Is Tinsley House a lot of old codswallop then?

[MerryMarigold]

Interested in this. Based on another thread. A couple of people inwardly groaning (or outwardly!) at the mention of it.

I have read the books, but not progressed to any assessment. Ds1 has some 'issues' which are nor obviously anything in particular but reading about other kids and a lot on here, it is fairly clear - auditory processing, dyspraxia, dyslexia, sensory processing overload, difficulty focussing/ concentrating. The auditory has been diagnosed by an OT, the rest have not. He should have started The Listening Programme but it has been delayed. The other (potential) issues are not being dealt with at all.

These issues he has then have a huge social and emotional impact. I have been desperately rummaging around for help and solutions since the end of YR when things got very bad for him.

Where I agree with the Tinsley House is that there must be a common root to all this, and a therefore a common treatment. Rather than dealing with symptoms, is it not better to address a cause. Where I am not sure is that I am not an expert at all in any of this stuff. Is it just a load of made-up stuff which is trading on parents' concerns?

I have significantly changed ds1's diet and added in Tinsley House suggested supplements and seen significant improvement in him this term. I don't know if this would have happened anyway. It certainly didn't happen during Y2 and there was actually some decline in how he was doing academically.

I just want to hear the pros and cons, really. Here's an invitation.

DS had swimming lessons from a baby. His swimming gave him a lot of confidence. He is now a qualified lifeguard which earns him money and a huge sense of achievement.
Ds also learned the piano from 6. He could identified notes but not read them fast enough to read music. He could play really well by ear or memory. Unfortunately his lovely teacher left and the replacement was horrible and he gave up.
But both were wonderful for his confidence and once he got to secondary school and other skills became important he shone.

Meh. It it were my kid id try anything

Wouldnt you investigate who and what you are spending your money on first.

My son has seen Robin, and one could say the massive improvements he made were a coincidence that just happened to occur at the same time we started TH therapy, but that would have to be a coincidence that has occurred with an awful lot of children (although as parents spending money of course we want to believe it helped).

I don't understand why people think Robin is a snake oil salesman, TBH he does very similar things with most children he sees, and the stuff is mostly outlined in his book, The Brain Food Plan, if you don't have the money to visit him, buy a 2nd hand copy of the book for a couple of quid on amazon and do it DIY. All the information is available virtually for free. I wanted to visit TH because I wanted to bring my husband along to get him on board because I knew he would never read the book.

The amount of crap in kids diets is unbelievable, it is completely insidious. Friends tell me they feed their kids healthy food, and I see them handing them dry cheerios, and rice cakes covered in crap as snacks. Every day 'healthy' school dinners have a sweet desert with a fruit in it eg. pineapple upside down cake and I think some educated middle class parents honestly count this as a portion of fruit a day. It starts from infancy with crappy organix baby crisps, and organic biscuits with no added sugar but lots of added fruit juice. Biscuits are doled out at the school gate to all these kids that have had a pudding only a few hours earlier, or a crossaint or a white bread roll. Birthday party after birthday party, grandparents visiting handing out chocolate. When you really try to eat healthily you start to realise the crap never stops.

We had one serious setback where my sons behaviour went down hill, I couldn't put my finger on why things had gone down hill so rapidly. Then it occurred to me to check the ingredients of some antibiotics he had been prescribed for an infection. It included an e number preservative which when I looked it up it said could cause hyperactivity.

I think there are genetic and environmental factors at play. I believe after what happened my son is genetically intolerant to certain things common in modern diets. As there are a probably a combination of causes for these developmental problems TH therapies may work for some children and not for others.

The exercises are a bit kooky, but my son has made improvements so I am happy to roll with it for now as it does no harm and is possibly doing a lot of good.

OTs do a lot of physical therapies with kids with developmental problems, and lots of other people think diet plays a factor, so I think Robin is combining these 2 different elements and there is not a lot completely new in what he does at all.

Regarding physical stuff, I have heard martial arts can be good, so I also plan to sign my son up for martial arts classes soon too.

Sorry this was a bit long

due I don't doubt a good diet makes a difference but I have always ensured that anyway, with home-grown veg, lots of fish and not a great deal of organic meat and both my DDs have had EPA supplements since they were tiny. My children have only eaten the crap you describe at other people's parties. Of course now they have the money to buy it. they have a diet coke habit, and the older one lives on a uni diet of, as far as I can see, a lot of MEAT and instant noodles, but there you go..... Yet they have both faced problems significant enough to be diagnosed as severe SpLDs. I am not being a luddite, I am sure diet has a part to play but unless you have unlimited resources, please spend the money on a Educational Psychologist or whatever expert advice is appropriate so you understand your DCs strengths and weaknesses and how best to address the,.

The crap diet you describe didn't even exist for many in the 60s and especially in the village my brother and I grew up and yet he was diagnosed profoundly dyslexic because he was lucky that my mother, a Deputy Head, recognised the signs. The Head told her that "the trouble with you middle class parents is that you cannot accept when your child is stupid" (My brother is now the Director running the engineering function for a Europe wide firm). They estimate 10% of all pupils have some form of learning difficulty. If anyone claims that increasing levels of diagnosis of Learning Difficulties indicate anything but that now they are better recognised rather than people dismissed as slow or stupid they are so wrong.

My mum had to really fight for my brother's diagnosis, getting much the same response as yours. My father and aunt who almost certainly were also dyslexic just learned to read very late and my father's writing was always decipherable (he used to dictate his letters even to us as children!).

Luckily they went to a bit of an alternative school that didn't put much stress on early reading, and my grandmother was a calligrapher so gave my father lots of extra help. They would both have had a pretty additive free diet, as would my brother as my mother never let us have anything not made from scratch (how we envied our friend who got to eat exciting things like oven chips!). I think most children in their generation with similar problems would just have been written off as stupid, and/or pointed in the direction of skilled/manual labour at the age of 14.

nooka yes. In fact that was just what happened to my nephew at a grammar school concerned about how his results would affect their position in the league tables only 10 years ago ( not that an apprenticeship hasn't worked out well for him). I am sure it is still happening and many with learning difficulties are still going undiagnosed and unsupported, especially if they don't have the benefit of parents willing or able to push for a diagnosis and the right support.

Agree with Nooka and Shooting re diet.
DH was another child of the 60s with a good home made diet which didn't stop him having learning difficulties. He didnt learn to read until he was 10, when he was finally taught phonics, which was a bit late and secondary school was spent in remedial classes. Thankfully he got a good apprenticeship at 15 and with hard work in evening classes/day release he is now a professional engineer. He is clearly dyslexic with left/right confusion and other traits.

Get the hearing issue sorted first; I have dealt with a number of children where Aspergers labelled problems all but vanished once they could hear properly. (Dealing with one right now - vast improvements in all areas since the hearing implants were fitted).

Some doctors are lazy and will just diagnose the latest "fad", rather than investigate what the real problems are.

I don't know it at all but am frankly stunned by your and maybe their statement "there must be a common cause to all of this and therefore a common treatment". I am not a expert on dyslexia etc but I understand from once talking to one of the worlds leading neulogists that basically the cause is likely be different wiring of the brain (laymans language). Any brain related issue is exceedingly complex to treat we actually know so little about how the brain functions and therefore there will not be a "common treatment" for all.
Is it possible that this place is cashing in on parental anxiety and frustration with poor support for SEN in schools and trying to present a simple understandable solution to parents?

Just to clarify I don't think a bad diet causes developmental delays, but a diet without sufficient nutrients that the body and brain requires will lead to the body and brain not functioning at its best. But I do think that there are some particular additives that can have a detrimental effect, and some children will have more of an intolerance to these additives than others.

Agree with getting a hearing test. A paediatrician suggested an assessment for ASD for my son, his reception teacher couldn't believe it (started reception after starting TH).

schoolnurse I think the OP is referring to a common cause to the array of symptoms her DS is presenting with, she is not talking about dyslexia as a stand alone problem across all children.

TH believe that symptoms appear in patterns which can be called a syndrome. In medicine a syndrome is the association of several clinically recognizable features. TH thinks you can group these types of symptoms together and call them developmental delay syndrome.

As Starlight McKenzie pointed out, what the NHS and education system actually do offer for children with learning disabilities and developmental delays is often pretty crap and ineffective (not to mention inconsistent and scientifically dubious), so they are not really in a good position to argue that what they don't offer is worse. What TH offers that the NHS and education system in general frequently fail to offer is the sense that someone is really listening to the details of your case and DOING something that makes you feel more secure and supported, able to cope and improve things, see things in a better light and ultimately move on feeling you've done everything you can and things aren't so bad as you thought, really, anyway. That may be cashing in on parental anxiety, frustration and lack of support, but SOMEONE needs to do something about the high levels of parental anxiety, frustration and lack of support, and putting parents on anti-depressants and whole families on a colossal NHS waiting list for CBT isn't the answer, really, is it? It strikes me that TH can make sufficient difference to enough families that it can continue to exist and charge for its services, and those families are not going to care at the end of it what the cause of the improvements was if it made a difference to them - fluke, perceiving the same situation more positively, being able to transfer some of the stress of the situation to a stranger, or serious brain-rewiring, so what? It worked for them.

dueaname "I think the OP is referring to a common cause to the array of symptoms her DS is presenting with, she is not talking about dyslexia as a stand alone problem across all children." I also was referring to an array of conditions hence the use of etc.
rabbit I agree provision is poor but in response to your comment "serious brain-rewiring," I understand from this expert that this is not possible we are what we are in this area, and we have to learn to live with it and cope with it. Interestingly in response to stressors be they physical e.g.even a minor significant head injury or emotional these conditions usually worsen either temporarily or permanently.

Gentle, Doctors may or may not be lazy, but they can't diagnose Aspergers on whim, and it isn't a fad.

Brain re-writing can and does change as a result of environmental influences.

We can't change our genetic PREDISPOSITION, but we can often affect how genes present themselves, with this being more possible in early development when brains are developing at their fastest rate.

Some 'wiring' once developed is set, but other wiring is still entirely changeable (the extent of which is influence by the 'set' wiring of course).

"Brain re-writing can and does change as a result of environmental influences."
Sarlight this is not my area of expertise but a few years ago i went with a child to the worlds leading neurological centre to discuss behavioural changes including in his dyslexic dyspraxic following a significant minor head injury. The internationally renowned the team of experts we saw were quite adamant you cannot change how the brain is wired up, dyslexia etc is not "curable".

If only I'd done a scientific degree, I could go and study some neuroscience. I find it all very fascinating, neural pathways etc. etc. Yes, I do agree, you can definitely do some brain re-writing.

rabbitstew, my ds was 8 a couple of weeks ago. I guess my awareness of his 'differences' has come mostly through his schooling but also as his 3-years younger siblings have grown up, and how much they can do so quickly. I know some of it is younger sibling syndrome, but they are both (twins) so different from each other, that I have become more and more convinced that there is something hindering ds1. He actually has a similar 'brain' to my dd - they are both very imaginative, can play for hours with a limited number of things, but she hasn't struggled with the things he has. He may grow out of it, I don't know. He is so clearly very intelligent in other ways that it's frustrating that nearly ALL of his schooling/ school experience doesn't reflect this.

We have a trampoline which is supposed to be good with balance, and he spends a lot of time on that. His Dad taught him to cycle (with much perseverance) and he plays a lot of football with his Dad. We were super into playdough when he was younger and spent hours doing that (though I wasn't aware of it's uses on fine motor skills!).

I haven't had his hearing tested, but he can generally hear most quiet things. He's extremely musical in the sense that he can hear a tune once or twice, recognise it a long time later, and even place it. He has surprised me many times with this. He's can also sing a tune after hearing it once or twice. His sister is also gifted in this way. (Not sure how to promote this one tbh). It's more that he can't process a lot of instruction, and is, if anything over sensitive to noise, so can't think if there are other sounds going on.

Dd and ds1 are very good at languages, can sound exactly like the 'original' person (again, a 'musical' ear), but if it's taught in a formal way eg. learning lists of words he wouldn't get it.

I have actually had a look at the website, have you rabbit? I don't think it is complete cods wallop, I do believe diet, exercise and especially parents spending time with their children doing something they feel positive about rather than stressed/ anxious / unhappy /upset can be a good thing and helpful.

However as a dyslexic myself what is on there also scares me and reminds me of nothing so much as all those books and websites out there trading on the anxieties of Cancer patients. I bought them all when faced with a diagnosis because I was scared and needed answers but in the end came to the conclusion that anything that spouted bad Science or told me what I had to do went in the bin. Then I reviewed all the scientific evidence and with the help of a nutritionist I came up with dietary changes and supplements that I had some confidence would make a genuine difference.

He claims that all the difficulties people experience on a spectrum of SpLDs, ASD, etc. "do not exist" and then spouts a load of pseudoscience that Ben Goldacre would have a field day with. There it is the bad science and the telling parents what to do, and that is simply codswallop that trades on parental anxiety.

I agree rabbit stew that for some problems it can be difficult for parents to access support and help but for most children with Specific Learning Difficulties including Dyslexia and Dyspraxia that is simply not the case. There may be a woeful ignorance of it amongst some teachers and in some schools and yes you do have to make yourself into a bit of an expert and be pushy but there is lots of help available, and it works. Not just that but as a dyslexic myself a lot of it is what you often develop as coping strategies by yourself. So am I to throw away my mind maps, the way I have learnt to have confidence in and use my strengths, my kindle and all the other things I do day to day that really do make a difference. Do the universities, many of which really are centres of excellence in identifying and supporting SpLDs disband their fantastic learning support? Because if what Robin says is true they should I actually think the best £400 I spent on my kids was paid for an Ed Psych assessment which gave us an accurate picture of their strengths and weaknesses, suggested coping strategies and ways of giving support and suggested links and books that had lots of help in them. Not half as sexy and offering me all the answers as TH but I am awfully glad I spent it on that and not TH. The other gift was all the time I spent intervening early on to make sure DD learnt to read write and spell using teaching methods that worked for her.

However here I am with all this knowledge, perhaps I could concoct some bad Science and write a book and create a website and get to make a living whilst having a chance to enjoy a rural idyll in somewhere like Brockenhurst

I'm always amused by people who think GP's hand out aspergers/ADHD diagnosis on some whim because they can't be bothered to investigate.

GentleGiant have any idea what the process is like to obtain such a diagnosis? How many health professionals you have to see?

My son had TWO hearing tests as a first port of call, then a referral to the speech therapist, then a referral to a paediatrician who then agreed a full assessment by CDC was necessary. The CDC assessment takes place over two full days where a paediatric nurse spends the whole time observing and interviewing you, then there is an assessment by an educational psychologist, speech therapist, occupational therapist, physiotherapist and a developmental paediatrician who all then consult together to make a decision about a diagnosis.

Calling aspergers a latest fad is pretty insulting and it's a shame someone with you ignorance is in a position to be working with these children, I certainly hope my son is never entrusted into your "professional" care.

schoolnurse - I suggest you look up neuroplasticity. Our brains have an astonishing ability to reorganise themselves.

Well, the guy that started Tinsley House is supposed to be an Assistant Professor at the Carrick Institute. I don't know much about it, though, and whether it's any good.

Surely most 'science' is theories? This is his one.

I can understand, having not gone down this route, and having lived your life with dyslexia, that it would be difficult for you shootingatpigeons to accept there may be other ways of doing things.

I I think even dyslexia experts would say there are different severities and that it manifests in different ways (perhaps it isn't even one 'thing' like Irritable Bowel Syndrome is basically any issue with your stomach). Even on other MN threads I've seen some kids can read really early, but not spell, and other kids can't read for ages etc. etc. The Tinsley techniques may work on some of those children, maybe. I don't know, that's why I started the thread. It's worth a try rather than spending your whole life in 'coping' mode.

I wasn't saying that dyslexia or any other developmental disability is curable, but with therapy you can get proven improvements.

Therapy that works on neural pathways to strengthen signals is an evidence-based technique as are creating new pathways to 'go around' the ones that you can't strengthen. It's how people learn to use prosthetic limbs. The theory and practice is pretty well established.

You can also optimise your body's ability to make it more contusive to learning by ensuring good nutrition, mental well-being and exercise.

'There may be a woeful ignorance of it amongst some teachers and in some schools and yes you do have to make yourself into a bit of an expert and be pushy but there is lots of help available, and it works'

Now that IS codswallop! Though my experience is of ASD not dyslexia.