I hesitated to advance the idea with this mother. I didn’t want to prey on her pain and anxiety of her daughter’s situa- tion, but she was determined. I was adamant that we not make any medical claims to her or anyone. We helped her secure the funding to purchase the bed and then assembled it in her daughter’s bedroom. Privately, my colleagues and I crossed our fingers and speculated hopefully that maybe this girl could sleep six hours a night instead of four. Mother and daughter cuddled up in a much wider space for the first night of sleep, and Natalie was out within minutes. She slept roughly 10 hours that first night and has maintained an average of 10 hours of sleep a night for over the past three years. Moreover, due to in- creased sleep, she has seen improvement in school and overall quality of life. When I heard the first report, I wasn’t a little surprised; I was thunderstruck. I never could have imagined that enclosure would have such a big impact on this girl. Since that time, the team at zPods® has had the pleasure of working with well over 100 families, including my son Joseph, and is growing fast. I’ve insisted that we continue to be careful about whether or not the beds are a good fit for any family. We are explicit in our con- versation with parents that every child is different. None of this conservative salesmanship prevents us from making at least one consistent claim: our beds are awesome!
Temple, in a self-constructed “squeeze machine” that gave her comforting hugs on her own terms. When people destroyed the machine a short time after its introduction in the film, the actress’ painful screams conveyed the degree to which she cherished an enclosed feeling of security. Second, it only made sense to me that I should at least in- vite my son over to the showroom to check out the beds to see how he would respond to them. I didn’t prepare Joseph in any manner, not even telling him what he would be seeing at my workplace. The minute he set eyes on the capsule bed with its inviting lights and control panel, he jumped in and closed the sliding door behind him. I waited outside the bed for a few min- utes and heard nothing—strange for a boy who is constantly on the move and who expresses his excitement by waving long implements up in the air in his periphery while reciting any number of Marvel or Disney stories word for word. When I finally opened the door, there was Joseph on his back with hands cushioning his head, smiling, and more relaxed than I had ever seen him in the first nearly 12 years of his life. What really sealed the deal of my commitment to the idea of using enclosure as a kind of therapeutic was finding the right case study a few months later. We put one of the units on pub- lic display for the first time at an indoor and outdoor solutions conference near our office. A young mother approached one of my colleagues and told him, “I need that bed.” Her autistic 13-year-old daughter Natalie had spent the past eight years sleeping in a narrow closet strewn with Christmas lights, de- spite having a comfy queen-sized bed in a fairly spacious bed- room. On average, Natalie was sleeping only four hours a night. Whenever she needed comfort—which she did frequently— Natalie insisted her mother snuggle with her in these tight confines. The closet was muggy, and the floor was hard. All this culminated in eleven days straight at the hospital being treated for severe sleep deprivation. Natalie used to feel insecure in her bed, opting to sleep in her narrow closet an average of four hours a night. For the past three years, Natalie has been sleeping roughly ten hours a night since finding security in her zPods® bed.
zPods® improved on the first generation of its beds, which were originally made in China, by designing a Made in USA pod that can be much more easily assembled and even be stacked to form a space age-looking bunkbed.
34
www.closingthegap.com/membership | February / March, 2023 Closing The Gap © 2023 Closing The Gap, Inc. All rights reserved.
BACK TO CONTENTS
Made with FlippingBook. PDF to flipbook with ease