A small butterfly !

 

This Red Eye Butterfly, Matapa Aria caught my attention accidentally, while walking in the drive way. What stood out was it bright red eye. Its smallness and neat elegant appearance was striking. 

I have been through an experience recently, when smallness of what I was pursuing in my involvement in child development came under suspicion and questioning.  

How to help families to receive their developmentally challenged children and create a space for them in their home to grow up exercising their abilities and exploring the prospects of  child development for them to have a meaningful belonging and involvements! That is how the campaign of creating a child's corner at home became a conversation topic for the last five years. 

I find that the perspective in childhood development and rehabilitation of developmentally challenged children, receive different outlooks depending on the objective of those involved in this professional pursuit. 

One objective is to make parents ready to receive and upbuild a developmentally challenged child and lead them to complement the residual abilities in that child to live and relate meaningfully. 

In the arena of childhood rehabilitation service this is a small part. The larger part is to create and provide opportunities for pre-school support service,  educational and vocational prospects of developmentally challenged children. 

So parenting, home environment, understanding stressors and demanding situations, attending to the siblings to avoid making them feel excluded, etc are still smaller matters in most child development and rehabilitation services! Anna and I  felt inlined to pay attention to these factors along with searching for the causal pathway for developmental departure of a child.  That journey took us to use some investigators like the EEG, MRI Brian, vitamin and trace elements in the blood, Thyroid functions, sleep monitoring, monitor orin go home practices, which gave the different strands that constitute the development needs of child. When we included the dysmorphic state, early neonatal subtle events and nutritional status, we came across a spectrum of treatable and modifiable conditions, which can augment the wellness of a developmentally challenged ged child. 

The above is a small set of co-morbidities and confounders which impair the developmental progress of a developmentally challenged child. Most of them are treatable or modifiable. 

This approach of regarding the wellness of a child and of the parents brought a new dimension  since, we started this approach at ASHIRVAD Child Development Centre at Chennai 1983. 

We continue to look for the small things which are feasible and possible. The latest in this approach was the publication of Accompany Your Child, developmental monitoring manual for parents to observe and record the progress of a pre-school child in 12 domains. To me it is another small resource for parents to take greater responsibility of involvement with their  child.  

The few small things having a confluence bring an integrative effect for the wellness of  a developmentally challenged child. 

The Red Eye butterfly, in its smallness brings something that is still valuable. 

I wonder whether each of us can value and feel content with the a few small acts of thoughtfulness we can offer to others!

M.C.Mathew(text and photo)