What are primitive reflexes?
At first the baby lives in an aqueous environment inside the mother’s womb where it develops and then must start living on its own. To survive it is equipped with automatic movements directed from the brainstem that are the primitive reflexes.
These automatic movements allow the baby to help down the birth canal, or suck for example.
However, these reflexes should have a limited life and give way to postural reflexes controlled from upper parts of the brain. What allows a neurological development.
If these reflexes remain active there will be a weakness or immaturity of the brain, and will affect not only their gross or fine motor skills, but also sensory and cognitive perception.
The integration of a reflex implies the acquisition of a new skill, sometimes what happens is that we do not get certain processes to be done automatically and are done through a continuous and conscious effort which leads to premature exhaustion.
Detecting if a reflex is not integrated can give us clues about the cause of the child’s problem, but if there are several reflexes, we could possibly face a delay in neurological development and what we can do is create a personalized exercise program to integrate these non-inhibited reflexes
A second chance …. Human babies make a series of stereotyped movements during their first year of life that allows them to develop. The Institute of Neurology of the United States and Sweden maintain that the specific movement patterns executed during the first months of life contain in themselves a natural inhibitory effect of primitive reflexes. If these movements have not been made, or have not been done enough, the reflexes will remain active. But we can give the brain a second chance through the practice of a personalized exercise program. When we integrate the reflexes we can observe results at the motor, academic, hand-eye and even emotional level.
SYMPTOMS THAT CAN GIVE REFLECTIONS WHEN THEY ARE NOT INTEGRATED.
- Dyslexia and learning difficulties
- Bad postures
- Poor hand-eye coordination
- Poor balance
- Poor coordination
- Lateral problems and crossed movements
- Bad postures when writing
- Bedwetting, and problems controlling sphincters
- Problems of attention and concentration,
- Problems learning to do the somersault, jump on a lame leg or ride a bike
- Motion sickness
- Behavioral problems, very introverted and shy or aggressive
- Broken words, poor and late language.
- Hypersensitivity to light, touch, visual or kinesthetic stimuli
- Bad letter
- Hyperactivity
- They get easily distracted
- Impulsiveness
- Organizational problems …