How to Balance Both Brain Hemispheres for Children with Language Disorders?
Does your child:
- Know how to read letters and numbers and excel in math at a young age?
- Have a remarkable ability to memorize long passages or sequences of numbers?
- Understand multiple languages?
- Often tilt their head, squint, or glance sideways?
- Enjoy playing with their hands and spinning in circles?
These signs indicate that your child has a dominant left hemisphere. As a result, they may struggle with communication, expressing emotions, creative imagination, and processing sounds and images. This can lead to language disorders and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
What Should We Do When a Child Shows These Signs?
Encouraging the Use of the Left Hand to Balance Both Hemispheres
Research shows that the right hemisphere controls the left side of the body. Encouraging children to use their left hand more often can help develop their right hemisphere, leading to greater balance.
Practical Activities to Support Brain Hemisphere Development:
- Train the child to use a spoon, fork, and pencil with their left hand.
- Encourage left-handed play activities such as throwing balls, solving puzzles, and drawing.
- Create an environment that supports left-handed use, such as arranging household items to suit left-handed individuals.
- Regularly stimulate the right side of the body (right hand, right leg, right back) through massage, pressure exercises, scratching, and weight-bearing exercises to enhance left-side movement.
- Stimulate sensory perception by allowing the child to see and hear only from the left side while isolating the right.
- Promote cross-hemisphere integration through simple exercises like:
- Alternating hot and cold sensations between both hands for 15 seconds each.
- Letting the child feel and distinguish between objects with different shapes, textures, softness, or hardness. When each hand experiences different sensations simultaneously, neural signals travel across both hemispheres, improving sensory perception and processing speed.
Early Intervention for Children with Special Educational Needs
Providing early support for children with language disorders and other learning challenges is crucial to helping them develop better cognitive and social skills.
