Welcome to Praxis Beweggründe, Physiotherapy for Children!

Elfriede Hengstenberg (1892–1992)

E. Hengstenberg used to be a gymnastics teacher who in Berlin worked mainly with school children. A significant influence on her method of working was given by Elsa Gindler and Heinrich Jacoby who trained the perception of adults to individual  research of relevant behaviour in various activities. E. Hengstenberg, inspired by this, made it possible for children to experience  autonomous experience and development. For this she used and developed materials which children could use to test their developmental abilities without being pushed or corrected by adults. They were allowed to discover something they were interested in by themselves.  Hengstenberg's richness of ideas, filled with her deep understanding for children's needs and interests, was practically inexhaustible.

From the 1930ies onwards the contact between E. Hengstenberg and E. Pikler had grown. They realized that there was a relationship between their attitudes and remained connected in friendship and as colleagues until Pikler's death despite the Iron Curtain.

„In principle, the children can always explor and discover on their own and I prepare things and equipment in such a way as to encourage children to experiment with them. We all know these natural (original) movements of children which always aim at wanting to try out things on their own. We only should know more that overcoming these untiring resistances on their own will enable them to take their own initiative and it will gain the vigor which we hope it can retain and that the joy to deal with difficulties is due to  letting it observe, explore and overcome difficulties by itself.“
(Elfriede Hengstenberg)

Monika Aly (*1945)

deficit-oriented therapy-methods she had learned as a young physiotherapist. In the 1970ies in Florence  she found an approach which put children's competences and the participation in every day life into the centre of attention by Dr. Adriano Milani-Comparetti, a pionier for rehabilitation for children with infantile cerebral palsy. In 1982, she met E. Pikler at a conference in Göttingen where both women each held a speech, Monika Aly on the topic of own activity of children with disabilities and E. Pikler on the development of movement of healthy children acting on their own. Both women realized, that their thinking of the child as a protagonist of its development was in accordance with each other (they agreed in many points). In a close exchange with the medical doctor E. Pikler, as well as with Anne Tardos, a psychologist for children, Monika Aly connected the Pikler Early education with the therapy for young children. In 1989 M. Aly together with colleagues of the Pikler Gesellschaft Berlin e.V. as a sponsor, founded a further children's and Youth outpatient centre in Berlin-Wedding and Berlin-Schöneberg which nowadays are an integrated part of the VDK social-pedagogic centres.  
In her role as a systemic family therapist Monika Aly advises families who have children with disablities. She is also an instructor in Pikler-pedagogics and in her role as a supervisor she also works in her home-country and abroad and has published numerous articles and literature in her field on pedagogical and therapeutic topics.

„This kind of therapy respects the autonomy of the child extremely and faces the fact that the movement of any human being is always directed by goals, wishes and imaginations. From these interrelations we can deduct that beside the development of movements also the development of the child's playing  will always have to be taken into account - as a central expression of mental well being, intellectual activity, urge for knowledge and joyful experimenting and learning. This is true for all children but particularly so for children  with delayed development or for disabled children.“
(Monika Aly)

Bertha Bobath (1907–1991)

The physiotherapist Bertha Bobath and her husband, the neurologist Karel Bobath, have developed from 1943  a treatment approach for patients with neurological impairments. Their interest was focused e.g. on patients after a stroke with hemiplegia or babies and children with impairment of the nervous system, e.g. infantile cerebral palsy, with their typical movement pattern. By taking part in courses of Elsa Gindler, Bertha Bobath became sensibilized for the interaction of movement and perception (sensomotoric) which formerly had not really been noticed.

The Bobath Approach which uses possibilities for compensation and the plasticity of the brain has since then been developed further under taking into account more recent neuroscientific knowledge and it is nowadays much more open than in the years of its beginning. The strength of neurophysiological treatment according to Bobath lies for example in taking notice of the reaction of the child to therapeutic intervention - diagnostic results and treatment are always seen together and matched one after the other also in view of the very exact provision of resources which serve to compensate missing movement and improve social participation.

Physiotherapy according to Bobath for children, on the medical prescription written as KG-ZNS-Kind (Bobath), is nowadays used for a broad spectrum of senso-motoric problems, because the holistic concept, which is individually adaptable, has proved worthwhile in many motoric queries during childhood.

„Movement is perception and perception is movement“
(Bertha Bobath)