How Can I Tell If My Child Is Uninterested in Learning their next milestone, or If It's Just Too Hard for Them?

Parent Question: How Can I Tell If My Child Is Uninterested in Learning or If It's Just Too Hard for Them?

A wonderful parent asked this question inside my MindfullMovement Program, and I wanted to answer it for them. Hi, I'm Jen Stewart, an Anat Baniel Method® practitioner, and I love to teach parents how to use slow, gentle movements right at home to accelerate their child's development.

I love this question because the parent immediately shows an awareness that their child is not just something mechanical that you can fix with a couple of movements. The Anat Baniel Method® uses slow, gentle movements to access the potential of your child's brain's ability to learn something new.

Instead of just doing physical movements to your child, we're accessing your child's brain's potential by giving them quality information – bite-sized pieces of quality information just right for their brain. And their brain's ability to organize that quality information is part of the learning experience of how to learn a new milestone skill.

So, instead of doing something to our children, we're actually using slow, gentle movements to access their brain's ability to piece together and know where their own body begins and ends and have that self-initiated movement.
Instead of just copying something that's repetitively done to them. We really pay attention to the fact that your child is not a car. We are not mechanics. We are not fixing a body part that's broken.
We're actually accessing the potential of your child's brain's ability to learn something new.

For instance, bringing the hand to the mouth is a learned skill. Holding your head upright and having better head control is actually a learned skill. The brain has to have the ability to coordinate the head over top of the spine over top of the pelvis. The brain is the command center for organizing all the muscles and all the bones to put them in the right place to have really good head control in all different positions.

And that's what I love to do for parents – to teach them how to use these slow, gentle movements to help fill in any of the missing gaps that your child's brain might have.

This parent has obviously heard about the Anat Baniel Method®. She's probably had lessons before, and she's done some of my guided videos inside my MindfullMovement Program.
So, she wants to know: "When I try the movements, is my son uninterested in learning something right now, or is it simply too hard for him?"

It might be the case that in this very moment, it's just too hard for your child to learn because of the environment around them. As parents, that's something you can control at home – creating the optimal environment for your child to learn something new.

And you can also help your child's brain gather up the foundational pieces of movement it needs to organize their bodies to do the larger milestone. Those foundational peices are what's inside the MindfullMovement Program. A full library of guided videos to support your child's brain learn head control, rolling over and independent sitting. You can learn more about the MindfullMovement Program here.