Children's learning disabilities

The problem of children's learning disabilities always makes many parents worry, but apart from being helpless, many parents do not have a good solution to this problem. On the basis of following the doctor's advice, it seems that we still have to do something for the children, such as seriously understanding such diseases and fully understanding the children's feelings psychologically. This is also something we as parents must do for our children. Please read the following introduction carefully, it will be helpful to you.

Typical children's learning disabilities are different from the learning difficulties we usually talk about, the latter of which may be caused by a variety of congenital or acquired factors. The learning disabilities mentioned here have a relatively narrow meaning. They generally refer to the state in which children with normal intelligence have one or more learning difficulties in reading, writing, spelling, expression, calculation, etc. The medical community tends to believe that the learning difficulties exhibited by these children are related to some dysfunction of their central nervous system. Clinical observations have found that these children are not blind, deaf, dumb or mentally retarded (some have borderline intelligence levels), and they receive normal education, or may have some emotional and behavioral problems.

In fact, the problem of children's learning disabilities was observed and reported by some European pediatricians as early as the mid-to-late 19th century. They found that some children had normal intelligence but were unable to read, but were no different from normal children of the same age in other aspects. In the nearly century of research that followed, researchers from many disciplines were involved in the exploration of this issue, and many disease names related to or unrelated to learning disabilities emerged, such as "pure word blindness", "congenital word blindness", "reading ability", "dyslexia", "developmental language disorder", "writing disorder", "calculation disorder", "mild brain injury", "Strauss syndrome", "mild brain dysfunction (MBD)", etc. After entering the 1970s, these names were gradually eliminated and basically standardized into the diagnostic standards ICD-10 stipulated by the United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) and the diagnostic standards DSM-4 formulated by the American Medical Association, collectively referred to as specific learning disabilities. However, there are still different naming and diagnostic definitions at home and abroad.

Due to different research years and research angles, reports on the incidence of learning disabilities in children vary greatly. In summary, domestic and international reports are mostly between 3% and 10%. Among this type of children, there are significantly more boys than girls, with a ratio of about 4:1. Medical research has found that the occurrence of this type of learning disability is related to genetics, abnormal brain structure (commonly known as cortical "heterotopia"), abnormal symmetry between the left and right cerebral hemispheres, mild brain dysfunction, and abnormal intellectual structure. The occurrence of these conditions is related to adverse factors encountered by children before birth (such as mother's smoking, drug abuse, alcoholism, malnutrition in the fetus, fetal nerve damage caused by various reasons), brain trauma after birth, birth injuries, premature low birth weight, asphyxia, neonatal jaundice, certain infectious diseases, heavy metal poisoning (such as lead) and other factors. Some children are born with biological and neuropsychological vulnerabilities, which make them more susceptible and intolerant to adverse acquired factors, thus leading to the occurrence of this disease. It was also mentioned that the incidence of dyslexia (a type of learning disability) is high among children in English-speaking countries, while children in countries and regions where Chinese characters are the native language are less likely to suffer from reading or writing difficulties. Therefore, it is believed that if children start learning written language by learning phonetic characters, they will easily encounter learning difficulties, but this is not the case when learning pictographic characters (such as Chinese characters). However, there is still a lot of controversy in this regard.

To sum up, I believe you must have a relatively detailed understanding of children's learning disabilities. If unfortunately, your child develops similar symptoms in the future, I believe you will have a more appropriate way to deal with it and a clearer understanding.