top of page
IMG_9161.jpg

TOMATIS Intensive for Children

Curve_edited.png

Many challenges children experience could be addressed with the Tomatis Intensive program including:

✓  Developmental Delay

✓  Learning Challenges

✓  Engagement, Reciprocity and Communication

✓  Language Delays

✓  Childhood Anxiety

✓  Sensory Processing

✓  Motor Delays, including:

✓  Praxis, Motor Planning & Muscle Tone

Our Children Tomatis program is a center based program.  Always combined with occupational therapy intervention, this intensive program has shown to make real changes and give the children a significant  boost in developmental progress. 

The program is completed in 3 intensives of 10 consecutive days for a total of 60 hours of therapeutic intervention completed over a 4 month period.  Each intensive is followed by breaks of 4-6 weeks designed to allow integration.   

How does TOMATIS work? 

Motor Coordination

Psychomotor difficulties concern a delay in the acquisition, coordination, and execution of movement and gestures that are not learned culturally but are instead acquired “naturally” over time. 

The ear is not only a sensory organ that captures sounds. It also plays an important role in motor function thanks to an internal organ known as the vestibule. The role of the vestibule is to manage the sense of balance. By means of its direct action on the vestibule, the Tomatis Method acts directly on the regulation of muscular tone, verticality, but also on the difficulties of laterality. Moreover, in conjunction with several other parts of the brain, the vestibular system plays an important role in the mechanisms controlling coordination and rhythm. As a result, the Tomatis Method can effectively intervene on difficulties with rhythm and of coordination. 

Finally, in conjunction with the cerebral cortex, the vestibule is highly involved in the capacity of spatial navigation and in the formation of the body schema. This is why Tomatis Method’s fields of application also include difficulties of spatialization and of the body schema.

Communication and Engagement

Children diagnosed with autism or autism spectrum disorder experience delays in the development of their capacities for social interaction, cognition, and communication.
The neural circuits linking the ear to the brain contain specific neurons (both motor and sensory) called « mirror neurons » that play an important role in the construction of social cognition, that is, the ensemble of the processes that allow you to attribute intentions and ideas to someone, and even to understand another person’s emotional state.

By acting on these neural circuits, the Tomatis Method proposes to improve both the capacity to communicate and the quality of our relational abilities.


The Tomatis Method has demonstrated its effectiveness in helping people who suffer from autism and associated behavioral disorders.  Numerous approaches are possible to help people presenting these disorders. The Tomatis Method is not exclusive in this regard. 

Listening Attention and Auditory Processing

Difficulties in communication takes a variety of different forms. For example, it may show up as an inability to perceive sounds in the environment without feeling aggressed by them: For some people with a communication disorder, the honking of a car horn, the slamming of a door, the noisy ambiance of a restaurant, and even the familiar voices of co-workers, parents or friends may be perceived as aggressive …. Others suffering from different communication disorders find it difficult, even impossible, to use their voice as a true tool of communication, due to a lack of mastery over its different melodic components—intonation, inflection, rhythm, intensity, etc.—and these peoples’ voices may consequently be perceived as aggressive, cold, or void of any power of expression by another interlocutor.By specifically working on the reception and emission of sound, the Tomatis Methodacts effectively on communication.

Attention

Attention is the capacity to select and maintain awareness of an exterior event or a thought. Attention disorders affect children and adults who cannot sufficiently concentrate on work to be done over long periods, even if this work requires only a minimum of intellectual effort or has a routine or familiar character to it (such as revising or recopying). A specific modality of attention is the capacity to divide one’s attention among several sources of information or tasks to be done. A deficiency in this attentional modality is very costly in a cognitive sense as well as a source of difficulty and even considerable suffering for a child in a school setting.

Beyond its general action of cerebral stimulation (i.e., cortical charging), the Tomatis Method can also have a very positive action on selective attention. In effect, the Tomatis procedure is based on the electronic gating that brings about a perceptual sound contrast meant to constantly surprise the brain so that it stays awake and attentive The goal is to help the brain develop automatic mechanisms for detecting changes, which will consequently reinforce selective attention. 

Learning Difficulties

There is a wide array of learning difficulties, and many children (between 4 and 6%) suffer from them. They are not due to a lack of intelligence.  These difficulties have a neurobiological origin and arise from the fact that certain areas of the brain did not develop correctly during the prenatal period. These difficulties include dyslexia and dyspraxia (the use and coordination of learned gestures).  

The Tomatis Method operates on the plasticity of the neural circuits involved in the decoding and analysis of sounds, as well as on those involved in motor, balance, and coordination. As such, the Tomatis Method can help children develop compensatory strategies to deal with and manage their learning difficulties and language disorders. The Tomatis Method does not eliminate these problems altogether, but at least helps the person manage them better and thus effectively overcome them.

bottom of page