The women who own the A4ever Family website have done it again! They have added a fascinating article to their information about Attachment and the Brain. The article is Neurodevelopment Interrupted: Signs and Symptoms by Emily Beard Johnson, Northwest Neurodevelopmental Training Center

The article talks specifically about an area of the brain stem known as the Pons.

What is the Pons?

Pons- part of the metencephalon in the hindbrain. It is involved in motor control and sensory analysis... for example, information from the ear first enters the brain in the pons. It has parts that are important for the level of consciousness and for sleep. Some structures within the pons are linked to the cerebellum, thus are involved in movement and posture.

Ms. Johnson correlates many behaviors and symptoms associated with attachment disorder with what she refers to as pons-level dysfunction. This dysfunction can occur when an infant’s needs are not met or their necessary neurodevelopmental movement is restricted. Because the Pons is responsible for regulating sensory input, like the limbic system, it plays a role in the brains responses to threats and the “flight, fight, freeze” reaction that becomes dysfunctional in traumatized children.

The neurodevelopmental reorganization approach used by Northwest Neurodevelopmental Training Center is designed to address the areas in the brain that were not fully or correctly developed during infancy and allow the brain (because it can grow and heal) to correct these deficiencies. The example that comes to mind is mending the crack in the foundation of your house instead of just trying to realign the upstairs walls or roof.

I know very little about neurodevelopmental reorganization, but I want to know more. And hopefully will have a chance to learn at the ATN conference in two weeks, when Susan Scott and her colleagues from Nehemiah’s Ranch for Youth explain how they’ve used neurodevelopmental approaches with the youth who come to their treatment center.

What really caught my attention in Ms. Johnson’s article was the list of symptoms attributed to pons dysfunction. It reads like a list of symptoms of my kid.

Pons Dysfunction:
• Skips words or parts of words while reading
• Uses finger to track text across the page
• Gets seriously hurt and makes little to no fuss, such as the baby who teeths without getting fussy
• Constantly hungry, even if he has just eaten an adequate amount of food
• Little or no appetite
• Lack of empathy
• Self-abuse, such as picking at scabs, biting fingernails until they bleed, and other forms of extreme self-stimulation
• Picks on others, including animals
• Bed wetting (beyond what is age appropriate)
• Fight or flight response to inappropriate situations, such as acting as if her life is threatened when a small issue has occurred. (Example: child trips on a toy, gets angry, and blames it on the closest available person)
• Fool-hardy risk-taking, such as leaping off of high structures or diving off of furniture
• Overly affectionate with strangers
• Inappropriate perception of danger
• Night terrors
• Violent rages
• Anxiety
• Clingy
• Controlling
• Manipulative
• Superficially charming
• Creates chaos in her environment
• Difficulty bonding with parents, siblings, and other caregivers
• Avoidance of eye contact
• A profound sense of displacement, isolation, and mistrust, with statements such as, “You don’t love me,” “I shouldn’t be alive,” etc.
• Pigeon-toed
• Hunched shoulders
• Anterior head carriage (head juts forward)
• Midbrain-level and cortical dysfunction, as neurology is cumulative

Anyone see your child in some of these? Go read the midbrain-level dysfunction symptoms too…bet you see even more.