Over on ParentData, Emily Oster posted a series of questions under the heading, “Rapid-Fire Reader Questions,” one of which asks about “the Doman method for early reading.” Professor Oster—she is an economist who writes popular, evidence-based books about parenting, pregnancy, and the like—rightfully dismisses Glenn Doman’s recommendations about reading with babies. I mention the post here because (a) I was somewhat surprised that those recommendations still have any currency and (b) I want to to underscore her message.

Allow me to clarify that the title doesn’t mean Professor Oster interprets lunch meats. I mean that she’s calling out as male bovine excrement, a recommendation about reading.

Why would I base an entire post on this little snippet of data? Well, first (as just mentioned) to call attention to Professor Oster’s dissemination of evidence-based parenting, but also to take a deeper look at the topic. However, to understand why, you’ll need to read the entire post; the main message is that the practices and theory of the Doman-Delacato approach to child development are an excellent example of the Ideas-run-amok School of Special Education. First, some background and then some evidence.

History

You know, of course, that we old people like to talk about days gone by. Here’s some of my talk about Glenn Doman’s and Carl Delacato’s recommendations. In the 1950s Doman and Delacato founded “The Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential” in Philadelphia. Delacato (1959) started along the road to applications to reading. In 1960 they and others (Doman et al., 1960) published an article in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association advancing “a new treatment” for addressing problems of “children with severe brain injuries.” They expanded on the ideas in many other publications (e.g., Delacato, 1963, 1966; LeWinn et al., 1966).

The ideas were developed during a time when the area of disabilities—in particular, learning disabilities, though “LD” was yet widely used—was awash in interest in perceptual and motor processes. It was an era when Kephart (1964), Frostig (1963), and others were championing therapies. In this context, it had a certain cache which was only enhanced by having theory to act as a driver.

The therapy is founded on an idea that many readers may remember from their basic biology class: embryogenetic processes. Embryogenesis describes the very early stages of development in which an embryo progress from being composed of just a few cells to being composed of way many cells, each of which has specific functions such as certain types of tissue (nerve, bone, muscle). It is the process by which stem cells expressly develop into different animal features (e.g., mammalian features, FANTOM Consortium, 2014; and other animals such as frogs, Dzamba & DeSimone, 20181). That idea is captured by the phrase, “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” a notion that has a substantial history:

In the late 1800s some scientists felt that ontogeny not only could reveal something about evolutionary history, but that it also preserved a step-by-step record of that history. These scientists claimed that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny (ORP). This phrase suggests that an organism’s development will take it through each of the adult stages of its evolutionary history, or its phylogeny. At the time, some scientists thought that evolution worked by adding new stages on to the end of an organism’s development. Thus its development would reiterate its evolutionary history — ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny.

This idea is an extreme one. If it were strictly true, it would predict, for example, that in the course of a chick’s development, it would go through the following stages: a single celled organism, a multi-celled invertebrate ancestor, a fish, a lizard-like reptile, an ancestral bird, and then finally, a baby chick.
Does ontogeny recapitulate phylogeny?

This is clearly not the case — a fact recognized by many scientists even when the idea of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny was introduced. If you observe a chick’s development, you will find that the chick embryo may resemble the embryos of reptiles and fish at points in its development, but it doesn’t recapitulate the forms of its adult ancestors.

(UC Museum of Paleontology Understanding Evolution, n.d.)

Doman, Delacato, and colleagues contended that the sequence of changes during embyonic and pre-natal development reflected the evolutionary sequence of development of a species. They argued, even though the idea had been debunked by the time they were adopting it, that ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny applied by analogy to the development of infants and young children. So an infant’s development would be disrupted if the infant didn’t progress through a series of stages, particularly with regard to motor development. If the central nervous system is damaged during the progression of stages, they presumed that it would affect only some of the cells and that other, undamaged cells could be “reprogrammed” to achieve normal functioning. They thought that their ideas applied no just to speaking and reading, but also to intellectual disability (including Down Syndrome).

Delacato and Doman depended on the concept of “plasticity,” the idea that the neural actions change. Plasticity is not a mistaken idea. It’s essential for what we call “learning!” In another post, I promise to examine plasticity in greater detail. For now, though, let me just asert that there is good reason to agree with the idea that neural tissues change over time, that is, that as organisms grow and develop, their neural systems also develop and change.

Practice

Delacato and Doman contended that the healthy cells could be trained and that certain actions would provide the necessary practice to accomplish needed training. They thought that plasticity would allow undamaged tissue to compensate for functions of damaged tissue. Doman et al. (1963) developed an instrument that purportedly assessed neurological development in six areas: mobility, language, manual, visual, auditory, and tactile competence.

Based on the diagnostic data from the assessment, children would benefit from being positioned in certain ways and practicing certain physical actions. For example, positioning an infant when prone so that she or he is oriented to the right (i.e., left side of the head down, left hand toward the left hip, left leg kept straight, and right arm and leg are raised; see diagram) would help to develop laterality.

Doman and Delacato recommended specific movements, including (a) rhythmically manipulating the child’s head, arms, and legs (called patterning), (b) creeping (abdomen on the floor), (c) crawling on “all fours” (d) summersaulting, (e) hanging from a bar (“brachiating”), (f) breathing repeatedly into a bag so one is rebreathing one’s own exhaled breath (“masking”), and lots more. Many of these were tied in some way to repeating the phyllogentic history of humans (creeping recaptured our fish ancestory; crawling reflected our mammalian history; brachiation showed our primate origins; etc.). The activities certainly fit with Doman’s background: He was a physical therapist.

Effectiveness

Does it do any good? Scholars pretty much unanimously concluded that there are no clear benefits from employing these methods with children with disabilities.

The early study (Doman et al., 1960) and a later book with multiple studies (Delacato, 1966) were critized for employing faulty research methods (e.g., having no or inadequate control groups; Robbins & Glass, 1968). Without a control group, it would be difficult to tell whether any changes in coordination, language, or other indicators of improvement might have happened simply as a result of growing up over time! In addition, Robbins (1966, 1967) couldn’t replicate the effects Doman and Delacato reported.

The American Academy of Pediatrics (1982, now formally outdated) published a policy statement advising pediatricians that the theory underlying and the practices employed in the Doman-Delacato method were shaky. Over on QuackWatch Novella (2008) thoroughly examined the theory and practice (though the current version of the Web page appears truncated).

Outlook

There were offshoots of the Delacato and Doman approaches. Holm (1983) described one based in California. And, of course, one can see many of the practices employed, perhaps with other theoretical bases, in contemporary products (“BrainGym,” for example).

Also, Doman (1964) recommended teaching reading beginning when children are babies. (It’s a good bet that there are more recent editions than the 1964 one, as the “Institutes” sell many, many products.) Reading is the question to which Professor Oster accurately replied that, in a nutshell, the Doman method is bogus but people should not let that stop them reading with their infants, toddlers, and children.

One of the sorry consequences of the misdirection built into the creeping-and-crawling idea was that some folks doubted the utility of thinking about the nervous systems and the brain. As Kearns et al. (2018) noted, that consequence is a mistake; there are good reasons to understand neural structures and functions in relation to activities such as reading2. Even as a loyal behaviorist, I’m here to tell you that there’s stuff going on in the brain from which we can learn.

To me, it’s sad news that there are still people taking this sort of bologna seriously. When a theory seems fishy, one ought to delve into it a bit. Just because an idea has an air of familiarity and a hint of science should not allow it to hold water; stricter scruitiny is almost always warrented. Kids’ futures are on the line here, and we owe it to them not to waste their time on bogus therapies.

There are, of course, other examples of the Ideas-run-amok School of Special Education. Please feel free to point to nominees in the comments.

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Sources

American Academy of Pediatrics. (19xx). Policy statement: The Doman-Delacato treat of neurologically handicapped children. Pediatrics, 70(5), 810-812. https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/70/5/810/47796/The-Doman-Delacato-Treatment-of-Neurologically

Delacato, C. H. (1959). Treatment and prevention of reading problems. Charles C. Thomas.

Delacato, C. H. (1963). The diagnosis and treatment of speech and reading problems. Charles C. Thomas.

Delacato, C. H. (1966). Neurological organization and reading. Charles C. Thomas.

Doman, G. (1974). What to do about your brain-injured child: or your brain-damaged, mentally retarded, mentally deficient, cerebral-palsied, emotional disturbed, spastic, flaccid, rigid, epileptic, autistic, athetoid, hyperactive child. Doubleday.

Doman, G. (1964). How to teach your baby to read: The gentle revolution. Random House.

Doman, G. J., Delacato, C. H., & Doman, R. J. (1963) The Doman-Delacato develop-
mental profile. Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential

Doman, R. J., Spitz, E. B., Zucman, E., Delacato, C. H., & Doman, G. (1960). Children with severe brain injuries: Neurologial organzation in terms of mobility. Journal of the American Medical Association, 174(3), 257-262. http://doi.org/10.1001/jama.1960.03030030037007

Dzamba, B. J., & DeSimone, D. W. (2018). Extracellular matrix (ECM) and the sculpting of embryonic tissues. Current Topics in Developmental Biology, 130, 245-274. https://doi.org/10.1016/bs.ctdb.2018.03.006

FANTOM Consortium. (2014). A promoter-level mammalian expression atlas. Nature, 507(7493), 462-470. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4529748/

Frostig, M. (1963). Visual perception in the brain-injured child. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 33(4), 665-671. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1939-0025.1963.tb01014.x

Holm, V. A. (1983). A western version of the Doman-Delacato treatment of patterning for developmental disabilities. Western Journal of Medicine, 139(4), 553-556. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1021589/pdf/westjmed00194-0117.pdf

Kearns, D. M., Hancock, R., Hoeft, F., Pugh, K. R., & Frost, S. J. (2018). The neurobiology of dyslexia. Teaching Exceptional Children, 51(3), 175-188.

Kephart, N. C. (1964). Perceptual-motor aspects of learning disabilities. Exceptional Children, 31(4), 201-206. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/001440296403100406

LeWinn E. B., Doman, G. J., Delacato, C., Spitz, E. B., & Thomas, E. W. (1966) Neurological organization: The basis for learning, In J. Hellmuth (Ed.), Learning disorders (Vol 2; 51-93). Special Child Publications.

Novella, S. (2008, 9 February). Psychomotor patterning: A critical look. Quakwatch: Your guide to quackery, health fraud, and intelligent decisions. https://quackwatch.org/related/patterning/https://quackwatch.org/related/patterning/ (There appears to be a misplaced HTML tag part way through the entry, ending it abruptly, as of 20 January 2022.)

Robbins, M. P. (1966). A study of the validity of Delacato's theory of neurological organization. Exceptional Children, 32, 517-523.

Robbins, M. P. (1967). Test of the Doman-Delacato rationale with retarded readers. Journal of the American Medical Association, 202(5), 389-393.

Robbins, M. P., & Glass, G. V. (1968). The Doman-Delacato rationale: A critical analysis. In J. Hellmuth (Ed.), Learning disorders (Vol 2; 321-377). Special Child Publications.

UC Museum of Paleontology Understanding Evolution. (n.d.). Ontogeny and phylogeny: Learning about phylogeny from ontogeny. Author. https://evolution.berkeley.edu/ontogeny-and-phylogeny/