Therapeutic Listening Program Autism
Brief Overview and Definitions Billy is a 6-year-old with moderate to severe autism. He still wears diapers because he cannot fully control bodily functions like going to the bathroom on his own. Part of this is due to his difficulty with sensory processing. Billy's pediatrician speaks with his mother and recommends that he try Therapeutic Listening, since it has been proven to help with organizing sensory experiences in the brain. After two months of listening to a CD for 30 minutes twice a day, Billy is now using the restroom more often on his own, following instructions, and communicating more with his parents. Therapeutic Listening (TL) is an evidence-based therapy technique that involves listening to music or sounds through specialized headphones for 30-minute sessions, twice a day, in order to help with numerous problems and disorders. It was developed by Sheila Frick, an occupational therapist with a specialty in sensory processing disorders.
TL has been proven to help with:. Sensory processing. Attention. Social skills. Communication. Following directions. Timing and organizing motor skills.
One couples experience with Therapeutic Listening as an autism therapy. The Listening Program® is an effective neuro-science based music program for brain training that may help children to live well with autism.
Mood Some disorders that TL has been used to treat include attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), sensory processing disorder (SPD) and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Autism, or autism spectrum disorder, is a disorder characterized by problems with sensory processing, communication, social interactions and unusual repetitive behaviors. Autism can range from mild to severe, which is why it is looked at as a spectrum. A person with severe autism can have a significant intellectual disability or even be completely mute.
Some problematic behaviors and qualities of people with autism are:. Hypersensitivity to sensory input: A person may overreact when they hear a loud noise.
Hyposensitivity to sensory input: A person feels a lack of stimulation from the environment and may self-stimulate by banging their head on a wall or biting their arm. Inflexibility to change in routine: A mother who takes a different route to school one day due to traffic may cause her child with autism to have a tantrum. Having an intense focus or interest in something: A child with autism may have a fascination with his toy cars and constantly line them up. Repetitive behaviors: A child with autism may turn on and off a light over and over again. Delays in speech or lack of communication with others: A child with autism may be slow in establishing a vocabulary or engaging in speech with others. Lack of eye contact: An adult with autism may appear distant and unfriendly because they don't provide eye contact. Social difficulties: A child with autism may not pick up on typical social cues, like when another child is bored.
Therapeutic Listening and Autism Because of its focus on sensory integration, listening and communication, Therapeutic Listening has proven beneficial in improving the functioning of children and adults with autism. How Does Therapeutic Listening Work?
The Therapeutic Listening clientele are typically children, though adults can gain benefits from the CDs as well. The CDs are individualized for each client's needs. Music can range from children's songs to popular music to classical music to nature sounds. Things like frequency and pitch are altered in the CDs with sophisticated sound technology. These alterations are done to target different areas of the cochlear-vestibular system in the inner ear or areas of the brain associated with the central nervous system. The music or sounds on the CDs can exercise the inner ear muscles, making listening easier, or they can stimulate a specific area of the brain, like targeting the frontal lobe to improve attention. Kaspersky antivirus for windows server enterprise edition key.
How Does Therapeutic Listening Help Autism? The music or sounds used in TL for a child or adult with autism can exercise the inner ear muscles and vestibular-cochlear system, or stimulate neural pathways to different areas of the brain and central nervous system. This can improve functions associated with autism like body regulation, sensory integration, communication and social skills. Let's look at Grace as an example of how Therapeutic Listening helped her with her autism. Four-year-old Grace is a child with autism who is extremely sensitive to sound.
The sound of a vacuum or blender can be so intense that Grace holds her hands over her ears and screams with discomfort. Grace's mother predicts that Grace will resist the headphones, since she doesn't typically like anything touching her head or ears. When Grace's occupational therapist puts on the TL headphones, Grace becomes calm and serene. The music is specifically designed for Grace to help exercise and contract the inner ear muscles that help regulate the sounds that Grace hears. After a couple of months of exercising these inner ear muscles, the muscles are able to better discriminate and modulate the sounds that Grace hears. She therefore becomes better able to handle auditory sensory input, as well as distinguish between sounds and human voices. It is due to this that she can hear and respond to others better and hear her own voice, which aids in her language development and communication skills.
Lesson Summary Developed by occupational therapist Sheila Frick, Therapeutic Listening (TL) is an evidence-based therapy technique that involves listening to music or sounds through specialized headphones for 30-minute sessions, twice a day, in order to help with numerous problems and disorders. It has been proven to help with autism, a disorder characterized by problems with sensory processing, communication, social interactions and unusual repetitive behaviors. Some symptoms of autism include repetitive behaviors, hyper or hyposensitivity to stimuli such as sound, inflexibility (to routine), intense focuses and interests, lack of eye contact or response to name, delays in communication and deficits in social skills. Therapeutic Listening CDs are altered for each individual client in terms of type of music, frequency and pitch of sounds. The music and sounds can exercise the muscles in the inner ear and vestibular-cochlear system, as well as build neural pathways in the central nervous system. These processes can build skills in areas that are deficit because of autism, such as communication, sensory integration, body regulation and social skills.
Email successfully sent When I first heard about therapeutic listening, I was very dubious. I didn't understand how wearing headphones and listening to weird sounds was going to do anything except seriously tick Billy off. Having completed the program now, we still can't conclusively say that his gains were specifically because of therapeutic listening, but I would call myself a tentative believer. My husband, Dave, for the record, is still skeptical.
There are few therapies associated with autism, though, where you can draw a direct correlation between what you do, and changes in behavior. If we change Billy's diet and see an immediate derailment into tantrum-land, we sometimes start blaming it on something he ate. He could also, though, be tired, have taken an irrational dislike to the neighbor's cat, which keeps showing up in our yard, or have a headache.
Until he can really talk to us about what's going on in his head, we just give it our best guess. The same thing is true about good behavior and gains in communication.
We want so much to believe that any particular therapy is working. Or, I should say, I do. Dave is comfortable in the permanent: 'It's baloney ‘till they prove to me otherwise' skeptic’s position. So we look for a few things in any therapy.
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First, do no harm. We have to know that there's no downside before we try something. Second, does he enjoy it? We believe strongly in following his joy - to the point that it does no harm.
(He can find joy in riding his inflatable spaceship down the steep staircase, but we do have to draw the line somewhere.) Finally, where's the science? We want to see a recent, reputable scientific study, with real data - which I then hand off to Dave to read. Therapeutic Listening® passed our test. The aim of this therapy is to help autistic kids, with underdeveloped nervous systems, differentiate the human voice from other noises in their environment. Based on what Dave explained to me - and I could have some of this wrong; I majored in English lit and creative writing and I sometimes, admittedly, tune out when he's talking about science -this specially filtered music with the specially designed headphones, help build up certain muscles in the ear, whose primary purpose is to recognize the human voice. You have to find a therapist trained in Therapeutic Listening to administer the therapy.
You have to buy the special headphones; we ordered ours from Vital Sounds for about $145. You need a portable CD player with a “random play” mode and the ability to turn off the bass.
There are about a dozen different CDs, ranging in themes from animal sounds to kid songs to Mozart; special sounds and clicks have been added to each one. If an adult, with a fully developed nervous system, tried to listen to them, they can make you feel slightly dizzy or even nauseous. I got an immediate headache after about a minute of listening to 'Mozart for Modulation.' But Billy didn't. He liked some CDs better than others, but on the whole, he didn't mind sitting down twice a day for 30 minute sessions of 'headphone time'. Our OT let us rent the CDs for $10 a pop, (if you buy them, each costs about $40) and each CD would last us about two weeks.
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Billy hated the one with dolphin sounds on it, (who wouldn't? That was two weeks of hell!) but loved 'Peach Jamz', which has a series of upbeat kid songs to which he'd sing along. We worked in one 30-minute session before school, usually while he was eating breakfast, and one after school. Kids are allowed to eat, ride in the car, or play with toys while listening. They can't watch TV or really interact with anything with bright flashing lights or loud sounds. Ideally, he would walk around and play while listening, but we could never get him to wear the fanny pack into which the CD player inserts, so he mostly just sat and looked at books or played with table toys.
At the beginning of this therapy, he wouldn't even allow the headphones to touch his head. By the end of the series, he had no problem with headphones - but he still has strong resistance to hair washing, brushing or cutting. He has become much more verbal over the past six months, and his potty training has made significant strides. Six months ago we were at our wits end with the tantrums, and he had also just started head-banging, which was alarming to say the least. Now, that is extremely rare.
His connections to people are much stronger, and his eye contact is much better. He said, 'I love you, Mama' to me for the first time in December, and he is more likely to look at someone when he's talking to them. Whether he looks up when we call his name is still a crap shoot, but its better.
Therapeutic Listening Program For Autism
BUT. (And I want to put this BUT in bright neon letters!!) Therapeutic Listening is NOT the only therapy we've been doing; far from it. We are committed to Floortime, regular occupational therapy, speech therapy, music therapy and Kindermusik.
And I can't overstate the importance of going to school and learning from his peers and teachers. He attends pre-Kindergarten five days a week from 8:30 a.m. To 2:30 p.m., and he loves it. Now that we've finished the Therapeutic Listening series, our occupational therapist has recommended we purchase the CD Billy really likes - 'Peach Jamz' - and continue on a two-week on, two-week off schedule. Apparently, the nervous system can get too used to one CD if you listen to it every day. We're thinking about it. We want to see if there are any changes in his behavior when we stop doing Therapeutic Listening for a while.
If so, we may pick it back up in a month. I would love to hear from any other families who’ve tried this therapy. It's only by sharing stories with one another that we can really figure out what works for our special children.