Delay mental development - This is a medical diagnosis, so only a specialist can determine it. If parents If you encounter similar difficulties, it is best to consult a pediatrician - psychoneurologist to clarify the cause of such problems.
Even before entering school parents may notice that their child is different from their own peers: he later began to sit, stand, and speak his first words. Even during the game, the child is impulsive, first he does, and then only begins to think. His activity in kindergarten classes is not always purposeful - it is difficult for him to concentrate on his activities, he does not understand where to start, how to continue, and is quickly distracted. These features, and even more so their combination, may already turn out to be an alarming signal of trouble.
Children with mental retardation are often restless, inattentive, have difficulty understanding the terms of the proposed tasks. They exhibit low cognitive activity and are less inquisitive than their peers. It's like such a child "does not hear" or "does not see" much in the world around him, does not strive to understand, comprehend what is happening around him. This is due to the specific features of its mental activities - memorization, thinking, attention, emotional-volitional sphere. The basis of such features is most often a mild organic deficiency of those brain systems that are responsible for the child’s learning ability and the formation of complex forms of behavior.
Avoid overprotection, when everything is done for the child, including what he could do without much difficulty himself, considering him small. It is in simple types of activities, basic self-service and self-control skills are developing such important qualities as self-confidence, sense of responsibility, independence. Of course, control is necessary, but it must be organized not "above", A "near".
Don't exaggerate your demands. Overload, especially intellectual, entails not only a decrease in performance and inhibition in understanding the situation, but can also manifest itself as aggression, behavioral breakdowns, and sudden mood swings. Excessive requirements parents are brought to whom that, when taking on a task that is beyond his strength, the child cannot complete it, begins to get nervous, and loses faith in his own abilities.
Develop skills gradually, starting with the simplest ones - those that the baby already possesses, and ending with the complex ones. Drawing, modeling, appliqué - all these activities help develop coordination, concentration, attention.
Pay careful attention to the organization of work and rest of the child in order to maintain working capacity and not cause harm to health.
Help your child learn and understand the world by using communication: interesting and fascinating stories from adults, and then you can ask questions about what new the child has learned.
Cognitive activity and the desire for mental work should be formed on material that is easy, accessible and interesting for the child.
Physical development. Physical exercise improves metabolism, blood circulation, breathing, tones the activity of the central and peripheral parts of the nervous system, and has a positive effect on the condition of the musculoskeletal system. All this helps to improve the general condition of the child’s body, increase his mental and physical performance, and increase the compensatory capabilities of the central nervous system. Such activation of the activity of the whole organism and, first of all, the central nervous system is an important condition for successful learning and overcoming shortcomings children with mental retardation.
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Let's understand the terms
Mental development of a child is a complex, genetically determined process of sequential maturation of higher mental functions, realized under the influence of various environmental factors.
The main mental functions include:
- gnosis (recognition, perception);
- praxis (purposeful actions);
- speech;
- memory;
- reading;
- letter;
- check;
- attention;
- thinking (analytical and synthetic activity, ability to compare and classify, generalize);
- emotions;
- will;
- behavior;
- self-esteem, etc.
Under mental retardation (MDD) understand the slowing down of the normal rate of mental maturation in comparison with accepted age norms. ZPD begins in early childhood without a previous period of normal development, is characterized by a stable course (without remissions and relapses, unlike mental disorders) and a tendency to progressive leveling as the child grows older. You can talk about mental retardation until primary school age. Persistent signs of underdevelopment of mental functions at an older age indicate oligophrenia (mental retardation).
As causes of mental retardationmay act:
- violations of the child’s constitutional development, due to which he begins to lag behind his peers in his physical and mental development - the so-called harmonious infantilism;
- various somatic diseases (physically weakened children);
- damage to the central nervous system. Such children experience a significant decrease in performance, memory and attention, have problems acquiring reading, writing, counting and speech skills, and develop emotional and personality disorders.
How does mental retardation manifest itself in childhood?
At birth, it is impossible to detect mental retardation in children. Most often they have no defects in their physical appearance. And parents always highly evaluate their child’s abilities, sometimes without noticing the important thing - developmental delays. The first worries among parents regarding the development of children usually arise when the child goes to kindergarten or school, and when educators and teachers note that he is not mastering the educational material. But even then, some parents believe that with pedagogical work they can wait, so that with age the child will independently learn to speak, play, and communicate with peers correctly.
Sometimes children with mental retardation are classified as educationally neglected children whose developmental lag is due only to social reasons. However, this is fundamentally wrong.
In some cases, the foreground will come h developmental delay emotional sphere (various types of infantilism), and violations in the intellectual sphere will not be expressed sharply. The emotions of such children seem to be at an earlier stage of development and correspond more closely to the child’s psyche. younger age: with brightness and liveliness of reaction, a predominance of emotions in behavior, gaming interests, suggestibility and lack of independence. These children are tireless in play, in which they show a lot of creativity and invention, and at the same time they quickly become fed up with intellectual activity. Therefore, in the first grade of school they often have difficulties associated both with the inability to obey the rules of discipline and with the fact that they prefer to play in class.
In other cases, on the contrary, it will prevail slowdown in the development of the intellectual sphere.
In this case, the child is prone to timidity, timidity, and fears. This prevents the formation of activity, initiative, and independence. And these children have gaming interests that predominate. They have difficulty getting used to school and the children's group, but they behave more correctly in lessons. Therefore, they go to the doctor not because of violations of discipline, but because of learning difficulties. Often such children experience their school failures very hard.
It is necessary to clearly understand that children with temporary developmental delays are in no way classified as mentally retarded children, since they perceive the help offered well, consciously carry out the tasks assigned to them and correctly operate with the concepts that they have. With timely correction, most of them progress well and gradually level out.
Statistics on the prevalence of mental retardation
The prevalence of mental development delays among the child population (as an independent group of conditions) is 8–10% in the overall structure of mental illnesses (Kuznetsova L.M.).
Diagnostics
It is possible to understand the nature and depth of a particular disorder only through a comprehensive examination of the child by a psychotherapist, defectologist, psychologist, or speech therapist. In this case, it is necessary to take into account the nature of errors in mathematics and writing, to examine the state of individual motor functions and the pace of activity.
Treatment
Practical experience shows that almost all children with an uncomplicated form of temporary developmental delay can become successful students in a comprehensive school. At the same time, it is very important that teachers and parents know that difficulties at the initial stage of a child’s education are almost never the result of negligence or laziness, but have objective reasons that can be successfully overcome.
For parents, in turn, it is important to understand that their child will learn more slowly than other children. But in order to achieve best results, you need to seek qualified help from specialists (a speech pathologist and, if necessary, a psychotherapist), begin thoughtful and targeted upbringing and training as early as possible, and create all the necessary conditions in the family that correspond to the child’s condition.
Treatment methods
- Drug therapy.
- Reflexology allows you to restore the functioning of various brain centers responsible for diction, vocabulary, speech activity and intellectual abilities.
- Pedagogical and psychological impact.
- Alternative methods are hippotherapy (treatment with horses), dolphin therapy, etc.
Psychocorrectional activities for children with mental retardation
The main task of a psychologist is to increase the level of mental development of children: intellectual, emotional and social.
When working with such children, the psychologist uses art therapy, music therapy, methods of object-sensory therapy, for the development of large and fine motor skills, expanding the child’s vocabulary and conceptual apparatus.
In the cerebral cortex, the sections responsible for the development of articulatory and fine manual motor skills are located close to each other and are closely interconnected. However, the latter develops earlier, and its development “pulls” with it the appearance of speech. Consequently, by developing fine manual motor skills in a child, we stimulate the development of speech.
Therefore, parents also need to provide their child with the opportunity to develop fine motor skills:
- designers;
- puzzles;
- Insert games;
- mosaic;
- cubes and balls of different sizes;
- pyramids and ring throws;
- trainers for fastening buttons and tying shoelaces.
You can offer your child modeling from plasticine, finger painting, stringing beads, and embroidery.
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The use of various massage techniques and motor stimulation is of great importance for the development of perception and sensations from a very early age. In cases where a child has deviations in psychophysical development, the use of massage (in the system of correctional and developmental education) should be continued in preschool and primary school age.
It is recommended to use outdoor games (logorhythmics technique), which develop the ability to navigate in space, move rhythmically and deftly, change the tempo of movements, as well as games in which movements are accompanied by speech.
It is also important musical development child. Such games as “Guess what sounded?”, “Recognize by voice”, “What instrument is playing?”, “Catch a whisper”, etc. are effective. After all, almost all children with delayed speech development have insufficiently developed attention, difficulty concentrating, increased distractibility, they do not hear the rhythm and poorly perceive the intonation coloring of the voices of others.
It is also necessary to develop visual attention by working with multi-colored stripes, sticks, cubes, geometric planar and volumetric figures and special cards.
Examples of psychocorrection exercises for children with mental retardation
It should be noted that timely psychocorrectional work with a child can give very positive results. The most important rule for parents is not to despair and tune in to positive results!
Psychologists say that in difficult life situations, at a minimum, there are always 3 options:
- leave everything as it is, or change something;
- change your behavior, habits, attitudes, attitudes or change the circumstances in which the problem arose;
- if it is impossible to change circumstances, then you can change your attitude towards circumstances, that is, accept them.
The choice is yours alone.
EXERCISES
Exercise No. 1 “Guess the emotion”
Materials: cards depicting emotions.
Age: from 5 years.
A schematic representation of emotions is laid out face down on the table. Children take turns taking any card without showing it to the others. The child’s task is to recognize the emotion, mood according to the scheme and depict it using facial expressions, pantomimes, and vocal intonations.
At first, an adult can suggest possible situations to the child, but we must strive to ensure that the child himself comes up with (remembers) the situation in which the emotion arises.
The rest of the children - the audience - must guess what emotion the child is experiencing, portraying, what is happening in his skit.
Exercise No. 2 “Mood Lotto”
Materials: sets of pictures depicting animals with different faces .
Age: from 3 years.
The adult shows the children a schematic representation of a particular emotion (or depicts it himself, describes it in words, describes the situation, etc.). The children’s task is to find an animal in their set with the same emotion.
Exercise No. 3 “How are you feeling today?”
Materials: cards with images different shades moods.
Age: from 4 years old.
He must choose the one that is most similar to his mood, the mood of his mother, father, friend, cat, etc.
Age: from 6 years old.
The presenter names the main emotion (or shows a schematic representation of it, or acts it out himself), and the children remember the words that denote this emotion. You can divide the children into two teams. Representatives of each team take turns naming synonyms. The last team to say the word wins.
Exercise No. 6 “Find the differences”
Age: from 5 years.
The adult asks the child to name a word that differs from the others in sound pronunciation.
FISHING FISHING FISHING FISHING FISHING FISHING FISHING FISHING ROD; DACHKA - CAR - CAR - CAR
Exercise No. 7 “Be attentive”
Age: from 7 years old.
An adult, throwing a ball, says a word. The child who catches the ball determines the number of sounds in the word.
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The article was prepared by: medical psychologist – E. O. Shakhrai
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Mental retardation means mental retardation. This disease is characterized, first of all, by a slow pace of development and improvement of such functions as thinking, attention and other indicators. As a rule, all of them, to one degree or another, lag behind the norms established for a certain age of the child.
In the very early age the disease practically does not manifest itself. It can be determined later, when the child reaches approximately 5.5-6 years. Typically, children with mental retardation are discovered during tests that determine the level of development of a preschooler. The final identification of deviations occurs at the beginning of the educational process. Limited knowledge and ideas, a low level of intelligence, and immaturity of thinking become obvious. In such children, purely childish play interests predominate. The causes of this disease are completely different in each case, in accordance with the individual characteristics of each child.
Psychological characteristics of children with mental retardation
Mental retardation and mental retardation differ significantly from each other. In the first case, there is a direct violation of mental functions, which manifests itself in the inability to normally analyze, compare and generalize events and phenomena of the surrounding reality. In the second case, the intellectual sphere suffers. Such children are characterized by inattention, unresponsiveness, impaired phonemic hearing and other deviations.
If sufficiently comfortable conditions are created for children with mental retardation and proper training and upbringing are provided, then they are quite willing to make contact and positively perceive any help from adults. This help and support has a greater effect when it is carried out in a playful way and is able to arouse real interest in the child in some useful activity. An important role is played by the emotional component, which manifests itself in vivid forms. Due to this, the child can perform an interesting task for quite a long time. This interest is directly related to the final results obtained at the end of the task or test.
Many children with mental retardation draw well and can clearly depict the surrounding reality on paper. A mentally retarded child can only scribble and draw the most primitive images. There are also differences in the neurological area. In children with mental retardation, visible symptoms of the disease appear in a mild form and are almost invisible at first glance, in contrast to true mental retardation.
There are many other features and signs that make it possible to accurately distinguish between mental retardation and mental retardation. In any case, only a qualified specialist can make a final conclusion about the baby’s condition.
Causes of mental retardation
Mental retardation can occur for a variety of reasons. It mainly appears as a result of the influence of biological or social factors.
Biological causes of mental retardation:
- Problems begin to arise during pregnancy. The pathology begins to develop under the influence of severe toxicosis, due to infectious diseases of the expectant mother, the use of potent medications and other factors.
- Problems during childbirth associated with hypoxia, as well as the need to use forceps or cesarean section.
- The baby is born premature, weak and sickly with minimal brain dysfunction.
- Predisposition at the genetic level. As a rule, mothers of such children in many cases have mild intellectual impairment.
Social causes of mental retardation:
- This diagnosis is most widespread in orphanages.
- The child's psyche is negatively affected by a dysfunctional family, where the material and intellectual level is very low. Poor upbringing of the child, lack of any activities with him.
- In kindergartens with a large number of children in a group, one teacher is simply not able to provide an individual approach to each child.
All the reasons can manifest themselves in a complex manner, resulting in a significant lag, which is finally revealed before the start of school.
Types of ZPR
The general condition of mental retardation is manifested in insufficient and slow development of elements such as memory, thinking, attention, perception, speech and other aspects. The cognitive and mental capabilities of such children are limited, so they are not able to fully fulfill the requirements placed on them. When reaching school age, this limitation manifests itself most clearly. In such children, play motivation and interests come to the fore; it is difficult for them to switch and distribute attention. As a result, a lag begins in one or more subjects. school curriculum. However, children with mental retardation behave in completely different ways in different situations.
Main types of ZPR:
- Constitutional form completely depends and is determined by heredity. Such children have a lag not only in mental, but also in physical development. In most cases, they are always in a good mood, and the grievances received are quickly forgotten. However, a weak emotional and volitional component does not allow the complete formation of positive learning motivation. This is the main reason for academic failure, since the baby only does things that are of some interest. In general, the prognosis for such a delay is favorable, subject to targeted pedagogical influence.
- Somatogenic delay occurs in babies born to healthy parents. Its main cause is past illnesses that have a negative impact on brain function. Despite the presence of normal intelligence, the baby becomes absent-minded and cannot properly concentrate on the educational process. Adaptation in a team occurs with great difficulty. Such children always show politeness and react adequately to the environment. However, they themselves do not show initiative, are characterized by passivity and inactivity, and require constant guidance and pushing to action from adults. Often the child feels very tired, accompanied by headache and loss of appetite. Because of this, he may refuse to complete tasks. Such children need constant medical and pedagogical assistance. As a rule, they study in specialized sanatorium-type schools or in classes where an appropriate regime has been created.
- In psychogenic form Children experience normal physical development. The only serious drawback is brain dysfunction. It mainly arises due to unfavorable socio-psychological factors. Therefore, intelligence gradually decreases, behavior is dependent, the attitude towards others is indifferent, emotions are superficial. Such a child requires an individual approach and specific teaching methods. In most cases, the situation can be corrected and academic performance can be brought to a normal level.
Special mention should be made of mental retardation associated with cerebral-organic abnormalities due to local disorders of brain function. These children experience frequent manifestations of cerebral asthenia, when frequent fatigue occurs, performance decreases, attention and memory are not able to concentrate normally. There is an imperfection of thought processes approaching the indicators of mental retardation. The acquired knowledge is absorbed in separate fragments, which are very quickly forgotten. This disease is quite complex and requires additional efforts. The usual training program is completely unsuitable; qualified systematic correction by experienced teachers is required.
Features of development of children with mental retardation
The emotional state plays a special role in the development of the psyche. When mental development is delayed, children's emotions are unstable, which often leads to inappropriate actions and behavior.
Therefore, the development of children with mental retardation has its own characteristics:
- The impossibility of long-term focused concentration on any type of activity. This indicates an unstable emotional-volitional sphere. The reason for this condition is the child’s low mental activity.
- Negative features of the so-called crisis of age and development appear. Because of this, it is very difficult to establish contacts with other people.
- Frequent emotional disorders, expressed in fear and unpredictable actions performed in a state of passion.
- In addition, children with mental retardation are characterized by increased fatigue, low levels of mental processes and hyperactivity. In most cases, they are not independent and require constant monitoring when performing tasks.
In the process of studying the developmental characteristics of such children, it became obvious that symptoms of mental retardation are most fully manifested in preschoolers before starting school. At this time, intensive preparation for school is underway, classes and testing are conducted to determine the level of development. For children with mental retardation, there are special kindergartens with the most optimal conditions for the correction of mental development.
Working with children with mental retardation
Deviations associated with mental retardation, which have already been mentioned, are considered a temporary phenomenon. They may well be compensated by methods of special training and education. Provided that classes start on time, the child’s mental retardation gradually lends itself to complete correction and reaches the level of ordinary children. At the same time, it is imperative to eliminate all the causes contributing to this disease. If necessary, special treatment is carried out.
The greatest difficulties have to be overcome when mental retardation is associated with damage to part of the brain cells that fall out of the thought process. Such cells can partially awaken and begin to work again. At the same time, neighboring healthy cells are involved in the work. For this, there are special techniques used by defectologists. This kind of work requires a lot of effort and a long time.
Developmental delays may not be immediately noticeable. It manifests itself gradually when the child begins to grow up and increased demands are placed on him. If you have any doubts about the baby’s development, you should definitely make an appointment with a neurologist. Final conclusions can only be drawn based on the results of special examinations prescribed by a doctor.
In working with children suffering from mental retardation, the main role is given to parents. The entire final result depends on how responsibly they take this. To obtain maximum effect, you must follow certain rules towards your child.
How to communicate correctly with children with mental retardation:
- In relationships between adults and children there must be complete trust and mutual understanding. Control should be carried out unobtrusively, without unnecessary extremes and categorical forms. All verbal instructions are reinforced with visual stimulation. It should be remembered that deviations in the child’s behavior are unintentional, so we must try to avoid punishment.
- A normal psychological microclimate must be created in the family. It is advisable to spend leisure time together. The child should not feel deprived of attention. Do not allow family quarrels in front of him.
- Establishing a solid routine plays a big role. When completing tasks, you need to make sure that the baby is distracted as little as possible and does not become overtired. Excessive fatigue reduces self-control and increases hyperactivity.
