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Now the caveat: Please do not take the above as an endorcement of the
Doman program. Both on a professional level, as a child development
specialist/early childhood education, and on a personal level,
as an IAHP graduate, I feel the program has a large potential for harm,
weighted by a small potential for improvement in a normal child.
Although it cannot be argued that the brain-injured children that were
selected for, and completed (two big areas of weeding) the Doman program
showed major short-term gains, ancedotal evidence (since no statistical
evidence seems to exist) seems to indicate that these gains were not
carried over the long term. I have yet to meet a Doman child who was not
later placed in special education, even if their release status from the
Doman program would indicate this to be unnecessary, and, since the Doman
program passed no records on to schools and had records purged and/or sealed
of previous results, these placements were done by independent evidence.
There is also a high rate of learning disabilities among these children,
which may be linked to the patterning program. Given these problems,
applying the system to normal children, on the hopes that it will cause
similar gains in intelligence seems a less than wise option, and one
that is not grounded in any firm evidence of improvement. Although the
programs described in the books are much less intense than those done
through the IAHP, the possible link to later learning problems would
tend to invalidate such programs as well. Please be cautious about
selecting such a program for your child. |
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