Pervasive Developmental Disorders

 Developmental Consequences- Relating to Inclusion:

Childhood Schizophrenia:

Childhood schizophrenia is accompanied by loose associations, illogical thinking, and communication discourse deficits.  The behaviours' exhibited are episodic and not pervasive like in autism.  This effects the child's language development, as well as their social and emotional development.

Language Development: Language is affected by the cognitive development which than affects the social and emotional development.  As children regress, their speech becomes limited and they show incoherent thinking.  They are unable to maintain one idea of conversation (loose association) and have inadequate reasoning (illogical thinking).  They also struggle with the ability to tie one sentence to another.

Cognitive Development:  Children with schizophrenia show great variabilty in cognitive functioning.  Most children who are schizophrenic achieve higher scores on the performance than on the verbal subscales of Weschler scales.  As the condition takes hold, cognitive development alters, and although there is no intellectual impairment, it causes the child to be unable to actualize knowledge.

Social and Emotional Development: The biggest concern with schizophrenia is the effects on a child's ability to navigate and test reality, as well as the ability to initiate and sustain interactions and contact with others in their environment.  This results in children withdrawing from the world.  Children show a reduction in interests and human attachments, they appear to live in a fantasy world and show emotional apathy, indifference and withdrawal.  Affected children display a variety of disturbances in mood, behaviour, and thought.  Hallucinations and systematic delusions are found consistently before the age of eighteen.

Autism:

Autism can affect almost every domain of a child's develpment and all aspects of progress.  Some children will appear to only have social deficits while others can appear severly retarded.  This means the group is extremely heterogeneous, individuals show wide variability in the type, number and severity of observed deficits in cognitive functioning, communication, social interaction, and overt behaviour.

Social and Emotional Development: Typically, children with autism live in their own world.  They have difficulty with social interaction and cannot interpret or predict the thoughts, feelings, or behaviours of others.  Children with autism often resent others who try to show them affection.

Cognitive Development:  Children with autisms IQ scores typically are located in the moderate to severe range of intellectual disabilities.  IQ scores do become stable over time and can be predictive of later functioning.  Females who suffere from autism are affected more seriously and have lower intelligence scores and more problems with cognition and language.

Language Development:  Countless children with autism lack awareness, intentionality, or competence to use language as a tool to convey messages to others.  This begins when they are infants and it later remains impaired.  Many children are non-verbal and those who are can be characterized by immaturity, abnormalities in grammatical constructions, delayed echolalia, metaphorical language, pronoun reversals, and stereotypic utterances.  Children are unable to understand facial expressions, body language and any other non-verbal communication.  Children with autism typically will perseverate on topics and fail to recognize rules surrounding turn taking.

Perceptual Development and Sensory Response:  Children with autism have an abnormal response to stimuli.  They may over- or under-react to incoming stimuli.  As they fixate on an object they may flutter their hands, cross their eyes, glance to the side, or unfocus their eyes.  A defining characteristic of autism is self-stimulation, a persistent, stereotypic, repetitive mannerism.  This involves activities such as prolonged and repetitive body rocking, toe walking, spinning, jumping, pacing, gazing at lights, twirling objects, excessive and repetitive vocalization, and finger playing, swishing saliva, flapping the hands, patting the cheeks, and humming for hours.  These behaviours decrease a child's responsiveness to educational instruction.

Inclusion:  To include children who suffer from any form of PDD's, there would have to be many changes to the way schools are run.  These children would benefit from smaller class sizes, having an E.A with them at all times and keeping change to a minimal.  If we were to group these children together based on their needs then we are stepping outside the realm of inclusion

Maladaptive Behaviours:  Children with autism often demonstrate aggressive behaviours that are directed towards others such as striking out, kicking, biting and scratching or directed towards self by way of biting themselves, gouging their eyes or banging their head against sharp corners.

According to Autism Society Canada, an effective treatment program should be one that is supported by scientific research and includes:

•  Early and extensive treatment and education techniques to help people with ASD's develop and learn new skills.
• Clear guidelines and exectations for behaviour.
• Highly structured- specialized and consistent education plan tailored to the individual.
• Parental and family participation in assrssment curriculum planning, instruction, monitoring and evaluation. 

References:  WINZER and BENNETT ET AL

Youtube clip: Young Schizophrenic at her mind's mercy

 

Informative website for Autism: www.autismsocietycanada.com