Three New Institutes
Buoyed by the success of the School for Human Development, my father totally reorganized the Children’s Center, and he created three new institutes. The Institute for the Achievement of Physical Excellence became responsible for all the children whose biggest problem was mobility. This meant we had to get completely immobile children moving or crawling (in the prone position), crawlers into creepers, creepers into walkers, walkers into runners, and runners into physical excellence. I became the director of this new institute. I had the double responsibility of continuing to run the School for Human Development at the same time.
My sister Janet became the director for the Institute for the Achievement of Intellectual Excellence. Janet had specialized in her training, both in cognitive development and nutrition. This institute would be responsible for all children whose problems in life were of an intellectual nature. Principally, this meant problems of understanding, language, writing, and organization (such as hyperactivity). In addition, Janet was the director of the newly formed International School. This will be discussed in the next blog post.
The final new institute was the Institute for the Achievement of Physiological Excellence. This institute was tasked with the responsibility for all the children whose biggest problems in life were health, digestion, and breathing. These were the most hurt children of all. Often, medical problems as a symptom of brain injury were the biggest barriers to their progress in mobility and cognition. This institute’s job was to get the children well enough that they could graduate to resolving their mobility problems or cognitive problems such as blindness, deafness, or being insensate.
This complete reorganization of the Children’s center by my father turned out to be very fortuitous. There was a friendly competition between the three Institutes to constantly improve their individual neurological programs and results. When children came onto the program based on their single biggest problem in life, they were assigned to a specific institute. For example, children whose biggest single problem was mobility were assigned to the Physical Institute. Children whose problems had to do with understanding, language, or writing were assigned to the Intellectual Institute. Physiological programs included our full nutritional program and our respiratory programs. Every child on the program received a physical, cognitive, or physiological program. Children who had social problems could be aided by either the Physical or Intellectual Institute.
The staff of the School for Human Development wore blue jackets like the senior class of the school. This was to help the seniors transition from being students in the school to being staff members in the school. This represented a huge victory for everyone. The parents never dreamed that their young person would be able to have a job. The students themselves didn’t have the self-esteem to think they could hold down a job. When my father proposed to me that some students might be able to graduate from the school and join the school staff, I thought he was crazy. So did my colleagues on the school staff. But the progress of the students, due to my father’s vision and the programs he developed, proved him right and us wrong. Several years into this new system, in the late 1970s, my father designed uniforms for each Institute.
In 1976, the staff of the school became responsible for the physical programs of all the children on the home Intensive Treatment Program. This process started because a number of senior staff were not content with my father’s leadership. In the early 1970s, my father worked hard on increasing the donations to the institutes and expanding into other countries. This limited his time in the Children’s Center seeing the families and the children. He continued to do the majority of the teaching of new families during the intensive two days of lectures for new families joining the program. He delegated a number of his clinical responsibilities to senior staff members.
After the failure to establish national units in the 1960s, my father was encouraged by a number of friends and parents who came from outside the United States to create institutes internationally. This will be discussed in detail in future posts. One of the institutes was the British Institute for Brain-Injured Children. In 1976, the organization purchased a large property in Sommerset outside the town of Bridgewater. The property included an old mansion called Knowle Hall, several outbuildings, and a pool. There were fields galore. The director, Keith Penick, encouraged my father to send staff from Philadelphia so the parents would know they were getting the true program of my father’s Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential.
In the summer of that year, Rosalind and I departed with a group of 11 students from the School for Human Development for the British Institute. The students were to have a summer abroad, continuing with their full neurological program and also having the opportunity to travel to the many beautiful and historic sites of the United Kingdom. I arrived in advance to help paint the entire third floor of Knowle Hall which would be dedicated to the bedrooms for our students and Rosalind and me. The summer turned out to be a huge success and we learned many things that we could apply to improving the program and the results of the little children in our Children’s Center.
When my father began using more of his time for the development of the school, the senior staff felt left out. This was true of the clinical directors with the exception of Gretchen Kerr. Gretchen Kerr was a fully trained Clinical Director. She was to become my father’s right hand and the Vice Director of the Institutes. Gretchen was a very quiet, introspective person. She had a strong character and a great love for all the children with brain injuries and their parents. Her character was very even keeled. This complimented my father’s enthusiasm and strong passion.
Between 1974 and 1976, some of the Clinical Directors became increasingly disenchanted. Some wanted more money. Others wanted to add techniques to the program that were not entirely based on Child Brain Development. They were not entirely upfront in running the School for Human Development. Gretchen was the exception. In the mid 1970s when she became the Vice Director, she proposed spending some days in the school doing the physical program with the students and staff. This was shocking to us. We were all in our mid-twenties and in excellent physical shape. Our physical program was unlike any others. We crawled in the prone position and crept on our hands and knees like the students. We did hundreds and hundreds of meters of this every morning. This required the development of particular muscles not used by average people or even those in fine physical shape. The skin on our elbows and knees had toughened into “elephant skin”. This meant that even if someone had superb physical strength, they could not crawl and creep with us without losing the skin on their knees and elbows. We had learned this the hard way as we were increasing our distances of crawling and creeping. We learned with new students to increase them gradually, so their skin toughened but never broke down.
In addition, we did many, many meters of forward rolls, backward rolls, and log rolls, these were physically taxing as we would do them for 20 or 30 meters nonstop. Most difficult and challenging was the fact that the brain had to develop in order to be able to process the continual movements of the body going head over heels.
In 1977, my father sent a team of staff and students to the institute in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. We were there to help create a school for the Brazilian Institutes. Dr. Jose Carlos Veras, who was mentioned in previous posts, had gone from complete paralysis and quadriplegia to hemiplegia and being a medical doctor. He hired students who had just graduated in physical education or exercise physiology from university. We were to train these young people to run the school exactly like ours in Philadelphia. Males and females alike were all in excellent physical condition.
Leia Coello, one of our Brazilian staff, who had joined the staff in the United States, accompanied me to her home city of Rio to help me set up the school. When Leia and I were leading the US students with brain injury through the physical course we had created, the young staff candidates would follow us. As we completed 20 meters of forward rolls, the candidates would begin to slow down. The students would encourage them to keep up with the team. After 30 meters, the candidates would begin to look a little green in the face. They were embarrassed that they could not do what the students with brain injuries did so easily. If they pushed themselves hard, up to 40 or 50 meters, we would watch them creep off to bushes and empty their stomachs. It was a neurological issue they had, not a physical one.
By fall of 1976, three of the senior staff decided to quit and go off to create their own organization. These had been my father’s students, and he felt very betrayed by their collusion. These staff had parents that they had befriended, and they encouraged them to leave the Institutes and go to their new clinic. Some of these families were European, Italian, Irish, English, and Australian. My father handled this situation with magnanimity and as a gentleman. Every week there was a new group of families coming into the Children’s Center which was our clinic for children and adults with brain injury. Every week the parents received Advanced Lectures which provided them with the whys of the program they would be taught to carry out for the next six months.
My father told each group every week, at the beginning of the lectures, that one of the principal problems for parents and children with brain injuries is that they do not have enough options in life. Now our parents had another option. They could go with the staff who had departed, or they could stay with us. He told the parents that whatever decision they made, he agreed. One of my father’s strongest values which pervades our work to this day, is that only the parents can decide what is best for their children with brain injuries. The medical establishment, governments, and school districts think they know what’s best for adults and children with brain injuries. They do not. In fact, they continue using ineffective practices that didn’t work 70 years ago. Only parents can decide what is best for their children, whether the child is hurt or well.
Glenn had to replace the clinical staff who had quit. He decided to bring the staff of the school, starting with the directors of the school, into the clinic to learn to teach the physical programs for families on the home program. Bruce Hagy, Rosalind Klein (soon to become Rosalind Doman), and I, began our training in the clinic under my father’s wing. We became his assistants for his physical lectures so that we were trained to take over the lectures. Our already complicated lives became much more complicated. We jumped from working in the school into the clinic and back again on a daily basis. Nonetheless, we loved it. And we found that we were increasingly more effective. The fact that we had done the entire physical program on ourselves meant that we understood it in a completely different way than past clinicians who knew the theory but not the practice. Much more importantly, we had had to motivate our students to do an intensive and sometimes difficult physical program seven days a week. Our experience with difficult and recalcitrant students paid off because we could teach the parents the same effective means of motivation.
Quickly, we began to see how we could improve the physical program of the little children in the Children’s Center. The old staff had taught the parents to do the physical program based on time. For example, parents were told to have their child crawl for 5 minutes and creep for 5 minutes many times a day. This meant that the actual quantity of activity done varied greatly among children’s programs. This had a direct effect on the results, the more crawling and creeping, the better the results were.
I went to my father and said we would like to change the physical programs and base them on distance, not time. As he said, having crawled his way across Europe during the Second World War, he understood actually having the experience of crawling and the importance of distance. Of course, each child’s speed would be different. Our job was to record the distance and determine the goal for the next visit in six months. This quantification of the Physical Program greatly improved the results. This was hugely satisfying for us young staff members. It was the beginning of a long process of quantifying every physical program from children who were immobile to children who were walking and running.
Written by: Douglas Doman