Introduction
Around the world, there are more or less 150 million children that live under the shelter of disability and require our attention. The biggest concern is that no matter how the world has developed over the years, 80% of such handicapped children belong to mostly developed countries.
Inadequate resources of treatment for the disabled children is another major concern that needs to be addressed at the earliest. They are the ones being discriminated and are unable to receive top class hospital services as compared to others.
Causes
A child can be handicapped, because of the various reasons, both parental or through any occurrence of an event. Most of the time these can be avoided if proper treatment is provided on time.
Some of the incidents that impact the lives of children include poverty, genetic problems, malnutrition, disease (polio for example), war (particularly through anti-personnel mines) and/or neglecting of proper sanitary.
Issues faced by handicapped children
It is important that the handicapped children must be provided proper attention and can get care if they are associated with occupational therapists.
Parents alone cannot provide them enough support and thus it is important to get help from professionals that may help children with issues such as communication, feeding, and eating, sleeping, using the toilet, movability, and challenging behavior.
Feeding and eating
There are various reasons why a handicapped child is facing problems related to eating. These physical problems include digesting, swallowing, chewing or sucking. Moreover, the limited mobility might be a hurdle swallowing food in some cases.
For this purpose, it is important that proper training must be given to the child. They can also be associated with a health visitor, dietitian or a speech-language therapist who can help them provide knowledge on how to develop skills.
Sleeping
A handicapped child can have problems related to quality sleep and thus the whole family can be affected because of it. There are multiple reasons that need to be addressed such as difficulty in breathing or muscle spasms as the case maybe. If a child is faced with disabilities of learning, it will not be helpful to know when and why they need sleep.
Thus, community nurse or a health visitor can play pivotal role in addressing the needs of such children. If necessary, psychologist or sleep specialist can also provide considerable support to these children. If they continue to face interruptions in sleep, they may also qualify for Disability Living Allowance (DLA) and for constant care they may get higher rate of DLA.
Toilet-training
Children learn to use a toilet when they are two to three years old, however, everyone is different from the other. Yet, in the case of most handicapped children, these signs are evident when they take the time to learn or grow older. The reasons for these may include muscle tone, motor skills, or impaired mobility. In most cases, some children are unable to learn to use a toilet for themselves entirely no matter how old they grow.
A psychotherapist or an occupational therapist can give helpful advice related to special toilet seats and how to maintain mobility of such children. A child suffering from such issues such as bedding protection, larger nappies, and pads. If unavailable, you can also buy these privately consulting your local health authority’s incontinence service.
Movability
Like normal children, a handicapped child also wishes to move around freely, but they are unable to due to inaccessibility. A General Practitioner (GP) may refer such children to the physiotherapist who can identify their needs of mobility.
A community health service or local hospital can also loan mobility options such as adapted seating walking aides, buggies, and wheelchairs depending on the recommendation of the psychotherapist.
Challenging Behavior and Your Child
Children suffering from sensory or learning disabilities are commonly faced with the challenging behavior. Handicapped children can have problems expressing their views such as what they like and dislike. Various forms of challenging behavior including aggression to withdrawal mostly found in handicapped children.
Whether anyone likes it or not, handicapped children are faced with discrimination all their lives. Whether in cultural life, education, transportation, and lodging, they do have to undergo numerous drawbacks. The infrastructure system in the entire world is not helpful for such children as the buildings cannot be accessed by those who cannot move without wheelchairs. When it comes to intuitional setup, the unavailability of professional interpreters of sign language is really an obstacle for such children.
If the children are unable to make decisions, it is important that the parents should stand up and make decisions on their behalf. However, once they reach 18 years of age, parents have no right to take decisions on their behalf whether the child is handicapped or not.
Communicating with your child
Communication is an important aspect for everyone including the handicapped children. However, in developed and underdeveloped countries, handicapped children are kept separately away from their parents which itself is a form of discrimination. They are kept away from other children of the family and can only meet their family once in a while. Hence, they are unable to merge with the society and later unable to even find employment which is their birthright.
Handicapped children have little to none skills of communication for that purpose. He/she may require sufficient amount of time to develop their speech and becomes a worry whether the child may be able to communicate in future or not.
Thanks to the advancement of technology, there are various types of tools and techniques available for the children to learn. A handicapped child may get significant help from language and speech therapist who can tell what aides might be required for the purpose of communication for them.