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    Unlocking Your Child's Potential: Music is the Key
    Unlocking Your Child's Potential: Music is the Key
    Unlocking Your Child's Potential: Music is the Key
    Ebook135 pages1 hour

    Unlocking Your Child's Potential: Music is the Key

    By Karen O'Connor

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    About this ebook

    Consultant speech and language therapist Karen O'Connor describes how children with Autism, Auditory Processing Disorder, Dyspraxia and other developmental challenges make remarkable progress with music-based sound therapy. She describes how listening therapy helps these children to become calm and more regulated; how their attention and concentration improve allowing language and learning to develop. Children such as three-year-old Theo, who came to Karen with a diagnosis of autism, and who two years later was attending mainstream school without any additional supports. Or Raphael, who came to see her as 'a last resort' as he had very little speech and couldn't interact with others, now he's a fun-loving five year old who enjoys playing and chatting with his friends. Unlocking Your Child's Potential: Music is the Key is the first in a series of books that will give hope to parents by telling the stories of other wonderful children who overcame their varied developmental challenges with the use of music-based sound therapy.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherKaren O'Connor
    Release dateDec 21, 2017
    ISBN9781370118168
    Unlocking Your Child's Potential: Music is the Key
    Author

    Karen O'Connor

    Karen O’Connor moved to Steamboat Springs, Colorado a few weeks after graduating college with a B.A. in Marketing. She became an official “ski bum” her first year, skiing over a 100 days. She later received her MBA in Business Administration. She is an active business consultant, real estate investor and options trader. For over 25 years Karen has developed practical financial and operational strategies that enable her clients to grow their business and create a sustainable foundation for success. With extensive knowledge steeped in accounting, finance and project management, she educates business owners on finding the right systems and professionals, thus allowing them to focus on the task of running their businesses. Karen looks forward to building a legacy of integrity and unparalleled customer care. She continues to gain the knowledge and skills necessary to drive her clients to organizational excellence. “My passion is helping small business owners and entrepreneurs live theirs!” BackOfficeTips.com SuccessExcellerator.com

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      Book preview

      Unlocking Your Child's Potential - Karen O'Connor

      Unlocking Your Child’s Potential

      Music Is the Key

      Copyright 2017 Karen O'Connor 

      Published by Karen O'Connor at Smashwords

      Smashwords Edition License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your enjoyment only, then please return to Smashwords.com or your favourite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      Table of Contents

      Acknowledgements

      Introduction

      What is Sound Therapy

      Chapter One

      Chapter Two

      Chapter Three

      Chapter Four

      Chapter Five

      Chapter Six

      Chapter Seven

      Chapter Eight

      Chapter Nine

      Chapter Ten

      About Karen O'Connor

      Connect with Karen O'Connor

      Bibliography

      Acknowledgements

      It was a real eureka moment for me when I started to see that not just one child, but every child I was treating was making great progress using music. That was when I knew I was onto something big and that I had to tell the world. 

      This realisation sent me on a journey to Toronto to talk to Paul Madaule – author of When Listening Comes Alive and creator of the Listening Fitness Programme (LiFT™) – to see what he thought. We spoke at length. Paul was so encouraging, supportive, and excited at the prospect of my book that I felt confident that this was an important thing to do.

      However, it was really the next morning when I was leaving Toronto that I got the confirmation I needed. I flagged down a cab outside the hotel to bring me to the airport and was chatting with the taxi driver when out of nowhere he said, ‘My father gave me a really unusual name. You’ll never guess what it is.’

      I made a few attempts but didn’t come close. ‘I give up,’ I said.

      ‘I knew you’d never guess,’ he laughed triumphantly. ‘My name is Amadeus.’

      So, a special thank you to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – not only for my lift to the airport but, most importantly, for inspiring me to write this book.

      There are so many exceptional people I want to thank. First, the beautiful children with whom I have had, and continue to have, the great pleasure of working and playing with every day. You never cease to amaze and delight me and continually teach me something new. Thank you. Thanks to my friends and family for all your love, support, and encouragement. You have inspired me to be who I am. I couldn’t have done it without you.

      To the great team, past and present, that I have worked and work with – Fidelma, Susan, Áine, and Carmel. You inspire me daily. An additional thank you to Carmel; the first person to edit my book. What great courage and patience you have.

      Thanks to the great therapists, clinicians, teachers, and doctors with whom I have worked and learned over the past 17 years.

      Particular thanks to Ann Brehony (editor) Dr. Goodwin McDonnell, Andrea McDonnell, Paul Madaule, Morana Petrovski and Sheila Frick.

      To other exceptional people with whom I have not had the pleasure of working with but would dearly love to have: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Jean Ayres, and Dr. Alfred Tomatis. All brilliant, they have this rare quality in common: they were never happy to stick to tried and tested methods but searched endlessly for ground-breaking techniques and tools that would change the lives of individuals forever, enhancing their abilities and helping them achieve their true potential and lead fuller lives as a result.

      I now know that the essence of an excellent therapist, doctor, teacher, or clinician is their passionate belief that there is a way to make things better. In believing there is a way, they are creating the way. I wish you the joy of knowing and working with someone like this. 

      Thank you.

      Karen O’Connor, Ireland, November 2017

      Introduction

      ‘Music is the key to unlocking your child’s potential,’ the therapist said with conviction.

      As a consultant speech and language therapist with years of experience, I thought I was hearing things. But what if it was true? What if listening to Mozart and other classical composers could help a child to be calm and focused, to understand better, to speak more clearly, to engage more effectively, to interact, and to learn? What a difference it could make to children, changing their lives forever by enabling them to create better friendships, maintain relationships, and achieve a better standard of education leading to a life lived to its full potential. Maybe, at last, there was a way to ensure that our biology did not need to dictate our biography.

      I thought of all the children I was working with and how, although they were improving to a degree with conventional speech and language therapy techniques, they were not achieving their true potential. They needed something more. Could listening therapy be the missing piece of the jigsaw? I wondered if this new tool could bring children with challenges further, helping them to achieve their full capabilities. Years later, having used these techniques with thousands of children with many different diagnoses, I know that everything I heard that day – and so much more – was true.

      I was listening to Sheila Frick, an occupational therapist and expert in the field of sensory integration. She was explaining to a room full of European therapists and clinicians how talented and experienced American therapists were incorporating auditory interventions and sound therapies into their practices, with exciting results. She explained how auditory interventions, such as Therapeutic Listening® and the Listening Fitness programme (LiFT™) could dramatically affect a child’s neurology by impacting on neuroplasticity – the brain’s ability to adapt and change. She outlined how these changes could help that child to make extraordinary progress, improving skills that are imperative to a child’s development, such as the abilities to be calm and focused; to pay attention and listen; to concentrate; to develop fine and gross motor skills; to develop comprehension and expressive language skills; to play appropriately; and to develop social skills, self-esteem, confidence, and the ability to learn.

      I quickly realised this new therapy could mean that children would achieve results in weeks rather than years, allowing them to reach their true level of ability fully rather than partially.

      Over the years many parents have asked me, ‘What led you, as a speech and language therapist, to incorporate sound therapy into your practice?’

      What really brought me to that room that day to learn about listening techniques and sound therapies?

      Having worked for many years in a variety of settings with children with many different diagnoses that ranged from specific language impairments to speech and language delays, autism, dyspraxia, and everything in between, I was aware that although these children’s skills were developing, they were often not achieving their full potential. When I worked within the public health service, I struggled with the practice of discharging children when they reached a certain level of development that often fell far short of their individual potential. There was nothing more we could do using our conventional speech and language techniques. 

      However, it was frustrating to be told to discharge children at this stage, knowing that they still required intervention. I knew there had to be another way. There had to be more tools that we could add to our speech and language therapy toolkit to help children achieve their true level of ability. I went in search of other approaches and techniques that could help children. My journey took me all over the world, introducing me to the most talented, innovative therapists and the most gifted children.

      The journey was inspired by my first speech and language therapy manager within the public health service, who introduced me to the concept of Sensory Integration. She gave us as speech and language therapists the sense that we had a role to play in combining sensory integrative techniques with speech and language therapy to help children achieve their communication potential. She encouraged us to attend sensory integration courses and to use the skills we learned to help the children we worked with to progress even further. We learned how to use sensory integrative techniques to work on developing their sensory skills at a basic level in order to facilitate the spontaneous emergence of speech and language skills at higher levels.

      Jean Ayres, a Californian occupational therapist and pioneer in the

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