Pediatric Development Disorders
Pediatric development disorders are mostly the health problems which include children having difficulty in performing simple tasks such as language, communication, socialization, and motor skills. In this article, we look at such problems in detail.
Children suffering from these disorders require extra attention and support from the family and the even medical services.
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)
ADHD is the most commonly diagnosed pediatric development disorder. It affects children and teens and continues into adulthood. A child suffering from ADHD is hyperactive and is unable to control impulses. It is more commonly seen occurring in boys and is discovered during the early years of school when the child shows problem paying attention.
A child with ADHD shows the following symptoms,
- Difficulty in completing a task
- Easy distraction
- Forgets daily task
- Lose things
- Makes careless mistakes
- Doesn’t follow instructions
- Daydream
- Doesn’t stay seated
- Interrupts in between conversation
- Cannot wait for his turn
Pervasive Development Disorder (PDD)
Also termed as an autism spectrum disorder, pervasive development disorder includes a delay in development, problems in socialization and communication in a child. This too is an increasingly common pediatric development disorder.
The symptoms displayed by the child suffering from PDD are,
- Avoiding eye contact
- Inability to express their thoughts
- Trouble controlling emotions
- Performing repetitive behaviors such as flapping, jumping, twirling
- Disagreement in any change in the schedules
Learning Disorder
A learning disorder is basically how a child receives and processes the information. Such children have a problem in reading, writing, calculating, understanding direction or learning new things. About 8-10 percent of children have some or the other type of learning disability, which too is one of the pediatric development disorders.
Dyspraxia:
A child suffering from dyspraxia displays affected motor skills. Motor skills help in movement and coordination. Such children may have difficulty in holding a spoon, tying shoelaces, or might bump into things. In later stages, they might face difficulty in writing and typing. Other problems seen in a child suffering from dyspraxia are speech difficulty, sensitivity to light, touch, smell, and taste, and difficulty in eye movement.
Dyslexia:
This is one of the commonest pediatric development disorders. A child suffering from dyslexia has a problem in processing language, difficulty in reading and writing. He also faces a problem with comprehension and grammar. Expressing themselves and putting together their thoughts is difficult for such children.
Dysgraphia:
Another commonest pediatric development disorder is dysgraphia. Children with dysgraphia have bad handwriting, troubles with spellings, and also difficulty in writing down the thoughts. It affects the writing ability of the person.
Dyscalculia:
It is difficulty in doing math. Young children may find it difficult to count or recognize numbers. As they grow older they may have trouble solving a problem and memorizing multiplication tables.
Auditory Processing Disorder:
It is a pediatric development disorder in which there is a problem in how the brain processes the sound heard. People with this disorder might find it difficult to read, distinguishing sound, and remembering things they’ve heard.
Visual Processing Disorder:
A child suffering from visual processing disorder might find it difficult to read or tell the difference between two similar looking objects. Such children have trouble with hand-eye coordination.
Communication Disorder:
Children suffering from communication disorder may find trouble communicating with others. They may not understand or make the sound of speech, have trouble in choosing a word or making a sentence structure.
It also has several types such as:
- Mixed receptive-expressive language disorders
- Speech-sound disorder
- Expressive language disorder
- Childhood-onset fluency disorder
- Social communication disorder
Pediatric development disorders are emerging as a challenge to the healthcare system globally. There is no specific cause for it. Developmental disorders can be an early sign of learning and attention issue. Early detection and intervention can prove to be of great help to a child in developing the skills.