Our Team

Kevin Byron Rowney is an independent scientist concerned with child development. In the 19th century independent scientists were called gentlemen scientists. Although Kevin is an independent scientist, he doesn’t claim to be a gentleman. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentleman_scientist  .

His interest and passion is  Developmental Skills Tension, a physiological condition which affects every person.  He made his discovery in 1993 while researching the performance of skills in child development. Much of his work is an extension of Chomsky's discovery of the biological basis of human language. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/noam_Chomsky  > 

You can read Kevin's inspiring story by scrolling down. 

Veronica Rowney [ story below] has a passionate interest in helping parents with their children's development.  She has worked with Kevin since 1992.  However she often says that the real reason she works with Kevin is to try to improve his social skills.  She says that he often talks like a combination of Basil Fawlty from Fawlty Towers and the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld.

Finally Kevin and Veronica were assisted in their early work by Simon Rowney who has a background in analytical philosophy.

Veronica's story:

"I first became interested in child development whilst teaching adults; In the 80’s I worked with and taught people who had not been able to obtain employment for many, many years.

Most of these people wanted to work but were missing so many of the skills they should have been taught before they started school.  As a result they were behind from the moment they entered the school ground.  Learning at school depends on a child having these basic developmental skills.  If we do not have them then we suffer for the rest of our lives.

I could not sleep worrying about my students who were suffering through no fault of their own and I set out to do whatever I could to stop this happening in the future. In talking it over with Kevin, I realised that what he had been researching for many years was the very thing I was looking for.  This started our journey together. Up to now we have helped thousands of children who would not have reached their potential, if we had not been there to help parents in this most important time in their little one's lives, We now have children thriving at University, Tafe or are in solid employment.  They would most certainly been long term unemployed if not for our intervention.

I made a vow that I would do everything in my power to help mothers of young children with their developmental skills, so that they didn’t grow up to be unemployed, on the social scrapheap and feeling so worthless.

I would like to dedicate this website to all those wonderful unemployed adults who craved a better life and my thousands of little ones who I have worked with all these years."

For many years Veronica, assisted in teaching children with special needs how to read, as well as conducting 'Understanding Adolescents' courses for parents. During the late 80's she was involved in the assessment and teaching of the Long Term Unemployed  for The Australian Department of Education, Employment and Training [DEET].

Kevin's story:

Kevin has learning difficulties. If he had been born in today's world, he would probably be classified as being ADHD and on the autistic spectrum.

He struggled in high school particularly when he did his Leaving Certificate.  Unfortunately this was put down to laziness and rebellious behaviour. Neither Kevin, nor his parents or teachers, knew that he had a reading difficulty because he loved to read all types of fiction, even though it used to take forever to read a book.

While he was attempting to do tertiary study as a mature age student, he was invited to attend a speed-reading course conducted by the Inservice Training Division of the NSW Department of Education.

Kevin remembers the event distinctly. "I was timed while I read a history paper. This was followed by a comprehension test. One of the trainers informed me that I had a reading speed of 250 words a minute and a comprehension level of 47%. I had absolutely no idea what that meant.  However she made sense when she said that I must have experienced a lot of problems at high school.

 An intensive weeklong course, using audio/visual aids followed. At the end of the week I did another test only this time my reading speed had jumped to 650 words a minute and my comprehension to a staggering 97%. My life changed forever."

Kevin began to consume books as though there was no tomorrow. The academic staff was astounded by his progress. In a class of 56 students he progressed from being at the bottom to 5th place, in a period of 13 weeks.

Although he didn't finish the full 7 years of his course, Kevin successfully completed the liberal arts component.

At 25 years of age Kevin felt a mission.  He wanted to find out what his original problem was and how it had been partially remediated.  But even more importantly, he wanted to do everything he could to prevent similar things happening to others, particularly children. 

Technical information

If you are involved in child development as a teacher or in professional support roles like speech pathology, occupational therapy etc, you might be interested in what follows. 

During his Arts study, Kevin developed a great interest in the history of western philosophy. This developed his critical skills. The result was that as he waded through various academic publications, he was able to sort out nonsense from sound developmental theory.

After many years of searching Kevin was introduced to cognitive science and many of the missing pieces began to fall into place. He discovered that during the early child development  years of his life, tracking and convergence problems had emerged which were not understood by his parents or teachers.

Technically speaking this meant that he had experienced general visual inefficiency resulting in excessive cognitive load on his working memory. This had not only impaired his ability to read and comprehend but also undermined his confidence in participating in a range of activities, particularly sport.

Apart from visual efficiency, the most significant contributor to literacy is a parent taking the time to tell stories and read to their children from a very young age. Fortunately Kevin's parents had done this so that he had always loved to read. He just didn't know how to do it very well.

These early setbacks provided the material for Kevin to make his biological discovery of Developmental Skills Tension.