One of the precepts of this program that we do involves moving children along the "normal" stages of development. As most people can tell you, the first stage of mobility for babies is crawling. Let's say it takes a well child 100 tries to learn how to crawl (just for a nice round number). Well, it might take a brain-injured child 500 tries, 1000 tries, or even 100,000 tries. That's why everything that Noah does has to be done at an increased frequency. What well children do at random, Noah needs to do on purpose, and he needs to do it a lot.
Easy, right? I wish! You see, the greatest problem (is that an oxymoron?) of the brain-injured child is gravity. It pulls down on the body, pinning those weak muscles to one place on the floor. The child, who needs greatly increased frequency for his brain to learn a particular behavior, thus learns a lie: Moving my arms and legs does absolutely nothing. Why try?
That's where the incline floor comes in. It takes the brain-injured child's nemesis (gravity), and turns it into an ally by making it work in his favor. One puts the child at the top of the incline, and now every little movement causes the child to move forward. In the beginning, you break the lie and the child learns that it is worth while to try. Eventually, the hope is, the child begins to keep moving on the flat floor in front of them.
After doing this up to fifty times per day (currently we are supposed to do 30 per day), this is exactly what Noah is starting to do.
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