After having slept in for a little, Janine picked me up around 10 am this morning. I was very eager to go see this child because of its very interesting condition. The little guy we visited is 25 months old and suffers from Goldenhar syndrome. The session with him today, unfortunately for Janine, was a typical example of those bad sessions that happen once in a while to every therapist. The boy was just not focused today and could not really get to work with Janine, so that it ended up being a rather unsuccessful visit. He is suffering from Goldenhar syndrome, which is a congenital birth defect. Because of his syndrome, his face seems kind of shifted to one side and one of his ears is missing (see picture). His condition impacts his hearing and speech abilities even though he is a very visual processing child. Janine works with him on coordination and keeping focus. During today’s session especially he would just run off, not listen and not follow through all the time. For him, routines and structures are very important. Because his parents are unfortunately very occupied with other concerns at the moment, he does not get this quite enough. Today showed a lot what kind of skills a therapist has to have in those situations. Janine had to improvise a lot and try to be able to find a balance between just letting the child have a bad day and pushing him a little bit further in terms of therapeutic progress. For any therapist a “backstep” like the one today is always hard and it is very important to reflect on the session afterwards. Reflecting the visit, Janine replays it in her head and tries to think about what she could do better next time and what she could do to prevent this from happening again.
Another lesson that today’s visit taught me was the significance of playing in the development of children. Through playing, children learn independence, rules, structure and back and forth interaction. For this little guy, playing with someone was very difficult because he has such a hard time focusing and staying with something. Janine made it very clear for him what toy they played with and when it was finished. Because of his weird mouth shape, the little boy does not talk a lot yet and needs the back and forth playing as a bridge to how communication works. Communication is nothing more than back and forth interaction either. Through playing his interaction was encouraged and important eye contact and self-help skills were worked on. If he would need help with a toy, he needed to ask for help from Janine and establish that communicative eye contact with her.
Even though I only had one visit today and it was rather a bad one for Janine, it was very helpful and full of lessons to learn for me. Tomorrow is going to be a research day, that Janine and I prepared for tonight.
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