakota still had from his birth injuries would be permanent or not. He recommended in addition to traditional therapy that I try “brain stimulation” type activities. Not knowing what that meant the doctor explained music, movement, art, computers, anything that stimulates his brain activity. Dakota was born in 1994 and back then, computers were not a big thing for everyone yet. However, I purchased a computer and a huge amount of whatever preschool educational DVDs I could find at that time. When Dakota was only diagnosed years later with ADHD and CAPD I was thrilled as at least those were somewhat mild issues to deal with in comparison to what he was at risk for (his limbs not growing, permanent disability in a wheelchair, permanent cognitive impairment) He later was also diagnosed as gifted which made Dakota twice exceptional. I don’t speak about Dakota as much as his brother Tanner who has apraxia, however, Dakota graduated from Savannah College of Art and Design for 3D animation and has worked in marketing for the medical, military, and currently in the entertainment industry using his creative talents.
As difficult as things were with Dakota, and in spite of his issues being so much more severe, Tanner was the child that was more difficult because even professionals didn’t understand what apraxia was. As a parent of a newly diagnosed son, I found myself in the peculiar place of educating his school professionals including the school SLP about my son’s motor planning impairment. Here is a page about Tanner
Hearing children sing so beautifully when my two children couldn’t even say simple sounds was just heartbreaking. Not that it made me not want to listen to Christmas Canan. I just know that this song and a few others bring me back to a difficult time when my boys were still struggling -so for those songs I choose to play them when I am alone so I’m not caught off-guard when I hear them.
What about you? Do you have any songs that bring you back in time like this?
More About How Powerful Music Is
LISA GENG
Author, Mom, Founder, and President of The Cherab Foundation
Lisa Geng got her start as a designer, patented inventor, and creator in the fashion, toy, and film industries, but after the early diagnosis of her young children with diagnosis including severe apraxia, hypotonia, sensory processing disorder, ADHD, CAPD, she entered the world of nonprofit, pilot studies, and advocacy. As the mother of two “late talkers,” she is the founder and president of the nonprofit CHERAB Foundation, and co-author of the acclaimed book, The Late Talker, (St Martin’s Press 2003). Lisa has hosted numerous conferences including the first-ever for apraxia overseen by a medical director from NIH who reviewed part of her protocol – the use of fish oils as a therapeutic intervention. Lisa currently holds three patents and patents pending on IQed nutritional composition and is a co-author of a study published in a National Institute of Health-based, peer-reviewed medical journal.Results of a Consumer Survey on the Effectiveness of a Nutritional Blend Reported on Autism Spectrum Disorder Symptoms, Apraxia, and Other Conditions Involving Motor and Speech Delays. which showed 92% of respondents reported positive changes upon using IQed. Improvements in concentration, energy, motor skills, and speech Lisa has been serving as a parent advocate on an AAN Immunization Panel since 2015 and is a member of CUE through Cochrane US. Lisa is currently working on a second book, The Late Talker Grows Up, and serves as a Late Talkers, Silent Voices executive producer. She lives on the Treasure Coast of Florida.
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