How To Deal With A Learning Disability In Your Child
When it comes to the fact that your child has a learning disability, it can cause a lot of stress and difficult times. Read this article and find out how to deal with it.
While parents are waiting for their baby to be ready to be born, they tend to imagine a set of expectations about their baby’s appearance, personality, abilities, etc. However, when the baby is born with a disability, they have to reach a settlement with this new situation. For this reason, we have prepared the following article so that you can learn to handle the situation if your child has a learning disability.
Home education is essential when raising a child with a learning disability. That way, one can help the child grow and mature, and give the child the best start in life. It is important to treat the child fairly, and take the child’s limitations into account. However, do not go to extremes and overprotect your child.
What does it mean to have a learning disability?
At present, a learning disability is understood as the presence of a significantly lower level of development than expected for the chronological age of the person, in the following two areas:
- Intellectual function
- Adaptive behavior
Furthermore, these children usually show the following symptoms:
- Problems performing rough and fine mortar skills
- Muscle hypothyroidism (commonly known as flobby-baby syndrome )
- Problems relating to their physical environment
- Problems establishing social and communicative interactions
- Problems developing their personal independence and autonomy
How to deal with a learning disability
Reconciling with the fact that you have a child with a learning disability is often very complicated and you can even go through some kind of grief. Because of this, in these cases, one has to have specialists around to get help to adapt to the situation.
It is beneficial for both the child and the parents as they all need advice to come to terms with the situation that they will have to live with.
It is important to understand the diagnosis and one should contact specialists and associations which can be a source of support for one. That way, parents can:
- Learn strategies for observation and intervention
- Acquire skills in stimulation and parenting skills
- Develop skills to understand and interpret the child’s behavior
- Get the necessary information about learning disabilities
- Get in touch with other families who are in the same situation
Parents will need all this knowledge and help so that the child can develop properly in every aspect of life and so that one can best deal with the learning disability. But, at the same time, parents should not be overprotective towards their child. Nor should they underestimate their child’s abilities.
Help for parents
Likewise, parents should ask for advice and guidance according to their mutual relationship. It is quite common for the relationship to get worse, due to the constant stress, conflicts and disagreements while the child is growing up. There is also a risk that one or both parents will feel completely overwhelmed by the whole situation.
In addition to this, one needs to understand how to deal with friends and the rest of the family (grandparents, uncles, cousins, etc.) They also need to understand the situation, as well as the behavior of the child.
Disability: a different path
The birth of a child is a change in the life of any person. It is the point where the path of motherhood and fatherhood begins. However, if the baby has some form of learning difficulty, it will catch the parents completely unaware. And, therefore, the road becomes quite different from the road one had imagined. A path where one has to respond to the specific needs of the child.
Because of this, mothers and fathers of children with learning disabilities need guidance to improve their child’s quality of life, as well as their own and their families’.
In conclusion, it is worth mentioning Pablo Pineda, a teacher, a conference speaker, an actor and the first European with Down’s syndrome to have obtained a university degree. He has proven to be a sovereign example of someone who has overcome a learning disability.
This phrase should be implemented in the minds of all mothers and fathers with children with a learning disability. That way, they will be able to believe in their children’s qualities and abilities, and empower them to achieve great things in their lives.
