Very Young Children with Special Needs: A Foundation for Educators, Families, and Service Providers Book

I read this book while on the waiting list to take my developmentally disabled baby to Glenn Doman's Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential. A chiropractor had previously told us to read his Teach Your Baby to Read, which prompted me to contact the Institutes and then apply.

We were on the Institutes' Intensive Program for four years, from 1986 to 1990, during which time my immobile son became a walker and made other impressive gains, and I later wrote about the experience in a memoir (published in 2011).

For someone who has the driving motivation to find answers for a beloved child's poorly understood problems, Doman's book offers perhaps the first glimmer of hope. His account tells how he and the other founders of the Institutes arrived at their philosophy, and while some of what he says was out of date even when I read it, it all sounds very common-sensical. Given the sad fact that generally no other resources are offering anything approaching hope, the appeal of this sort of thing is undeniable.

My view of the Institutes itself is more complicated than my view of this book (for details, please listen to an interview I gave here), but the book deserves its enduring place in the literature.