Learning Disability In Children

Hello,

I am Dr. Priyanka Srivastva, I am a counselling psychologist, practicing in Noida. Every day I come across with cases related to children, teenage, adult issues. In children, today I am going to discuss the cases related to children. Children are having a lot many problems like I want to focus on learning disabilities for this video. Many children are learning disable and parents really get confused about how to handle them or how to manage with them. And many schools at times are not able to manage with them, because learning disability as per them is only dyslexia or it’s only autism. But learning disability is much more than that. There can be another learning disability like difficulty in writing, mathematical learning disability and difficulty in reading. So, how to handle this type of children, because they are going ignored in society. So there are various tips to handle, tips for the parents especially.

So the number one tip is Be empathetic with them. I mean to say be empathetic means you really need to feel what difficulty they are facing despite just focusing on marks, why they are not able to score marks. We need to understand why my child is not able to read a particular subject or a topic? So be empathetic, if you are empathetic then you are lowering the anxiety of a child because learning disabled children is generally as on the highly anxious state. So anxiety level of a child will be lower down if you are empathetic. Secondly, discuss the children’s strengths and interests. What I mean to say is that discuss the strength, share with them, make them understand that what are their strengths and how they need to improve upon their strengths and interests also for example if I have to say if a child describes a book or a movie in a very hilarious way, in a very creative way, so we need to give a positive stroke to the child because this is the creative child in a child. Maybe a child is not able to give you the systematic pattern of describing that story. The third point is to discuss the areas of the weaknesses in a child. Weaknesses are also very important, despite of directly emphasizing on the weakness we need to say, yes my son as you are not able to read or you are not able to focus till the end of this chapter and your focus drifts from one point to the another, so let’s both of us sit down and work together. Then you will probably be able to work on the weaknesses of your child and the child will get strength out of it. The fourth point is that describe your child how to identify a mentor. A mentor is very important for a learning disabled child. But for any child, I will say help them identify a mentor like a teacher in a school, a tutor or a neighbor or a friend or any other member of your family, whom you feel the child can learn new things in his or her life. The next important 5th point is that optimize them, the child about the future thing. Optimism is very important. Tell your child the future possibilities based upon their strengths and weaknesses. So if you tell them this, how we can reach the goal, the child’s anxiety level will again be lowered down. The last point is that help your child or protect your child from bullying. Bullying means because when the child is learning disabled, a child is slow in writing, for example, that’s a child takes a little longer time to complete any exam or any test in the class in the school, others can bully. So, motivate your child or help the child to boost his or her self-esteem, so that this bullying does not harm him and as a parent also we need to understand that at times we also compare from one child to another child, so please do not do this because this is also a form of a bullying by which the child lowers down his self-esteem.

So these are the tips which if one follows then we can help protect this learning disabled child. If you have any questions further in detail related to any of the issues related to the child, teenager or adult you may contact through Lybrate or to my clinic directly.

Thank you so much.