New born babies are not a blank canvas! They arrive pre-programmed by evolution with sets of instructions such as: suck when your mouth is stimulated, move your limbs when your head moves, grip when the palm of your hand is touched and cry out and throw your arms and head back when you're frightened.
These are called Primitive Reflexes.

Primitive reflexes are reflex actions originating in the central nervous system that are exhibited by normal infants.

They are thought to help:

• with the birth
• when in danger
• with practising hand and eye movement
• with sorting out the left and right sides of the body
• with sorting out the upper body from the lower body
• the muscles to develop and work together
• to help the senses to work with the balance (vestibular) system
• in getting the child ready for the next step in development (rolling, sitting, crawling, walking)

As the baby gets older, more sophisticated parts of the brain learn to take control and these primitive reflexes become dormant.

Deciding what to do and doing it, is now due to voluntary intellectual thought. Therefore the child develops better ways of:

• standing, walking and sitting
• coping with all the information the different senses send to the brain
• sorting through and making sense of all that information
• deciding what to do
• doing what it decided

If a number of primitive (baby) reflexes remain in control, they can seriously affect how a child’s brain handles all the information gathered by the senses. This is called Neuro-Motor Immaturity.

For some children the world is slightly askew, they have ‘two left feet’, left and rights become confused as does learning to read and write. For others information going to and from the brain is disorganised and their life is disjointed.

Having a cluster of uninhibited primitive reflexes can affect children in so many different ways. It is a contributory cause, not necessarily a symptom, so by reducing it, many other ‘problems’ seem to just disappear or reduce.