Knowing your child- 21

This rose flower and three buds thriving in a broken stem caught my attention. The plant endured the broken state of the stem to continue its  growing profile with a flower and three other buds! They look  healthy!

I remembered instances of visits of families for consultation for developmental needs of their pre-school children. 

I happened to review recently the developmental story of a four year old child whom I welcomed in 2022, whose copy of some notes from the clinical record remained with me.  

A child born in another country and studying in a foreign language other than mother tongue or English had considerable difficulties in language and communication/

The above graph of the level of language and communication illustrates that the child had  a delay in different functions of language development impairing the social and interactive communication functions. 

I stayed with this thought wondering how a child was placed in a difficult situation of having to start schooling in a foreign language which was not the spoken language at home or in the social circle of the family. 

During the involvement to help the child to develop primary language skills the focus had to be on developing inner language with emphasis on semantics and pragmatics of language in the mother tongue, which was the primary language of the family! The progress the child made was slow, but nevertheless indicative of how the child was making efforts to overcome the disadvantage of the previous years. The child was used to watching cartoons in yet another foreign language for about five hours during the day.   

The child's language and communication dysfunction was an inadvertent consequence of deprivation of normal language development due to environmental factors. The environment at home and school did not favour the child for the usual developmental progress in language and communication skills!

Some children would be resilient and would be overcomes like the rose plant above, although it suffered a disruption to its normal growth. 

Some children grow up with a gap in their developmental abilities because the environment does not support the normal developmental trajectory!

I make this confession with some regret. While many children with neuro-developmental delay might have an organic contributory factor, many children have unfavourable epigenetic factors contributing to their developmental departure. A pre-school child who might have had some exposure to risk during pregnancy or at child birth or thereafter might overcome them if the environment contributed to overcome the natural risk factors. 

I wonder whether professionals and parents endeavour enough collaboratively to address this issue! What is needed is to take measures from infancy onwards to reduce the impact of the risk factors and make the environment rich with proactive play based interactive engagement from infancy onwards!

This form of augmented parenting and vigilant professional support would be a big step to compensate in some way the adverse initial neuro-developmental insult, that an infant experienced!

I find that an interphase between parents and professionals from infancy is needed, if we want to rescue children from the after effects of the vulnerable environment into which some children are born!

The thriving rose bush in the photo above is an illustration of how children too can be enabled to be resilient by anticipatory and thoughtful supportive measures !

M.C.Mathew (text and photo)