(Warning, long post on my favourite subject!...).
Ds1 is now nearly 8 and is a sociable, happy, imaginative, talented little boy who loves new experiences, runs around the playground joining in with the other children, talks confidently in class, is willing to try new physical skills, but who doesn't know when to stop talking! Or at least, he doesn't at home (he never gets into trouble at school) - he'll even tell everyone else to be quiet so that he can keep on with the flow! He's a very different little boy from the repetitive, obsessive, rigid, anxious little boy who started school at 4 terrified of other people, with a selection of little grimaces and other tics, unwilling or unable to tell people his needs, with limited skills of independence and no desire whatsoever to be independent.
Most definitely, what made the most dramatic and colossal difference was intensive physiotherapy. Until he had the muscle strength in the appropriate muscles to use his body efficiently, no amount of attempting to keep him active was going to particularly help his motor or self-help skills and until he could move about without feeling threatened or inadequate, nothing much was going to help his social skills, either. It was a big fight to get him the attention, though - apparently being able to walk is the only requirement in life...
The physio exercises I think also to a certain extent helped with his hypersensitivity to touch. He is still extremely ticklish, still wets the bed, still needs a bit of encouragement to experience new textures on his hands, but he no longer avoids activities because he thinks they are painful and certainly wouldn't freak out being asked to do something even if he does find it a little bit yucky... I suspect it did also help that he was taught to crawl when he was 17 months old, that however slowly he appeared to be progressing, I perservered with teaching him to dress himself, swim and to ride a bike and to hop and to skip, to balance on beams, to do forward rolls, etc. Once he had sufficient upper girdle strength, we also made significant progress teaching him to throw and catch and enjoy throwing, catching and kicking - there is actually nothing wrong with his balance and co-ordination, except for the motor planning side of co-ordination, in that he is not good at working out how to do new motor activities so needs to be taught how to use his body to do them. Now that he has reasonably strong muscles and knows where they are to use them in the first place, he is much more willing to try to work things out for himself, though, and his unbelievably good memory means he doesn't need to be reminded how to do something once he's been taught!
We did also do some retained reflexes therapy with him, but we started this after he'd already made huge improvements from conventional physio, so there was quite a lot of overlap (the form of retained reflexes therapy we did was based on physio-like exercises). However, I think they did help with the progress, as they were a useful addition to what he was already doing, and as we were paying for that, rather than relying on advice from the NHS, he was also regularly reviewed, so it was lovely to see the improvements in his skills and attitude.
Learning to play the piano was also turned out to be a brilliant idea. It helped hugely with his hand strength but also with his self esteem as it's a fantastic activity for rapidly seeing how a bit of effort can bring big and positive results, unlike intensive physio, which is uncomfortable hard work on the basis of a promise it will help with other things in the future, making it a hard sell for a young child...
I also got some advice from a behavioural optometrist, who said his visual skills were about a year behind (which didn't stop him being able to read fluently when he was only 3...), which was what you would expect from a child who was about a year behind in moving about and about a year behind the average for walking. For example, there was a simple exercise for speeding up the process of learning to move his eyes to look at things, rather than tending to move his whole head when he didn't need to. Also, we were advised to encourage him to learn to read maps and try things like tangrams, and this did help with his basic presentation at school and also with his ability to interpret 2D represenations of 3D images, which prior to that wasn't brilliant.
These days, he is doing extremely well academically at school. He is noticeably less good at strategy and forward planning than his db, which I guess may become noticeable at secondary school, but he is basically a very happy, confident little boy these days who feels like he fits in. Long may it continue. He goes to a lovely school and hasn't been bullied at all, which I think has helped hugely, as has having a best friend since the beginning of year 2 - so I hope nothing happens to sour that, either, because self esteem is very important to positive development!!!!!!