Opinions Please: TOMATIS PRGM

I haven’t done Tomatis yet with my 8 year old CAPD son but we are doing FFW. I would like to know if it helped your daughter. I’m curious to know where you are from. We have a Tomatis Center in Toronto.
Barbara

We did Tomatis with our dd at age 5.5. I suggest getting the book ‘When Listening Comes Alive’. The author runs the Toronto Tomatis Center. The book really explains all aspects of the program.

Our center also provided lots of literature and seminars that you could attend to better understand the program.

It’s very expensive and somewhat of a time committment - but children like it alot better than FastForword. (I personally enjoyed going as they had a parent program where we did listening as well - stress reduction/relation kind of listening). My dd at age 5 would not have been able to sit thru FastForword - we were having a hard time with 20min. of Earobics.

We saw a different child after Tomatis -although not cured. She still had CAPD. But I do believe it improved her alot. It like woke her up and she seemed to understand and learn- whereas prior it was like a brick wall. We were doing Earobics kind of concurrently. We started Earobics before Tomatis and she was so fustrated with the program and had difficulty with most of the exercises except one. Immediately after we completed Tomatis, she zipped thru Earobics except for one exercise - we addressed with Brainbuilder 3.0 and within a month she completed the whole program and it was not a challenge to get her to do it.

I’m finding that the effects seem to diminish some over time. We have had to do boosters - we purchased The Listening Program for this as well as went back and did another 8 sessions a year later. I’m also probably going to go back and have them do a refresher at the beginning of school next year. We do feel like this helps her, but can’t really explain it or explain why. (If I thought it was a waste of time/money we would not be considering going back?).

Have the center also provide you with some references you can call. It’s alot of time and money committment and does not have alot of research support.

You could consider The Listening Program- it’s a fraction of the price(and can implement at home). We don’t see as much of a benefit from TLP as we did from Tomatis, but it might be a way to ease into if money is a consideration. If you are considering both Tomatis and FFW - I would do Tomatis first. You will see your FFW training shorten and be less frustrating for your child.

Dea,
Having a 7 y.o. son with auditory processing problems I read with interest your post on Tomatis. I also read the overview on their website www.tomatis.com.

I was wondering as I read the overview if the center had made any recommendations for chages in your home (i.e., playing classical music in the background)?

Would the book you recommened ‘When Listening Comes Alive” be of any help to those of us too far from a center to actually take advantage of the program?

Thanks,
Jess

Our center recommended playing CD’s from the Sound Health Series as background music - this is primarily from a focusing reason. You should try to give your child lots of auditory stimulation - like books on tape, listening to stories vs. watching TV (my dd is really bad about TV and nintendo!) You also want to make sure the auditory sensory ‘channel’ is clear - no ear infections, middle ear fluid or pressure.

If you are interested in sound therapy and want to understand more about it, then the book When Listening comes Alive’ will intrigue you - although it is very focused on Tomatis.

There are number of sound therapy programs out there and Dr. Tomatis was the initial founder of sound therapy, therefore most programs are based/altered after Tomatis. Other programs include - Joudry, Sonomas, AIT, The Listening Progam(TLP). So if there is not a Tomatis center near you, you may want to investigate one of the other programs. TLP is inexpensive by comparison and easily done at home. The Director of our center (who is a neurologist/physchiatrist M.D.) worked with Advanced Brain (ABT) to develop TLP - so it is very much based on Tomatis. He will use TLP with some clients so they can shorten the amount of time they have to come to the center and potentially decrease their cost. TLP is a subset of the whole Tomatis program.

Dear Barbara:

We completed 4 out of the 7 games of Fast Forward, acheiving 100% completion withing a 4 week period. She has come to a road block though on Circus Sequence, Phoneme Identification (only 40% compl.) and Block Commander only (only 80%) completion. She continued on through 8 weeks and still cannot get past these marks. VERY FRUSTRATING FOR HER !

I talked with a Speech/Language Center here in N. California where we live and she said that we should have done the Tomatis program first because this opens the listening pathways so to speak. So we have suspended the Fast Forward Program (all I had to do was call Scientific Learning up and tell them our situation and they said no problem because clients have 1 year to complete it.)

My daughter is going to be starting Tomatis the first week of June and will fiinish Fast Forward when she is done with Tomatis. I only wish I had this info. from the start. The Tomatis program here is a 13 week program costing $3200 through a speech/language center.

The results from Fast Forward I did see was it helped her ability to process information more quickly and helped somewhat with her expressive/receptive language skills. I feel Fast Forward is an excellent product (not a cure all though) but I highly reccommend doing some type of music therapy Dea mentioned in her post. We did purchase the Listening Program and began it a year ago. But because we live in a busy household she never completed it. In addition, speaking with the audiologist that tested her she highly reccommended the Tomatis program over it because Tomatis is intensive and specific in its treatment. The Listening Program is more for people who do not have severe CAPD or other learning disabilities but rather for the average person who wants to clean up any rough edges so to speak. I can see it as a good brush up once we complete the Tomatis program.

Please e-mail me if you have any questions.

Sincerely,

Denise

My then 7 year old son took 16 weeks last summer to get to 90% plus on all FFW games. He had only completed two by eight weeks. In retrospect, some sort of sound therapy would have probably been a good idea. But just so you know, progress on these games is not necessarily linear. My son at 8 weeks had 7 % completion on Circus Sequence. He then took off and in 4 weeks was at 95%.

Beth

After we completed Tomatis and started Earobics back up, my dd still had problems with Karloon’s Balloon’s. It was an auditory/visual sequential memory exercise. We did Brainbuilder 3.0 to help target this area - it works on increasing your digit span. AFter 3-4 weeks of Brainbuilder (15min. a day), she completed Karloon’s Balloons(without the frustration) and then we did Earobics Step2 she had no problems with any of the exercises (including Firefighter Fly which is close to Karloon’s Balloon’s exercise).

My dd had/has big problems with auditory sequential memory (she had very low digit spans which measure this- her visual was not that great either, but she tended to progress faster on visual than auditory). I would like to see this area stronger on my dd - she is still low average, but not as handicapped as before. It’s a tough one to address.

We did Brainbuilder for 9mo. One of my observations with TLP was that she would plateau on a certain level and after a round of TLP should we immediately master that level and move to next. I also saw the effects of colds/flu. She tended to get alot of colds/flu that year and she would drop back half to one level every time. It was like 2 steps forward, one step back every time she got sick.

Thanks for your good advice which I have taken to heart. I haven’t decided which program is really for us. In the interest of doing what we can as quickly as we can (we’ve spent months waiting for appointments!) I did a quick search for the Sound Health Series to no avail. Was that something you purchased through the center?
Regards,
Jess

Never mind, I found the cds at www.rmlearning.com.

Unfortunately, they charge $10 to ship a $20 cd! I have to get over being angry before I can place an order with them. The shipping charges don’t seem to fluctuate with how much you spend so I am torn between ordering more to make it worth while or not ordering at all. When I think of what a multi-billion dollar industry our innocent children have become I can’t help being suspicious. I have one professional referring me to his pal in another building, programs and therapists. Most recently our family therapist said she would have to insist that we pay personally for a visit in which to review the results of a neuropsych exam she recommended!!

I just had to get that out. :)

We purchased our CD’s from the center. You might see if you can order cheaper from www.advancedbrain.com.

Dear Dea:

Thank you so much for you input ! You hit it on the spot when you said a brick wall was in your daughter’s way of learning. My daughter’s teacher made the comment that she wishes we only had the key to open her brain. At the present she can’t seem to understand or learn much of anything. So much so that she is unable to advance to third grade in the fall. I am hoping after doing the Tomatis program over the summer along with remediation she will be able to join her class in the fall.

Thanks again for sharing, it has made a difference!

Sincerely,

Denise

Dear Parents,
Where could I find a listing of the Tomatis Centers? I live in the San Jose, Ca area and am very intrigued by this program. We have completed FF I and II.
Thank you!
Heather

try www.tomatis.com

I’m curious whether you had some success with the FF program?

Thanks
Jess

Dear Jess,
Yes, we were very pleased with the results!! It was very worthwile, but, my daughter fir the description to a t!
Good luck!
Heather