Shanker – developmental disorders

We created this self-reg wheel,and this wheel is telling us something incredibly important about self-regulation. If you look at the wheel, at twelve o’clock we have developmental disorders, and by developmental disorders we mean things like: autism, or ADHD or learning disorder, and the point of implicating self-regulation here is not to say that these disorders are caused by problems in self-regulation, these are neuro-genetic disorders, these are disorders that, you know, everyday we’re learning something new about the sorts of core, perceptual and motor mechanisms that have been impaired in these children.  

The nature of the biological, the neuro-genetic challenges that these kids with disorders have is such that it interferes with, it obstructs these interactive experiences. It obstructs their capacity to engage with their primary caregivers, so as to deliver this information to the parts of the brain that are coming online. So what happens is that the child develops problems in self-regulation as a downstream consequence of the neuro-genetic challenges which interfere with their social interactions. Now what happens is so many of the symptoms that we associate with the various developmental disorders, so many of these symptoms are actually downstream consequences of the impediment to social interaction which in turn causes impediment to the development of self-regulation.