Shanker – therapy and caregivers

So the more we understood this, the more apparent it became that whatever kind of therapy program we employed, had to be one that placed the caregiver at the heart of the delivery of the therapy. And there seemed to be all kinds of reasons for why the caregiver remains so important past this initial period of two years. Perhaps it’s because, simply sort of a dose effect. The caregiver spends more time with the infant than any therapist possibly could. Perhaps there’s a sort of intimacy factor, the fact that the child trusts the caregiver, but also that the child understands the caregiver’s non-verbal signals, their non-verbal cues, far better than they understand anyone else’s. Remember we all gesture in very subtly different ways. We use subtly different vocalizations, or looks on our face. So the child has a much better understanding of the caregiver’s intentions than anyone else.