This is a love letter to two of Jean Ayres’ core ideas, the just right challenge and the adaptive response, with the books physically open on the table. The thread that holds it together: an adaptive response is never an either-or, it’s a continuum of complexity and quality, and our job is to evince the next little bit of capacity that’s already in the child, across whichever domain they’re growing in.
We all turned up holding our copies of Ayres’ 1972 blue book, Sensory Integration and Learning Disorders, which leads to a genuinely good story about Tracy’s husband, a forged inscription, and how her lost copy found its way home through a secondhand sale. From there we go to the source, reading Ayres’ own words: an adaptive response is a continuum of complexity, quality and effectiveness, not an either-or reaction.
Tracy unpacks the attain, maintain, challenge dimension that became part of STEPPSI, and Ayres’ lovely word evince, revealing the presence of the capacity already in the child. We talk about why all of this is developmental, not just sensory, why you need to know the developmental sequence to pitch the challenge precisely, and how the same principle applies across posture, modulation, praxis, social and executive function. Two case stories ground it: a little one who went from bottom-shuffling to crawling up a slide to climbing a cubby ladder within days, and an impulsive eight-year-old who found his own stop signal when the challenge was social and a less capable friend mattered to him.
Lightly edited for readability. Speaker labels and chapter markers match the published episode.
Lightly edited for readability. Speaker labels and chapter markers match the published episode.
Cory: I can’t tell you how excited I am that we all have this book. The amount of times, Michelle, I think you and I having this book in the same physical space, I don’t think I’ve ever had anybody have this book with me, if that makes sense. I’m like, come on, I want to read this book with somebody, or talk about it, and Michelle, you’re about the only one I can. And we’re so busy that we want to, and then we read it separately instead. Tracy, I always admire you at DFX, because you do a certain month where you all reread this, don’t you? I love that we all have notes and things.
Tracy: Okay, hold on, hold on.
Tracy: You’ve probably heard this story, but I’m going to tell it because I think it’s funny. So this is my copy of Jean Ayres’ book, Sensory Integration and Learning Disorders. I’ve had it since I was first an OT in the early 1980s. The book was published in 1972.
Michelle: The year of my birth.
Tracy: I was ten years old when it was published. I had this book for a long time, and then I lost it, so I had to get a different copy. Then a few years ago our team at DFX was going to read it, because we choose Ayres readings every year. I only had this one copy, and I’m protective of it because I’d lost one. So one of my therapists ordered a copy on Amazon. Now, my husband is a very funny person, and he does two things he’s done our whole marriage: he’ll retitle books with sticky notes and funny comments, or write in them. So my colleague Angela Graff, who’s actually the co-author on the SPIRIT, came in one day completely dumbfounded and said, I ordered this book on Amazon, and it’s signed to you. Your name is in it, and Jean Ayres signed it to you. And I thought, wait a second. First of all, it wasn’t Jean Ayres, it was my husband. He’d written, may you always practise with happy hands, Jean Ayres. But it was my husband doing his goofy things. Here’s the weird part: someone in the world had borrowed my copy, then sold it on, and our community is so small that Angela bought a used copy online and it happened to be my copy. So it made its way back to me.
Cory: That is so funny, and amazing that it found its way back.
Tracy: So now I have two copies, because I bought Angela a copy that wasn’t mine.
Michelle: That is gracious. Mine’s Debbie Bingham’s, from Orange, New South Wales. Anybody know Debbie Bingham? I have your book. Talking of funny families, ours has a tradition. My dad and sister find the most expensive, unusual book and sign it from each other. Dad bought himself an expensive book about knots and whip-making. Tanya took it off the shelf and wrote, dear Dad, I hope you love this book, happy birthday from Tanya, your favourite daughter. Dad opened it and went, what, I bought it for myself.
Cory: I love that about John, it doesn’t surprise me at all.
Tracy: The reason this whole conversation about the books is happening is that we decided to focus the podcast a bit on basic principles from Ayres. Today we’re going to talk about the adaptive response and the just right challenge, so we all pulled our books out to go to the source.
Cory: If you’re following us on YouTube, you’ll see us holding them.
Tracy: We’re letting this information seep into our brains. Put the book under your pillow and let it seep in.
Cory: I had visions of recording myself reading this book so I could listen while driving, because I can’t read it all the time. It takes a bit to get your head to sink into the language of Jean Ayres, but it’s good stuff, you’ve got to be really present with it.
Tracy: So true. I thought, not to make anybody fall asleep, but we could read what she actually said about the adaptive response, in her own words. Michelle, you and I were having a bit of a mind meld about that.
Michelle: Yes, I thought this morning, I’ll pull that out. I opened to page 125.
Tracy: 125, open it there, because she has a description of the adaptive response and a couple of really important things. Right now, in our world of trauma-informed care and understanding there’s no black-and-white yes-or-no answer in most intervention, it’s all in this both-and space. And look, Dr Ayres, 1972, she says...
Tracy: An adaptive response is not an either-or reaction. Like most behaviour, there’s a continuum of degree of complexity, quality and effectiveness. The ability to evaluate the nature of the adaptive response contributes immensely to the therapist’s ability to concurrently judge treatment effectiveness, and this is the major subjective indicator of the degree of sensory integration. The reason we’re obsessed with this topic is that you have to live in this zone of continually drinking in and deepening your understanding of every moment. That’s why it’s so compelling.
Michelle: Absolutely. I love where she says it’s not an either-or, it’s this continuum of degree of complexity, quality and effectiveness. That’s what we’re seeing when a child first makes a new move or plays in a new way: it mightn’t be precise or smooth yet, it’s the zone of proximal development, the burgeoning of a new skill. So it doesn’t have the quality it ends up having with continued practice. The quality improves as the complexity and degree of integration improve.
Tracy: In any moment, whatever target the child is on, it’s about what they’re trying to come into, and then it’s little by little, a baby bit more capacity in the next opportunity. That unfolding of one more little bit, whatever it is: a postural response, a praxis response, a social glimmer, a little more range of adaptation and modulation. We have to have enough clinical reasoning to know that in each moment we’re crafting that tiny micro-bit more, and that bit more often feels spontaneous to the child. It doesn’t feel coaxed or forced or demanded, we’re allowing it. It’s so much to hold, because all these domains are happening in front of us, sometimes shifting from one to the other, so you have to stay fluid with what it means in this moment.
Michelle: And it’s different with the child, too. Sometimes a child sees and feels the enormity of what just happened, whoa, did you see that, whether they articulate it or not. Others just do it, and while I might want to celebrate big, that was huge, they just want to keep going. So I let myself be present and hold space, and let them repeat, repeat, a bit more of whatever’s unfolding. It’s super exciting, and part of my discipline is to stay with it, give a little I saw that too, but stay in the moment, let’s keep going.
Cory: You’re honouring their signals: okay, you’re sunk into this, this is mastery now, you’re driving towards mastery, so I’m not going to take you away with the social excitement of it. As I’ve got better at observing the more discrete adaptive changes in session, my enjoyment of treatment has continually grown, because I can actually bring meaning to what I’m doing. It’s not like early on, where I’d spray my approach and hope something landed, then go to supervision asking, is this working? As I improved my ability to notice whether the child has more adaptive capacity in this moment or not, it changed. And I love that Ayres said it’s a continuum, because there’s so much gradation. I keep coming back to your diagram, Tracy, the attain, maintain, challenge one, and the just right challenge, adaptive response element.
Tracy: We were trying to create a visual image so you could almost rate it. It comes from STEPPSI. When we were working on STEPPSI, there wasn’t a fidelity tool for Ayres sensory integration yet, so Julie Wilbarger, Sharon Trunnell and I worked on this tool, and used it with our whole team at the Children’s Hospital in Denver. Many team members were brave enough to let us watch each other treat, watch each other’s videos, and rate each other, not on performance, but to identify the core elements we read from Ayres and thought were critical. We were trying to apply it to sensory modulation, which wasn’t well defined at the time. When you think about a just right challenge related to modulation, which underpins our regulatory capacity, the first thing we were all doing was helping the child feel regulated, finding their foundation. We called that attain.
Tracy: Then we’re pulling for an adaptive response. Ayres uses this beautiful word we don’t hear in everyday vocabulary: evince. She says the master therapist is evincing an adaptive response. It means revealing the presence of. So the therapist, through the opportunity of the just right challenge, is evincing the adaptive response. It’s a shared space, with the therapist really seeing and believing this child has within them the next level of capacity. In modulation we created a linear visual analog, because to align our thinking we needed a way to rate it. If we have a child in front of us, we’d probably agree the child needs to either attain a regulated state, or maintain it in the face of a challenge. So the dimension is: once I have you regulated, how is your capacity going to reveal itself, given these demands and stretch points to staying regulated? We’re good at noticing the subtlety of how far toward attainment versus how far toward challenge. On an imaginary ten-point scale, how much can we urge toward challenge, or how much do we have to hold to keep attain and maintain salient and available? As we named that dimension, it became a tangible thing we could put a mark on and talk to each other about. You’re a co-regulator helping to evince this opportunity, and that’s the therapy dynamic at play. Ayres wrote this as how you harness neuroplasticity, and it’s not black and white, it’s the experience the child goes through. It’s mind-blowing that she figured it out and could name it.
Cory: It’s impressive. Reading current neuroscience never makes me think what she said isn’t valid anymore. I’ve never had that experience of, oh, the sensory integration literature is outdated. It’s amazing how well it meshes with what’s available now. Tracy, do you feel there’s still a lot of people in current neuroscience who don’t really know or understand this process?
Tracy: The science here is really around neuroplasticity. Ayres didn’t use that terminology, but when you look at how the nervous system organises itself for change, they talk about adaptive response, you don’t usually hear just right challenge, but you hear about some quality of an opportunity to find the next layer of capacity. There are lots of ways it’s talked about, but on paper they’d all be a version of this same thing.
Michelle: Another quote I love, page 114: the central principle in sensory integrative therapy is providing planned and controlled sensory input with, usually but not invariably, the eliciting of the related adaptive response, in order to enhance the organisation of brain mechanisms. The plan includes utilisation of neurophysiological mechanisms in a manner that reflects some aspect of the developmental sequence. The objective is progressive organisation of the brain, as similar to the normal developmental process as possible. There’s so much in that. One thing I needed to go back and do the work on was the developmental process, because if my goal is to facilitate postural stability, I need to know the developmental sequence so I can provide opportunities in the right order, and then allow the just right challenge after I’ve assessed where they’re at and where they need to go. That’s precision work. I knew philosophically it had to be just right, but I didn’t have the precise knowledge of the developmental sequences to be on purpose for the child, so I had to do a lot of work, and I’m still doing it.
Tracy: That’s the whole rationale for the SPIRIT tool, because it organises your thinking around the developmental unfolding of each capacity. If you’re thinking about posture, you have to know the basic postural mechanisms and that you’re approaching it developmentally. The same is true for what we call the high route of A, the executive and effortful control functions, which develop in an expected sequence. A lot of the social-emotional domain in SPIRIT draws from interpersonal neurobiology and how our social and emotional selves emerge in the context of relationship and somatic, sensory-integrative processing. And praxis and modulation are themselves developmental phenomena. You have to have that developmental insight, but unless you’ve mastered everything Ayres wrote and the related domains, we end up not staying developmental, unless we have a tool. Every time I teach the SPIRIT course, I feel heartened that it’s the tool we need right now. Ayres said it, you just read it: it’s not just access to movement or a postural challenge, her theory sits in a developmental frame, and I don’t think everybody appreciates how true that is.
Michelle: And it allows that unfolding to occur. Another quote on 125: adaptive responses are purposeful, goal-directed actions. Adaptiveness implies a certain mastery over the environment, rather than the environment mastering the child. And, paraphrasing, when a child is emotionally involved and believes they can cope, they’ll gladly summon effort to make a response of greater complexity and adaptivity. That gets to the internal drive, and springs from what we spoke about last episode, follow the child’s need. If they’re internally motivated, they’ll conjure up the energy and attention. And as it gets uncomfortable, trying something outside their comfort zone, there’s some worry, will I be successful, that adrenaline, a state of agitation, and we stick with it and stay goal-directed to reach the next level of mastery. Her words: the child will gladly summon effort to make a response of greater complexity. They work harder.
Cory: You’re perfectly describing the just right challenge. If the challenge is just right and developmentally informed, then even though it creates friction for me, I enjoy it, and you and I together evince an adaptive response. That’s what we’re trying to do across all the domains, matched to the need in front of us, following the child’s lead, because that’s where the child finds greater capacity with our support. It could be social, in the modulation system, in attention and joint attention, in praxis and fine skill, or in the postural system. That’s why the SPIRIT tool is so useful, and why we need people around us to think about this with. There’s no moment where I’ve got everything. Sometimes I’m like, I’m not a hundred per cent sure what just happened, but I know something happened, and now I need to unpack it with somebody to understand it and learn to recreate it.
Tracy: In the current Sensory Integration: Theory and Practice textbook, there’s a reference on page 301, in the chapter by Anita Bundy and Stacey Szklut, saying the science of sensory integrative therapy rests on this principle of tailoring the just right challenge and the expected adaptive response to the particular needs of the child. What’s tricky is that every child’s individual differences show up in their own particular way. We can expect development in certain ways, but every child is unique, so it always requires us to show up as little investigators, analysing in this moment with this child what’s salient and relevant to their unfolding. You can work with a child where one week it’s posture they’re grooving on, and that brings a different level of social awareness, and the next week it’s all social cause-and-effect play. To someone who wants it more educational and discrete, it can look like we’re floating about, but we’re not, because the nervous system makes the most salient thing available, and we follow that. Over several months you might work on posture, social and fine motor, dancing across the adaptive things that show up. It’s a beautiful process of trusting that Ayres had it right, which she did, and there’s only mounting evidence for it. Then you have to know a lot and trust yourself. It’s an admiration society we’re in here.
Michelle: It really is trust in the process. In the clinic we’re all sharing the joy of one little child’s expansion. He’s had delays in movement and never crawled, he bottom-shuffles, and he’s just getting up on all fours. The other day the therapist put a slide on an angle with a thing of interest, and he started those first movements of crawling up the slide to reach it. Five days later, and this isn’t how it always unfolds, a video came through of him climbing up a ladder onto the cubby house to be with his big brother. The mum’s like, oh, he’s climbing now. But at the time, when we were going back to four-point, he was pulling to stand and it didn’t look graded or awesome. Everyone was excited and wanted to move on to walking, and we said, let’s come back to four-point and work on that. Just trusting: I know we’re pulling to stand and it looks like we’re moving to walking, but trust, let’s come back. And it’s paying off.
Cory: It’s exciting because it relates directly to a functional change in his life: he can climb onto the cubby and join his brother in play. That’s where we feel we have a meaningful job, that’s why I care.
Michelle: And he did it at home. The carer was videoing, and the last step was a bit difficult, you could see her hand come in near his bottom in case he fell, but she didn’t touch him. She let him have a go. At one point she cued, oh, maybe this hand, so he reached higher for the handle rather than the base, but she didn’t touch him. She wasn’t in a hurry to push him up, or too scared, saying you’re up too high. The brother could have yanked him up, which would’ve been fine too, but didn’t. The biggest thing happened at home, and the family facilitated it. We churned it out in the clinic because we knew exactly what we were striving for, but the unfolding happened spontaneously in family life. We don’t always see that unless we’re all taking videos.
Cory: We’re all following the development. You can get caught up, as a therapist, seeing a child and thinking, oh, we’re missing this developmental skill, so we have to do all this crawling now. But really you want to help the child do the upright more adaptively. For him, pulling to stand looked tricky and not very adaptive, so you wonder, what pieces can I add to make that more adaptive? Developmentally, it was useful to come back and organise him around his midline and activation against gravity in four-point. If he were a much older child trying to master that, he wouldn’t resist you, that’s my gut instinct, because when it’s the right thing, the just right challenge, they like the feeling of pushing in that zone. It’s like, yeah, there’s something in this my nervous system is trying out, and I want to do it even though it’s tricky.
Tracy: For sure. I love how you’re taking the story of postural adaptation, which is one of the first things Ayres described clearly: what’s your midline, how do you find it, find stability, hold on and stay put, and then navigate the complexity that comes because you can do that. The unfolding of the adaptive response and just right challenge naturally builds complexity, and we can see and name that most concretely in the postural system. But, Cory, you started talking about parallel thinking in the other capacities, and that’s a space Ayres didn’t always write as explicitly about. Some people always bring it back to, we must treat through the postural system because that’s what she described, but really she gave us the principle, and we can apply it to any function. If we think of the foundation of a function as that attained space, the referent point, the baseline, I sometimes call it the landing pad, then you stretch into the zone of proximal development to broaden it. In modulation you bump the edges of the arousal system; in the social system you expand what a circle of communication feels like if it’s a little longer, or add two circles; and so on across domains. The developmental thinking applies across domains, and the function is the same. The way neuroplasticity lets us become more adaptive, more fully ourselves, is through that just right challenge and adaptive response in whichever domain you or the child is curious about. It wasn’t a single domain, and it wasn’t just sensory integration itself, it’s the products of sensory integration that are our adaptation, across all domains.
Michelle: You said something about where the child is wanting to go. Early on that was tricky for me, because I’d got my head around the physical domain, since Ayres wrote about it concretely and my early learning was around physical development. So if a child was interested in, say, social skills, I’d keep thinking, but come over here and do this physical thing, I want to take us here, let’s play the game because I want to work on four-point. That was part of my learning around following the child’s lead, because that’s what allowed the evincing of the adaptive response. The child’s like, Michelle, I’m not into that jigsaw or my pencil grip, I’m over here playing with the spinning wheels, which we talked about last episode. So it was, drop your agenda, Michelle, come over and follow the child’s lead, and catch up and learn the developmental sequence of that, so you can be with this child and not pull them over to the thing you know more about and want to show all your tricks.
Cory: I love the way what Tracy says ignites trains of thought between Michelle and me, and we both have to use good working memory to hold the original thought, which maybe isn’t our strength. When you were talking about the sensory-integrative piece and the adaptive response in the zone of proximal development, depending on the domain, it made me think about how sensory integration is organised in typical development around social interaction. Reading Lisa Feldman Barrett on the brain predicting an event, I thought, everything we’re doing supports a more predictive, organised, adaptive brain, and we’re always doing it in a relational way. It’s not about just giving a kid deep pressure or swinging them in space, it’s how we offer predictability or novelty or intensity and duration and land it in an affective way, so the child is more adaptive, with more capacity for a wider range of skills.
Tracy: I’m catching the affect from both of you, how we’re leaning in and loving this geek-out. This theory gave us the just right challenge, and we’re evincing our own every time we say blown away or amazed. The affective tone is telling us we’re revealing our deepening understanding moment by moment. It’s a lovely parallel process: we’re having our own adaptive responses to the work of offering adaptive responses. Very meta.
Cory: If you want to read more about the adaptive response, there are places in our OT literature. The blue book is very hard to come by, but Sensory Integration: Theory and Practice is there, and even outside the OT literature, any literature on neuroplasticity would cover it.
Tracy: Getting ready today, I pulled out the new Sensory Integration: Theory and Practice textbook, and what made me chuckle, in honest humility, is that they kept referencing an article I wrote in 2014, fairly consistently throughout the book. So thank you, Shelley and Anita. I wrote that little article for AOTA on what the adaptive response and just right challenge are, because I felt people were so focused on sensory processing that they’d forgotten some of Ayres’ principles, the primary one being this coupling. I was mentoring a clinic in Ireland where several clinicians had done advanced training, spent thousands of dollars, and had never heard the words adaptive response or just right challenge. I was astounded I had to teach it to them after all that. That’s partly why I wrote the article, and partly why we wanted this little series touching base on the core principles, because Ayres got it right. With the sensory processing disorder nosology retired and the field in flux, we don’t know exactly how it’ll iron out, but Ayres had it right, and the neuroplasticity information is spot on. I’ll also say, when I first fell in nerd-out love with neuroplasticity, there was a neuroscientist named Bill Greenough, who’s passed away now. He coined the phrases experience-expectant and experience-dependent development, which you often hear me talk about. In graduate school my cohort used to tease me because I’d say I loved to relax in the bath and read Bill Greenough.
Cory: You’re in the right field.
Tracy: One of my dearest grad-school friends still teases me, what papers are you reading in the bathtub these days, Tracy? Greenough connected how a little animal’s experience shows that neuroplasticity depends on these opportunities for just right challenge and adaptive response. His research was often with rodents, and the way he studied it, they’d be in cages that look like a sensory integration treatment space: ramps, nets, things to climb and jump on, the opportunity for social adaptive response, for praxis and problem-solving, for finding relaxation after a stressful event. All the things we work on. So even in basic neuroplasticity discussions, you’ll hear that the brain is basically an adaptive response machine.
Michelle: Amazing. Great discussion. Do we have any other quirky stories or insights?
Tracy: Here’s a little boy, about eight, with a real history of impulsivity. Whatever he does is so full-on that everything around him gets pummelled by the full-on-ness. He’ll come into a room wanting to go over there, and there’s a chair and a bag in front of him, and he’ll burn right through them. He wants the pitcher of water because he’s thirsty, and he just grabs it and it flings. Very impulsive, ungraded, unaware action, so those are some of his therapy goals. But here’s the thing: the just right challenge for him is a social context where his mate in the treatment room is a little less capable than he is. It pulls for his empathy and for him to be more attuned to the other, and suddenly he’s tuned in, so the background environment is less salient. I’m watching this video where the other kiddo, who has a primary motor condition, is a bit unsteady, trying to climb over a pillow. The game is a little circuit, climbing up to the loft and jumping. The one boy gets up there, then stops himself, finds that internal stop signal, because it matters that this other kid has a positive experience too. He generated that on his own, he wasn’t taught to take turns. The adaptive response was, I have more control. Then the other boy goes away, and the therapist puts items in the way, like the bag or furniture from his home, and now he’s more tuned in. So the adaptive response transfers from the social condition that pulled for it: his awareness is increased, and he can use it to guide his graded control, his effortful and impulse control. Giving him the exact just right challenge with the right quality is what pulled for the evincing, it revealed the capacity to him, and then he could make use of it. It was powerful to witness, and to see the therapist trust the process.
Cory: It really highlights what Ayres said, that it’s goal-directed and purposeful. When he had the goal in mind, I want this child to have a good experience and enjoy this with me, he could also pull together sensory-discriminative capacities around grading his body and force that he didn’t have together before. Amazing. A good one to end on.
Michelle: Gorgeous.
Tracy: Thanks, guys. What a joy.
Cory: Bye.
And that’s a wrap on today’s episode of Spirited Conversations. We hope this sparks something for you, whether it’s a new clinical idea, a fresh perspective, or just the reminder that you are definitely not alone in this work. If this conversation resonated, we would love for you to share it with anyone on their own learning journey. You can find information about the podcast on our website, and you can join us in the courses and communities the Developmental FX team have put together at developmentalfx.org. And if you’re enjoying listening, please subscribe or leave a review, it genuinely helps more people find us. Until next time, keep the conversations spirited!