Developmental Variations for Children with Autism - Case Study Example

DOMAINS

Typically Developing Children [No more than 250-300 words in each cell below]

Developmental Variations for Children with Autism [No more than 250-300 words in each cell below]

Developmental Variations for Children with Down syndrome [No more than 250-300 words in each cell below]

Motor - Development of bones, muscles, and the child’s ability to move around and manipulate his/her environment; includes gross motor and fine motor skills.

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Brain wiring

The ability of the brain to foster connections between different parts of the brain dictates the process of learning new motor skills. For typically developing children, their brains are able to make connections with parts involved in control of movement and transmission of sensory information. Children with typical motor development exhibit easier integration of the information needed for task learning, unlike the autistic and Down Syndrome children who may require more efficient pathways to learn new motor skills. Between the times a child is conceived and when it attains three years, the brain exhibits significant changes. Whereas all the neurons are present at birth, the first year sees a growth in the size of the neurons and the brain. A typically developing child’s brain should attain 80% of the adult brain volume at three years.

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Mobility

One of the greatest features of cognitive development lies in the motor skill of mobility of the joints and its coordination with the muscles. In typically developing children, the joints are inherently stable, and less muscle is required to facilitate movement control and good posture. Besides, joint mobility, rather than hyper mobility, defines the strength, flexibility and general fitness that typically developing children exhibit, thus their ability to sit comfortably on a chair, and perform simple shoulder movements required for tasks such as handwriting and drawing (Riquelme Agulló & Manzanal González, 2013). The mobile joints of typically developing children enable them to walk easily, as their muscles are more relaxed and coordinated.

Brain wiring

Unlike in typically developing children, autistic children encounter difficulties in brain wiring, hence the manifestation of the developmental coordination disorder. Autism subjects children to slow learning of new motor skills due to the differences in which their brains form the new connections. The variations in brain wiring limit the ability of the brain to transmit sensory information from the skin, muscles, vestibular system and the joints. This affects the interaction between the environment and the sensory information through impaired vision and hearing. This is referred to as Sensory Processing Disorder, a condition that is linked to approximately 90% of the autistic children’s population. A key feature of this disorder is the disconnection of the brain with sensory nerves. The most common type of Sensory Processing Disorder linked with autism is the loss of connections that are essential in processing of facial emotion and memory.

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Mobility

According to McPhillips, Finlay, Bejerot and Hanley, (2014), autistic children report higher prevalence of Generalized Joint Hyper mobility, meaning that they have joints that are more flexible than usual. This is a condition that manifests through having connective tissues that are easily stretched. Joint hyper mobility among the autistic children often subjects them to difficulties of sitting erect at tables, leg weaknesses that affect their ability to run, walk upright and draw or handwrite. These children often have tight shoulder and hip muscles, which inflict pain in the legs and hands. The tightness of the joint calf and muscles exposes autistic children to poor motor planning, hence adoption of toe walking and inability to stand with feet close together.

Brain Wiring

Children born with Down Syndrome have changes in their gene expressions of the brain as opposed to typical children, according to the study findings by Ralston and Partridge (2013). The study established changes in oligodendrocytes, the genes tasked with creating the brain’s myelin, a white matter that acts as a wiring insulation. Down syndrome destroys the wiring insulation, hence subjecting children to lower signaling and poor development of brain nerves. Children with Down syndrome have slower interactions between the brain and sensory organs, as they exhibit difficulties in integrating the information required for task learning.

Mobility

Approximately five to eight percent of children with Down Syndrome have abnormalities associated with the hip, which is linked to mobility. This syndrome generates subluxation, a condition of the dislocation of the hip. This affects the walking of the atypical Down Syndrome children, as they being to limp between the ages of three and eight years. Besides, the mobility of children with Down Syndrome is affected by joint inflammation, which causes hyper mobility of the joints. This explains the flat foot phenomenon among children with Down Syndrome, which manifests through rotation of the heels to a point where the child walks on the inside of the heel, or an inward bend of the front part of the foot behind the big toe. In severe cases, this may cause development of bone spurs.

Adaptive - Development of self-care, community self-sufficiency, personal-social responsibility and social adjustment; skills needed to do everyday tasks, leading to independence; includes eating, dressing, and toileting. 654

Personal-social responsibility

This refers to the ability of children to interact not just with other children but also with adults. Typically developing children demonstrate abilities to make choices, indicate their desires or needs, follow a schedule and solve problems through seeking assistance and application of personal decisions. Typically developed children take responsibility of their actions and decisions. Typically developed children acquire social responsibility skills from interactive play and social interactions with components of their surroundings.

Self-care development

The developmental appropriateness of typically developing children is denoted by their ability to perform tasks such as easting, dressing, grooming, toileting and hygiene. At the age of five, many children ought to have developed such skills. For the typically developing children, the completion of one task requires a connection of several distinct steps, which lengthens the duration of learning certain self-help skills.

Community Self-sufficiency

In early childhood, typically developing children function optimally for their ages and cultures with assistance from adults within their surroundings. As they grow older, these children develop skills of using public facilities such accessing public transport and community places. Typically developing children quickly learn how to behave in public and adopt appropriate mechanism for communicating their desires and choices to adults (Susan & Kimberly, 2014).

Personal-social responsibility

Children with autistic disorders have difficulties in understanding the social behaviors of others, a factor that makes it challenging for them to deduce socially acceptable behaviors. As Shire, Shih, Chang and Kasari (2016) explain, autistic children are identified by their literal thinking and interpretation of language. Besides, they find it difficult to understand the social context of language. Therefore, children with autism exhibit inconsistencies in their reaction to behaviors of different people within their environment, thus subjecting them to frustrations, confusion and stress owing to their inability to make decisions.

Self-care development

In a study conducted by Susan and Kimberly (2014), it was established that the range of abilities on the autism spectrum that parents of autistic children had to keep up with varied significantly. Children with autism encounter obstacles in developing self-help skills due to sensory insensitivity and their inability to master routine. Specific difficulties have been identified in learning self-help skills such as tooth brushing, maintenance of hygiene and toileting.

Community Self-sufficiency

Autistic children have invariable difficulties in acquisition of communicative skills, which affects their social engagement capabilities. Mostly, these children exhibit deficiencies in development of non-verbal communication skills and functional language skills. Therefore, their ability to share perspectives with others is significantly limited. This translates into slower adoption of interactive skills with the environment, thus requiring adult assistance till later stages of childhood to undertake tasks that typically developing children comfortably manage.

Personal-social responsibility

Children with Down syndrome, unlike those with autism, have reported a better understanding of the real-life emotions arising from situations of hurt and sympathy. However, these children have an affinity to understanding more than they have to expressing. Down syndrome children have sociable interactions with other children, though their temperament and personality affects the extent to which they demonstrate their sociability. As such, shyness, quietness and social withdrawal may be a common observation for children with this syndrome.

Self-care development

Based on the study findings by Dykens, Hodapp and Evans (2014), significant progression in personal independence is realized in the first five years of a child’s life. For children with Down Syndrome, however, such milestones are delayed till later stages of childhood. By the age of five, majority of the children with Down Syndrome are able to walk and dress, though they require supervision to go to the toilet. Between five and eight years, children with Down syndrome begin to eat less messily, with little dependence on writing and toileting assistance.

Community Self-sufficiency

An index of self-sufficiency among children with Down Syndrome, according to the study by Riquelme Agulló and Manzanal González (2013), indicates that these children do not have significant challenges to their self-sufficiency development. However, the relationship that the child fosters with the community, with more specificity the immediate family, during the earlier stages of infancy determines the level of social activity experienced by the child.

Cognitive – Child’s ability to grow and develop his/her thinking skills and adapt to changes; includes problem solving and pre-academic skills.

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Thinking Skills

No absolute definition has been developed to explain the concept of thinking sills development among children. However, thinking skills are a significant component of cognitive development that involves processes such as problem solving, categorization, memorization, reasoning, planning and creativity. For children below eight years, thinking skills envisage a transition from simple perception of events and objects, skillful action on objects to acquire specific goals to production and understanding language (Patterson, Rapsey & Glue, 2012). Several stages are involved in the development of the cognitive thinking skills, more so between the ages of two and seven years. Memory and imagination develop at the preoperational stage of typically developing children, where they display the ability to understand symbols, and memorize ideas of the past for use in the future.

Learning and pre-academic skills

Typically developing children learn by establishing connections between the neural pathways. Upon growing older, these children strengthen their neural pathways, hence the ability of skill development through practice. Learning for typically developing children occurs through senses, language, logic and reasoning. The concept of learning through logic encompasses the pre-academic skill acquisition. By the age of 6 years, typically developing children have the ability of making logical thinking. This is demonstrated in their social interactions with regard to the emotions of others and the mastering of simple arithmetic.

Thinking Skills

Autistic children think differently largely because their brains are different due to the brain wiring. The challenges that these children encounter in their quest to attain normal thinking abilities are varied, though they typically have difficulties in predicting the behaviors of other people based on their feelings and thoughts. The executive functioning of these children is significantly low, as their planning and problem-solving skills are minimized by their inability to memorize information optimally. One factor that enables children with typical development to undergo gradual development in their thinking skills is the interactions that they have with their environments and people around them. Interactional challenges with these components of cognitive development largely could the abilities of the autistic children to develop their thinking skills. Even more, this factor affects the speed at which autistic children coordinate, synthesize and memorize information from the environment.

Learning and pre-academic skills

Children with autism are often characterized by delays in the learning and pre-academic areas. Unlike typically developing children, autistic children cannot separate or group objects into categories (McPhillips, Finlay, Bejerot & Hanley, 2014). The learning and pre-academic skills require the child to have joint attention, which is low or absent among children with autism. These difficulties in attention make it challenging to maintain conversations, and interpret ideas, hence slower learning capabilities. The difficulty that autistic children have in understanding the desires and beliefs of other people affects their learning and pre-academic skill development. As a consequence, they are more inclined towards their own beliefs, making it nearly impossible to impart new knowledge in their minds.

Thinking Skills

Children with down syndrome are typically identified by the longer time they take to learn. This significantly affects their thinking skills development. The immediate memory system that enables typically developing children to develop thinking skills, also referred to as short-term memory, is low among children with down syndrome (Patterson, Rapsey & Glue, 2012). Therefore, these children have a mismatch in their ability to hold and process visual information as opposed to verbal information, which creates a link with the development of thinking abilities. As a consequence, Down syndrome restricts the ability of children to recall new sentences and words, with slower trends evidenced in their ability to process spoken language. This affects the process of learning, as it is a component of thinking.

Learning and pre-academic skills

As stated earlier, there exists an uneven cognitive profiling between the verbal and visual skills of children with Down Syndrome. Therefore, children with this condition exhibit stronger receptive vocabulary but weaker grammatical and linguistic skills, which strengthens their reading abilities. Studies have shown that the decoding and comprehension skills were more developed in children with Down syndrome in comparison to children with similar non-verbal mental age. Despite this, the learning skills of the Down syndrome children remain low when compared to those of normal children due to the impairments in understanding the links between language and reading.

Communication – Ways children make their wants and needs known to others and understand what others are saying to them; includes receptive language, expressive language, and articulation. 655

Receptive language

Typically developing children extract significance in receptive language, as they find it easier to communicate, follow instructions at school or at home and respond to questions appropriately (Ralston & Partridge, 2013). Some of the building blocks to development of receptive language for typically developing children include attention and concentration, social skills, pre-language skills and play skills.

Expressive language

With expressive language, typically developing children have the ability to express their ideas, thoughts, and needs while arguing in support of their viewpoint. Children often demonstrate ability to conduct their activities without any distractions and display comprehension of language. Typically developing children can understand communication without words, hence using facial expressions, eye contact, gestures and imitation to drive their points. Typically developing children, furthermore, have the ability to extrapolate the application of language in social situations, hence their motivation to interact with others while communicating.

Speech articulation

This is a significant link between the sensory transmission and the ability of the brain to make sense out of verbal communication. As the neural nerves grow stronger with age, children’s speech articulation development continues to grow. For typical development, children can learn how to produce different sounds in different languages within the age ranges of developmental sequence.

Receptive language

Receptive language disorder is a common diagnosis among children with autism. Unlike typically developing children, autistic children have lower abilities to understand and comprehend language (Shire, Shih, Chang & Kasari, 2016). During the earlier stages of their communication skills development, these children exhibit high prevalence of language delay, as they are unable to follow simple directions and commands, such as responding to their names.

Expressive language

A common feature of children with autistic disorders is their inability to initiate communication. This is a characteristic that is identifiable with the Expressive Language Disorder, which is the inability to comprehend and use language. As such, these children are unable to use language to express their basic needs. It is important to note, however, that the expressive language disorder in autistic children often supersedes the effects of receptive language. Children with autism are not effective communicators, hence cannot employ non-verbal behaviors when communicating or make sense out of words constructed in a different way.

Speech articulation

Speech articulation difficulties are a common observation among children with autism. This is largely attributed to their deficits in appreciating social situations. This makes them have limited urge for communication, as they may not understand the responses of other people to their messages. Poor speech articulation by autistic children affects their ability to pay attention, as the link between thoughts and words is impaired due to weak neural nerves.

Receptive language

Speech and language are major problems for many children born with Down syndrome. Many children with this condition are able to understand much more than they can express. This means, therefore, that their expressive language skills are lower than the receptive language skills. This creates the receptive-expressive gap. However, the difficulty that these children have with word endings, tenses, grammar and short sentence communications hinder their ability to link their stronger receptive language skills to express their needs.

Expressive language

The linguistic output by children suffering Down syndrome is less mature when compared to that of children with non- Down syndrome and younger children that have similar comprehension levels. This indicates a problem in the expressive language, hence affecting the ability of these children to comprehend. This means, therefore, that Down syndrome children, just like autistic children, suffer from the Expressive Language Disorder, which affects their communication abilities.

Speech articulation

According to Ralston and Partridge (2013), overwhelming evidence indicates the patterns of development of grammar and vocabulary in children with Down syndrome. Studies specify that children with Down syndrome have impaired spoken language, which manifests in lack of intelligibility that does not diminish with age rather with consistent mastery of phonology development. Therefore, these children have delays in their speech articulation abilities, as their speech production is inconsistent just as much as their articulation of speech is variable.

Social/Emotional – Development, display, regulation, and understanding of feelings and emotions, including how a child feels about him- or herself; how a child relates to others (people they know, strangers, children their age and older/younger children), including sharing, taking turns, understanding someone else’s perspective, and carrying on a conversation.

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Social development

This is an area of child development that concerns interaction that a child fosters with his or her environment (Susan & Kimberly, 2014). Typically developing children exhibit social interactive behaviors such as imitating the behaviors of adults around them, and focusing on one activity for brief periods. These children begin to show interest in other children from the age of two years, and do not require any rigidity in their routines.

Emotional development

Typically developing children acquire their emotions from the social interaction they have with people around them. These children often have an easier time controlling their emotions, and are identified by constant need of affection from parents. Typically developing children get easily frustrated and are in constant need of attention, which if they are denied express their emotions of jealousy.

The emotional development of typically developing children is linked with social interactions. Between the ages 0 and 1 year, these children exhibit an increasing responsiveness to stimuli under contingent control. Between 1 and 3 years, self-evaluation and self-consciousness become more evident in the expressive behavior of the typically developing children. 50

Social development

Children with autism are characterized by their inability to understand and express emotions. This adversely affects their social development, as they are unable to build strong social relations through emotions such as empathy, self-regulation and restraint. Their inability to communicate using non-verbal cues makes it even more difficult for them to foster social interactions, as the link between body expressions and the message is broken.

Emotional development

The major difference between young children with autism and typically developing children is in the inability of the former to describe their feelings. These children find it difficult to control and express their own emotions, which stretch to their inability to interpret the emotions of others. The misinterpretation of information acquired from the expressions of others affects their emotional development (Shire, Shih, Chang & Kasari, 2016).

Unlike typically developing children, autistic children learn less on emotions from social interaction. As such, between 1 and 3 years, autism manifests in children through a slower comprehension and production of expressive behavior and the affective states that are common in typically developing children. Consequently, they cannot exhibit behaviors linked with shame, pride or coyness. 55

Social development

Unlike autistic children and those with similar language difficulty and learning disability, children with Down syndrome have a better social behavior and social understanding. These children learn social routines through imitation and copying, as they are able to pick and interpret information owing to their receptive language strength.

Emotional development

Nearly half of the children population diagnosed with Down syndrome end up with mental health problems in adulthood. The progressive loss of cognitive skills from poor expressive skills often inflicts emotional inconsistencies among children with this condition (Riquelme Agulló & Manzanal González, 2013). During the earlier stages of life, Down syndrome subjects children to impulsive, disruptive and inattentive behaviors, which manifest from emotions related to oppositional behaviors and hyperactivity.

The increasing discrimination of the emotions of other people is a common feature that binds the emotional development of children with down syndrome to typically developing children. However, major differences in the lack of early forms of pro-social action and empathy are the key indicators of the effects of Down Syndrome on children’s emotional development. 54