Parents of children with developmental disabilities usually despair about whether they can be productive in life. Experts say this is possible if necessary steps are taken, KOFOWOROLA BELO-OSAGIE reports.
The joy of parents is to see their children healthy and grow to achieve their full potential as active members of the society. However, children with developmental disabilities (autism, Down Syndrome, cerebral palsy or other physical or mental challenges) may not be able to live up to these expectations, especially in a country like Nigeria where many of them are still hidden from the public or neglected.
Many parents do not easily accept that their special children may not grow like others, and struggle to cope with the burden of educating and caring for them.
Last Saturday, the Children Development Centre (CDC), Surulere, in Lagos, opened its doors to members of the public, including parents in the lower rung of the socio-economic ladder who have children with developmental disabilities.
The programme was to enable them to learn about possibilities of their wards getting educated, learning to use technology, and how various approaches, such as hydrotherapy and multi-sensory exposure, could help them develop and gain skills. A portion of the programme was dedicated to teaching them coping skills in training this category of children.
Some of the parents shared heartbreaking experiences of how they were unfairly judged by other members of the society because of their special children.
Mrs Tola Abibatu (not real names), said her sister called her child a ‘snake’ that she should have suffocated with a pillow.
“She asked me what was I carrying about – that is this one a child or a snake? She said I should have put him under a pillow and sat on him until he died. I still feel pained as I recall what she told me,” the woman recounted sadly.
A parent, Mrs Bisola Idris (not real names), asked consultant psychiatrist Dr Yewande Oshodi if her child born with developmental disabilities could ever recover and live a normal life.
Responding, Dr Oshodi said the million dollar question had no straightforward answer as causative factors that lead to disabilities vary.
“Developmental disabilities are caused by neurological problems that may vary in severity. They are not caused by the same things and cannot have the same treatment. Improvement over the years depends on the level of neurological damage I cannot tell you whether your child will get better and not need constant care. All I can say is that you should take one day at a time. Do your best for them,” she said.
Dr Oshodi said many members of the society do not want to be associated with people with disabilities mainly because they do not understand their cases, and as a result do not know how to respond to them. She counseled parents to seek support from fellow parents with special children and not just anyone. She also advised them not to neglect themselves while caring for their wards.
“You need to take care of yourself and accept help from other members of the family and friends in caring for your children. From time to time, take breaks to regenerate – take a few days off to recover from the stress of caring for your children. At times you may need professional counseling and support. Ask questions; it is a useful strategy,” she said.
In an interview with The Nation, Another consultant psychiatrist, Dr Mashudat Bello-Mojeed, said it was important that parents and caregivers get educated about their wards’ conditions and how best to care for them. She said denial or wrong diagnosis affects parents’ ability to cope with caring for special children.
She added: “You need to get correct information on what the individual has, if not, there would be a lot of rejection, discrimination, even exploitation. In the family, the support they have, are they making use of it? Are they talking about it, or are they are just accepting it as ‘this is my cross?’ Is there hope? Are they putting effort? Are they labelling those children by themselves or they’re seeing them as okay?”
Beyond concerns about the ability of special children to fit into normal societal role, Founder of CDC, Dr Yinka Akindayomi, said parents, teachers and the rest of the society should begin to see them as a class of people who learn differently. She said society had a lot to gain from using the special skills children with developmental disabilities have – and she said this comes from educating them differently – using ways that attract them and not judging them based on conventional numeracy or literacy skill sets.
She said: “We want to show that even if people have developmental disabilities, when given the opportunities people can thrive. Our students have a creative way of learning and they can teach us how to solve problems because we might have a singular, way of solving a set of problems, and because they cannot do what we can do, they might have a different way of solving problems. So we can also tap into the way they learn and use some of that to solve some issues and problems. I tell people that when you are looking for people for jobs, your talent pool is decreasing because everyone is honing in certain people but there’s a whole lot of people with autism, down syndrome, even cerebral palsy that have a different way of solving issues and would be part of that talent pool.
“So the idea is for us to get together and work and get these children to be exposed. It is because they don’t have these opportunities, that is why we think this person cannot do this. We have never given them this opportunity, and I think over the last one year the facilitators that come here have seen that these children can actually learn a lot and also teach them a lot.”
Abraham Raymond, a facilitator with Women Technology Centre (W.TEC), is one of those who have discovered that special children can do much more than people expect. He was deployed by W.TEC about a year ago to CDC to teach computer and technology to special needs children under a partnership between both organisations to expose children with developmental needs to technology.
Abraham said his students, who are different from the sets of learners he used to teach at W.TEC, learnt basic digital literacy, design, and robotics using Lego bricks.
“They are really surprising because when I first started with them, I was like ‘how would I work with people like this?’ ‘God please help me’! But now I have gotten to understand the kind of people they are and I get to flow with them. It helps me give a second thought in the sense that you don’t just judge people when you just meet them, rather you move close to them, you tend to know them and see the potentials in them,” he said.
Founder of W.TEC, Mrs Oreoluwa Lesi, said partnering with CDC to expose special needs children to technology had been an eye-opener. Though still evaluating the effectiveness of the lessons, Mrs Lesi said parents had given feedback that their wards had picked interest in technology. She, however, added that long breaks from computer classes affected the retention of lessons learnt so spoke of plans to increase frequency of lessons.
“We used to have one class per week but we have found that it is not enough. We are planning to increase it to twice and also hold Saturday classes for special children and their siblings and even other children in the community. We closed for one month during Christmas and by the time we resumed the children had forgotten most of what they had learnt. So we now know we can close for so long,” she said.
CDC’s Head of Operations, Ms Ebele Oputa, said parents would benefit from exposing all their children – with or without developmental disabilities to various activities the centre engages its learners.
She explained that while children with disabilities would generally learn better, even the typical children, especially the siblings of those with learning disabilities would understand more how to support them. She said all children would benefit from hydrotherapy, multi-sensory learning – which incorporates visual, auditory, doing and touching activities in learning.
“Even if is once a week let the children come and do dental care and then do the computer as well with the hydrotherapy. Hydrotherapy is water play, it will benefit children who have developmental issues but other kids can as well will relax and have fun in it; and then it is another avenue for siblings to understand a little bit of how they could support peers who have special needs or other case once they just see other kids who have special needs to see how they could embrace them,” she said.
