“Nothing is permanent but change.”
Heraclitus

“Change is the only evidence of life.”
Evelyn Waugh


Plastic is defined in the dictionary as malleable, moldable, pliable, pliant, ductile, flexible, soft, workable, bendable. What better word—plastic—to describe that big miraculous, wondrous nerve in our head: the brain.

When my son was diagnosed with cerebral palsy thirty-five years ago, no medical doctor used the word plastic. I heard “he is very stiff” or “he will never walk normally” or the word “developmental delays” to describe his condition. But I was nervy and undaunted—my son was going to walk no matter what neurologists and pediatricians told me. I carried on and learned about the potential within a child’s central nervous system to recover completely or partially after an insult to the brain.

Advances in brain science today confirm what I was learning 30 years ago: a young child’s nervous system is still forming; it is indeed malleable, pliant, workable. This plasticity means that the brain of a very young child has a greater capacity to repair itself than does an adult brain. As a result, as long as a child’s nervous system has not yet matured there is still a chance that the child can make at least a partial recovery from early anomalies or lags.

Look at it this way: the brain is a complex computer that is not programmed at birth. The organization of the central nervous system does not happen automatically. In addition there is a direct correlation between development and a longer process of trial and error. (Repetition! Practice does not make perfect but it sure makes a difference.)
Each stage in a child’s development is essential to the development of the next stage. Each stage in the human individual, even on the cellular level, recapitulates the prior stage. In this way, development can be viewed as an ever-expanding spiral of sensory and motor development.

A child makes random floor movements, crawls on his stomach and finally achieves cross-lateral crawling—this brings physiological changes to the brain. As a child moves along the widening turns of this spiral, there occurs a return to various developmental themes and each time these are experienced, it is with a broader perspective, with new knowledge, new skills, and greater independence. Is it any different for us in all realms of our emotional, physiological or spiritual lives?

Learning comes from doing and is greatly dependent on the unconscious functioning of the nervous system. Learning itself is seen as a powerful therapeutic and self actualizing force. In other words, our brain cells are so specialized that we have literally a brain cell for every item of knowledge.

There is a systematic integrity in each individual, a self-balancing and self-adjusting ability in our human species. All bodies are in process; they are not static. The important thing is to help life come into balance in the way it intends. Take advantage of the brain’s plasticity to provide new opportunities for your child to blaze new pathways—inside and out.




Before becoming a mother, Laura worked in the entertainment business. She has written extensively about travel and is the author, most recently, of Uncommon Voyage, Parenting a Child with Special Needs—A Guidebook, a travelogue for the parenting journey based on her experiences and previous memoir of raising her son with cerebral palsy. Her collection of inspirational essays, Can You Show Me Tomorrow Today? will be published in 2019.

uncommonvoyage.com