How to Detect Developmental Delay and What to Do Next

Practical Interventions for Home and School

Mary Mountstephen

• Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781849050227
• eBook ISBN: 9780857004970
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

If a child is not meeting expected milestones it can be a source of great anxiety for parents and teachers. This forthright guide offers practical advice on how to recognize the signs of developmental delay, address difficulties effectively, and help the child to flourish.
Mary Mountstephen presents a practical approach to dealing with developmental delay, equipping readers with the knowledge, understanding and tools to tackle problems successfully. By clearly explaining how children develop, drawing on the expertise of a number of specialists in the field and detailing straightforward interventions, the author enables parents and teachers to identify a wide range of problems and empowers them with the information they need to take action.
Concise and accessible, this book provides a wealth of useful advice on how to address developmental delay, and will prove invaluable to parents, teachers and other professionals working with children.

Part I:

Child Development and Signs of Delay

1

Factors Affecting Early Development

This chapter looks at:

• pregnancy and child development

• genetic and environmental factors

• the role of primitive and postural reflexes.

Pregnancy and early brain development

The brain has evolved over hundreds of millions of years to be a very complex collection or community of structures. Each part of the brain has specialized functions but all parts work in unison to help us adapt to and survive in our environment. At birth the brain is equipped with more than 100 billion nerve cells or neurons that communicate through tiny connections that form networks. These networks are connected into systems which work together to carry out a set of specific functions such as vision and hearing. These mental systems are designed to sense, process and store information received both from the outside word and from inside the body (for example hunger, pain and emotions).

During pregnancy, the basic structure of the brain is formed, beginning at sixteen days after conception. Within seven months the brain transforms from a small group of cells to a highly complex organism that has the form, if not the function, of the mature brain. The different areas are in place and the basic brain functions that help the baby to survive are established. Unlike the heart and other organs of the body which are already functioning much as they will throughout life, the brain is immature and goes through many changes. Newborn infants function on only a very small part of the brain called the brain stem which deals with all the basic functions you need to stay alive such as breathing. Curran, in his fascinating and very readable book The Little Book of Big Stuff about the Brain (2008), describes the newborn baby’s brain as a:

clean slate ready to receive new learning. Other than a few primitive reflexes that seem to be genetically determined and reside in the brainstem, newborn babies have no stored templates. (p.129)

It is as the brain develops that the different areas become fully mature according to a pre-determined biological timing. At birth, the brain stem is fully working, whereas the higher order functions mature later, with brain development continuing into young adulthood.

The brain not only grows and changes as a function of development (Couperous and Nelson 2008), but it also continually interacts with itself and the environment, adapting to achieve the best level of functioning. This ongoing adaptation is termed ‘plasticity’ and refers to the brain’s ability to change and adapt in response to changes in the brain or the environment. Learning is highly dependent on the experiences we have and while all typically developing children are capable, for example, of learning how to make biscuits, not all children do. The specific learning which takes place in our brains depends on how the brain is assembled, genetic influences and other factors and experiences such as those below.

Genetic influences on development

People often say that learning difficulties run in families, particularly when children seem to be experiencing the same problems as another family member. However, a parent’s learning difficulty or difference may not take exactly the same form as her child’s. Some learning differences such as dyslexia often do seem to run in families and it is known that in many cases genes do play an important role. It is not uncommon to find that multiple members of an immediate or extended family have dyslexia. Family studies of dyslexia indicate that almost 50 per cent of children born to a parent with dyslexia will end up facing difficulties in the acquisition of reading skill (Lyytinen et al. 2008, p.122). In addition between 30 and 50 per cent of the brothers and sisters of a child with dyslexia may themselves have dyslexia – but genes are not the only factor influencing its occurrence. If dyslexia were completely genetic, we would expect that identical twins (who share the same genes) would always share dyslexia if present, but in only about 70 per cent of affected cases are both members of an identifiable twin pair dyslexic (Molfese et al. 2008).

Smoking, alcohol and other drug use in pregnancy

Lise Eliot, in her book What’s Going on in There? How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life (1999), has provided an excellent guide to the brain’s development through the first five years of life.

She details the difficulties which cigarettes, illegal drugs, caffeine can cause and points out that these represent a continuum from devastating effects on the foetus to subtler long-term effects, including the slower development of sensory, motor or language abilities as well as disorders of attention, sleep and poor academic achievement. Characterized as neurodevelopmental disorders, these can cause parents to be concerned about their child’s progress in relation to other children of the same age.

Prematurity

Prematurity is defined as childbirth occurring earlier than 37 weeks of gestation. The earlier a baby is born, the greater are the risks of physical complications, periods of separation from the mother and a restricted level of sensory stimulation in terms of movement experience, feeding and touch.

Pre-term children have a normal range of intelligence, however, difficulties such as language delay, attention deficit, hyperactivity and behaviour problems have been identified as associated with prematurity. When these children reach school, they are more prone to weaknesses in communication skills, maths reasoning, reading comprehension and other areas of the curriculum (Allen 1996). Children who are born prematurely can be 9–12 months developmentally behind other children of the same age and the brains of premature boys are more severely affected than the brains of premature girls (Sousa 2007).

Although premature babies do make up for lost time in achieving their developmental milestones, they remain at a disadvantage as they are expected to enter school and function based on their birth date, rather than their expected birth date. The implications of prematurity can be long lasting, for example:

A child who is born at 32 weeks in July or August is not only going to be one of the youngest in the school year based on birth date, but if school entry were to be based on expected date of birth, the child would be placed in the next school year, allowing a margin of a further ten months to make up for time lost in the womb, and for time spent fighting for life in the first weeks after birth. In the first five years of life when neurological development takes place at a rapid rate, the difference of a month in development can be the equivalent of a year, two decades later. (Goddard Blythe 2009, p.186)

Stress during pregnancy

Although post-natal depression is a well-known condition, prenatal depression is more common and at least as damaging to the child, according to Vivette Glover, a professor of perinatal psychobiology. Women’s stress levels reach the growing baby on a physical level. Maternal anxiety affects the placenta, reducing the activity of the barrier enzyme that hinders the stress ho...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes from the Author
• Introduction
• Part I: Child Development and Signs of Delay
• Part II: Interventions for Home and School