“It’s a bit of a story of how I stumbled across our Fairy Godmother, but it was one of the only meetings with a professional that gave us hope. The doctors and speech therapists were quite frankly, useless. One exception, Dr. Goodwin McDonnell, a great man, who handed me Karen’s book whenever he first examined our daughter and told me “the music is the key”. I read Karen’s book – I had to meet this women – my daughter had to meet this women.

I recall our first meeting. After assessing our daughter for a couple of hours, Karen told me that she did not believe that she was autistic, but that she needed immediate treatment. We commenced the LiFT Programme followed by the booster. Coming from a medical family, I was at first cautious, but as Karen had remarked, “You have no-where else to go other than brain surgery”!! She was totally spot on. Mainstream medience had failed us completely. Instead, we needed an alternative avenue and deeper dive. After multiple testing, we found out that our daughter was intolerant to a number of foods, and in particular, dairy, and that was causing a number of other problems and in particular, many ear infections. But as she was a baby whenever this developed, how could she tell us of her physical ailments? We took her off dairy, boosted all of the vitamins and minerals she was lacking and then started the LiFT Programme which essentially repaired the damage that had been caused by repeated ear infections, and then more – – something more – – it joined something in her brain together, click, made it all work.

The results were immediate. After her first session in the LiFT Programme, she said her first sentence. I was there with my mother whenever it happened and once again, the floodgates opened, but this time for joy. I knew she was going to be ok. She in now in her second year in a highly competitive and academic mainstream school. The teachers have no idea about her start in life but we have been told that she is a very bright little girl and very, very popular in the class.

It’s almost hard to believe a couple of years previously we were faced with a possible autistic child, who could not speak and lived in her own world. Karen O’ Conor, our Fairy Godmother and her amazing team had done the impossible – she waved her wand and made the nightmare go away. God bless them all and the outstanding work they do.”

“He is more content, he likes walks in his buggy again, sings or chats along, likes drive in the car as well and generally he’s chatty most of the day.  He is babbling again, mama, baba, sometimes he tries to imitate words when I emphasize some word. He sleeps well through the night, last few nights he hasn’t woke up at all during night.  He started drinking for longer, previously I would stop him after 2-3 sips, but now he holds my hand when I hold the beaker and controls how many sips he has, and it could be 5-7.

On iPad he started playing his puzzles and matching apps again. He is managing to stand up against the coffee table by himself, if he is well positioned. From being on tummy he is managing get himself into all 4, by pulling the knees towards his tummy.  He started doing side walk beside coffee table, just like that, and myself and physio have been trying to make him do it without success for the last few months.  Finally as you could see on the video, he started crawling. I am not sure if you have expected to see all that after 2 weeks, we certainly haven’t and we are over the moon.

Note also that in the 2nd week of the Listening Therapy with bone conduction headsets, we have started doing the Bio-med gut programme, which means that he was taking some antibiotics and anti-fungals, to kill off bad things in his gut.  We are finished with antibiotics today, and still have few more anti-fungals, and after that we are back to usual supplements on clean gut.  Maybe we could give small credit to the gut programme, but we believe that most of the success is thanks to the Listening Therapy.

I am wondering how would Karen explain such big changes in Jack? I would love to know what has happened there? It looks as if music has unlocked him to do things that he was already able to do, but was somehow blocked from doing.  From the start of New Year I am convinced that he is ready and has the strength to crawl, but we couldn’t make it do it, even when we tried facilitated crawling with two pairs of hands.”

We are over the moon with results so far as this past few weeks he is just a different child so Thank you.”

“If you trawl the internet as we did you will read all those terrible stories about children with verbal dyspraxia or even apraxia in our case as our son didn’t have a sound and how it can take a lot of therapy and so long to even make small changes and that children may not achieve full flowing speech! We were terrified that our son wouldn’t talk but thankfully we found the team at The Child Development Centre. As you can imagine we had been to see so many professionals by the time we found Karen and her team that we were losing hope but Karen was so positive about our son and explained things so well to us that we just felt we could trust her and that she and her team had the knowledge and experience that our son needed. We started on a home programme of Therapeutic Listening straight away combined with some other sensory programmes that were recommended. We saw changes within the first week of starting the music and as the weeks progressed so did Eoin.”

“We couldn’t believe it. He started to move his mouth more, started to imitate actions and body movements which he hadn’t been able to do before and then about eight weeks into the programme he started to imitate some of our sounds. We were thrilled and Karen explained how the music was working on Eoin’s nervous system and improving his motor planning for movements and speech. After about 12 weeks of Therapeutic Listening, Karen recommended that we do an intensive LiFT programme. This brought Eoin’s skills in so many areas to a whole new level. Not only did his speech improve and he started to use more sounds and combine sounds to make a couple of words but his coordination and movement in general was better. He was listening better and his understanding improved. We did a LiFT boost after that and Eoin is improving all the time. Now a year later Eoin is using sentences of 4 words and sometimes more ….something that we couldnt have imagined a year ago! Thank you so much to all the team at The CDC!”