USA: Jasour – News Desk
Irrespective of culture, race or geographical location; children are not just bye products of the marital relationship but a crucial basis for societal modulation of the family unit.
This explains the basis for different cultures having varied but potent reactions to infertility where children cannot be produced and having children with peculiar challenges. Beyond the medical explanations for infertility or special children; there are very potent socio-cultural and religious issues that are capable of militating against the beneficial approach to the effective management options of these problems.
Special children in this context are those with peculiar needs that require much more support than other children for them to function optimally. This condition may have been precipitated by the mishandling of the pregnancy where certain drugs are taken that damage the growing brain of the fetus, failure to take precautions against the possibility of jaundice in certain circumstances or mismanagement of the delivery process such as prolonged labor, premature draining of the waters that can result in fetal distress and mechanical trauma to the fragile brain of the newborn baby through unprofessional handling of the delivery process.
We have many untrained traditional birth attendants and religious maternity centers that are not professionally supervised which may lead to an increased incidence in the population of children with special needs. There may be other causes traceable to some genetic factors, some inherited metabolic disorders or advanced maternal age. These children may be born with cognitive defects associated with seizures that could manifest in many ways. As the child grows there may be deficits in the achievement of developmental milestones with associated poor performance in the school short of that expected for their chronological age.
The overall presentation could be mild, moderate or severe depending on the severity on the overall global functioning of the child. These children may also have problems with posture and sensations that will require orthopedic and physiotherapeutic interventions. These children often require a multi-disciplinarian approach in their management with the ultimate goal of assisting them to maximize the available intellectual resources for their ultimate good.
Some of them can perform brilliantly well in certain aspects of life when appropriate educational techniques identify such dimensions and assist in developing them. Drugs are often indicated in a number of them which should be professionally administered so that the side effects of some of these drugs do not outweigh the beneficial effects especially for children with behavioral challenges that require medications.
However, our society through the sick role has explanations and prescribed interventions for these special children which make it difficult for the parents of these children to get the best out of them. Within this context, children with special needs are viewed as products of spiritual attacks and that their parents may be serving some form of punishment from God for wrongdoing which can explain the hostile attitude of some neighbors to these children and the society at large.
