← Back to portfolio

Beyond Disabilities: Minimizing Potential Developmental Delays

The first three years of a child's life are crucial to their development. For disabled children, simple activities such as playing, walking, talking or eating can be tasking, putting them in a disadvantaged position compared to their peers.

For disabled children to successfully celebrate developmental milestones, early intervention is necessary to minimize potential developmental delays. This is like a support structure to enable the learning and development of cognitive abilities to reach their full potential.

In most situations, developmental disabilities are diagnosed at birth. However, many others are only identified when the child is between the age of 3-6. There are different reasons a child has a developmental delay. For example, exposure to alcohol and recreational drugs during pregnancy, exposure to toxins during infancy, child neglect and genetics.

The Impact of Early Intervention Programmes For Child Disability

Every child is uniquely different, and no two children grow at the same pace (not twins). Some parents notice early that their child is developing slower than other children their age. These delays translate to physical impairments, intellectual disabilities, speech delays, and medical conditions that can affect how they relate to others.

Early intervention program helps improve brain development, especially in the first three years of the child's life. They also link it to the child's learning outcomes (behaviour, foundational learning) and help lessen the effects of the disability.

Children living with disabilities thrive with the support of inclusive communities and supportive families. Family support for children with disabilities helps with learning disabilities. 

The children develop meaningful, equal relationships regardless of their different developmental disabilities. Community services and support help the children express themselves creatively in diverse ways, including crafts.

Inclusion encourages people with developmental disabilities to integrate into the community early. Steering them in the right direction to attend and coping well in the same school and classroom as other children their age. These activities also help them develop new skills and confidence.

There is a need to promote learning and independent living in inclusive communities. As they grow into independent adults, people with disabilities can have friends, secure jobs with good wages, and an opportunity to defy social stigmas and live a fulfilled life.

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is one of the many neurodevelopmental conditions that affect children and adults. Over 75 million people live with autism, making up around 1% of the global population.

Usually, autism is diagnosed in childhood between 18 months to 4 years. There are also rare situations where children grow into adolescents and adults before their diagnosis, even when their symptoms are glaring and more severe.

Autism has a wide range of symptoms and different levels of severity. However, the major differences are visible in communication and problems with social interaction. People with ASD often demonstrate restricted and repetitive interests or patterns of behaviour.

Long-term physical, mental, intellectual or sensory impairments may hinder a child's full and effective participation in society on an equal basis with others. Autism affects all ethnic groups.

It affects all ethnic and socioeconomic groups, but male children are four times likelier to be diagnosed with ASD than girls. However, autism can easily get overlooked in girls.

The goal is to work intensively with people at their own pace – supporting them to recognize their strengths, recover from crises and integrate into society by providing high-quality resources, education and information in core areas across the lifespan to children and families with neurodevelopmental disorders.

Early intervention programmes can improve your child's learning, communication and social skills.

Diagnosing Autism

Autism cannot easily be diagnosed through blood and a medical test as there is no medical detection for autism.

Assessments are usually carried out if the parents or paediatrician notices a developmental delay in the child. A full medical history of the family and the child are carried out. Tests measure the child's development to understand why they might develop at a different pace than their peers.

Tests like imaging could determine if your child has a central nervous system disorder, while blood samples/blood tests could detect genetic and metabolic disorders.

If your child is experiencing developmental delays, getting an early diagnosis can be helpful. This way, you can understand and support them in every way possible if they are diagnosed with autistic disorder.

Health Professionals To See For Accurate Diagnosis

Paediatrician: A paediatrician is a trained medical doctor who provides specialist medical care to infants, children and adolescents. A developmental paediatrician specialises in a wide variety of learning and behavioural and developmental disability from infancy to young adulthood.

Child Neurologist: This doctor specializes in treating children with problems with their nervous systems. They are trained to address a child's unique needs, including child-specific conditions in the nervous system. Symptoms like seizures, delayed speech, poor muscle tone, frequent headaches and slow brain development need a neurologist for evaluation and diagnosis.

Child and adolescent psychiatrists: They are trained in assessing mental health development.

Psychologists: Psychology is the study of the human mind. Child psychologists are trained to assess children's social, emotional, and mental development. They observe a child's development from prenatal to adolescence to diagnose and treat pervasive developmental disorders, mental health, behavioural problems and emotional issues.

Speech-language pathologists are health professionals who assess and treat speech, language and communication disorders. They play a role in diagnosing children with ASD.

Occupational therapists (OT): They are trained to assess children with physical, sensory and cognitive challenges and diagnose and support them to become healthy members of society.

Signs of Autism in Children?

Autism is largely genetic, and children born to older parents are at a higher risk of autism. For children with ASD, social communication and interaction skills can be challenging. Symbols, aids, strategies, and techniques can enhance the child's communication.

A person with autism may

  • Talk too little or too much about their favourite topics.
  • Make unusual facial expressions and gestures while talking.
  • Talk monotonously while screaming 'at' others instead of having a two-way conversation.
  • Find it difficult to interpret simple things and play with others.
  • Be easily overwhelmed in social situations and will be alone most of the time.
  • Display unusual physical movements, such as touching, biting, rocking or finger flicking.
  • Have unusually intense interests
  • Be over or under-sensitive to sensory stimuli (e.g. textures, sounds, smells, taste).
  • Display aggressive behaviour to avoid stressful situations.
  • Repeat words or phrases multiple times.

Therapy And Learning

Persons with disabilities face societal discrimination as they are often treated as broken vessels that need fixing or ignoring. Meanwhile, every child is different, and so should their learning journeys, especially when living with some form of disability.

Learning through therapy is essential as it creates a dynamic pathway for each child to develop steadily. We support each child/family to achieve balance and optimum health in our healthy and therapeutic environment.

The therapist supports disabled children in understanding developmental delays and navigating the effects of disability on relationships and daily living.

They teach the child's interests –– music lessons, painting, computer skills, literacy lessons, swimming and other activities — to help them uniquely develop according to their interests.

Learning Programmes

  • Music Therapy: This recreation therapy is administered to help people with disability express and verbalize their emotions. Children with special needs – especially non-verbal children – improve motor functions and mental and emotional coordination through music.

The music therapists create musical programmes incorporating dancing, singing, playing instruments, writing lyrics and composing songs. The therapist captures and maintains the child's attention by using tempo, melody and sound.

Music therapy programs can help children living with disability to

  1. Reduce anxiety and improve cognition.
  2. Harness multiple senses like sound, touch, and sight.
  3. Reduce negative responses.
  4. Express themselves and develop physical coordination
  5. Respond to stimuli and display sensory behaviours.
  • Applied therapy: Applied behaviour analysis (ABA) focuses on behaviours and uses reinforcements and rewards to promote acceptable behaviours and skills.

In applied therapy, we encourage children to perform simple tasks and reward them when they successfully carry them out. This helps improve their reading and adaptive learning skills.

To improve social and communication skills, we adapt cue and response kind of therapy according to the needs of each child. We focus more on responsiveness as we increasingly monitor their responses to over one cue in a social structure.

ABA programmes can help children living with disability to

  1. Improve language and communication skills
  2. Develop fine motor skills
  3. Improve attention, focus, social skills and memory
  4. Boost grooming capabilities and competence
  • Psychotherapy: This talk therapy helps people with a disability express themselves and change negative thought patterns or behaviours.

Through psychotherapy, we provide psycho-social support for children with physical, mental, intellectual or sensory impairments to improve their overall well-being.

Psychotherapy programs can help people living with disability to

  1. Cultivate social relationships
  2. Develop and achieve personal goals.
  3. Control minor disorders and anxiety
  4. Boosts self-confidence
  5. Adapt Independent living
  • Cognitive behavioural therapy: This form of talk therapy helps examine how a child thinks and why they act the way they do. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is an intervention program for children with mild to moderate intellectual disabilities and anxiety.

By focusing on the child's thoughts, emotions and behaviours and how they affect one another, our therapists can help each child according to their needs.

  • Art Therapy: This enables people struggling with different forms of disabilities to express themselves through art and crafts. Most disorders hinder a child's interaction and participation with their peers, but they can be seen with art. Art helps children learn new skills.

Art therapy programmes can help children and families of children living with disability to

  1. Get in touch with their feelings.
  2. Positively express themselves
  3. Explore
  4. Emotional development
  • Play therapy uses toys and other play materials to help children with developmental and health disabilities develop stronger social relationships. Play therapy strengthens adaptive behaviours and aids in the discovery of physical and emotional strengths concerning individual disabilities.

There are child-based therapy, group-based therapy and family-based therapy. Play therapy improves the child's sensory, motor, cognitive, emotional, and social development.