The sweet sound of unleashing a child’s potential

A week ago Amy*, like thousands of other teenagers around the country, sat her mock exams ahead of her Junior Cert in June.
Twelve years ago, it was a feat her mother never thought she would achieve because, unlike her peers, experts believed the North Clare teenager was not suitable for mainstream education.
“My daughter is now 16 and doing her Junior Cert. She has just done her mocks. She has gone to mainstream school right the way along but when she was four, the opinion was she would never go to mainstream education. Amy had difficulties with her language, motor, sensory and social skills and it was a difficult decision for us to send her to mainstream education,” Margaret* recalls.
The turning point, according to Margaret, is easy to identify.
“It was pure luck. There was speech therapy available in Clare but it ceased because they did not have enough speech therapists. I was being offered no speech therapy for Amy so I had to find private speech therapy. Karen’s name was mentioned by two people so we went to her,” she adds.
Karen is Karen O’Conner, consultant speech and language therapist and founding director of The Listening Therapy Centre, Ireland. Karen introduced Amy to music therapy and Margaret believes this has been key to unlocking her daughter’s potential.
“Karen changed our lives but I can’t put it into words. She changed Amy’s life, she changed my life, she changed our whole family’s lives. Even though I have no proof of what things might have been like without her intervention, I know it was her that brought us this far. She has been the one constant the whole time,” Margaret says.
For Margaret, things began to click when she and Amy first visited Karen.
“We went along for a consultation with her and I can still remember as clear as day that after about three minutes, she said ‘we will not teach Amy to speak until we get her to sit down for more than five minutes’. To me, it made more sense than what the rest of the professionals were saying before that. If Amy could not stay still for two seconds, she couldn’t learn anything, she wouldn’t be able to listen or look or learn the way other children did. It was a very simple but dramatic statement. Even though it sounded easy, at that stage, even that looked like an impossibility because Amy could move at the speed of lightning but had no sense so it was high alert all the time,” Margaret recalls.
“As it happened, the following day, Karen was going to do a course in listening therapy. This is when she started to get into it first and at our next meeting, she came back with what she learned and we started it,” she continues.
Music therapy aims to help children with developmental challenges listen better, to understand more, to express themselves better, to learn more and enjoy interacting with other children.
“The main thing at the start with the listening was that she developed a specific programme for Amy. at the start, we would do the listening at home and the main change was that it grounded Amy. It calmed her and then you could bring in other things to work on. So it got her to sit still for more than two seconds. That was a huge thing. It is only other parents of children like that who understand,” Margaret explains.
Now at 16, Amy still goes back to her listening therapy. Her mother believes she always will.
“As she went along, Karen would develop another six-week or eight-week programme or the intensive listening but it is designed specifically for her. The programmes are targeted at major problems at the time but they always have a positive effect. There might be a blip or a difficult time when, as you go through the listening, you might hit a wall before you get over it and once I gave up but then Karen explained to me that this happens and I was in a better position to manage it the next time and we got through it. Maybe this doesn’t happen to every child but it was definitely the case with Amy. If I had not known at times that it would get better, I would have given up. If someone doesn’t tell you this, that it is just a bad patch and you will come through it, you might just give up at the bad patch,” Margaret explains.
“This therapy has meant that Amy can live a far more normal life than she may have been able to. It is hard to say because we don’t know what it would have been without it but I know that Amy and her family would have had a more difficult time without it and she would not have gone to mainstream school at all,” she continues.
As well as changing Amy, the therapy has changed the way Margaret looks at her daughter.
“I would see huge capabilities in Amy. I have been with her the whole way along so I have seen the changes in her. I don’t think I would have seen Amy’s full capabilities if Karen hadn’t helped me to see them.
“Amy is doing her Junior Cert. She plays badminton and has gone kayaking and gone swimming when there was a time when she wouldn’t stand one inch off the ground on anything that was remotely shaky. I remember a time I put her on one of those seats on springs in a playground and she was hysterical. She went from that to jumping high on the trampoline or sliding down full-size slides. These are the day-to-day changes that show how she has come on,” Margaret illustrates.
“Amy’s social skills have improved greatly. She went from someone who wouldn’t look at or talk to anyone to one day hopping out of the car to go into Karen’s on her own. It sounds like nothing but it was a huge, huge thing. There is always more that Amy will do and knowing that and knowing that if you keep going with the right supports and the right person, I feel there is nothing she can’t do,” she adds.
Music is the Key: to Unlocking your Child’s Potential by Karen O’Connor, published by Londubh Books and released this Friday, is the first in a series of books aimed at giving hope to parents and children by telling the stories of children who overcame their developmental challenges by means of music-based sound therapy.
“Karen absolutely changed and continues to change our lives. She set us on the right track at the beginning and we could have gone a very different direction,” Margaret concludes.
*Not their real names