Early Intervention is a Requirement or a Duty?

The last forty years have witnessed a dramatic increase in awareness, services and opportunities for young children with special needs. Legislative initiatives, litigation, public policy and the efforts of advocacy groups, are some of the factors that have helped to focus attention on this group of children.

Despite the progress and development as mentioned above, the title of this article opens up a matrix of puzzling questions and fears of the unknown in every parent mind of special needs children. It may even possibly lead to self-induced ignorance or indifferent attitude towards the subject matter. The question here is, a requirement or a duty? If given the choice, we opined it to be both, i.e. a requirement and a duty as a parent.

Our opinion is based on the fact that the so called “special needs” of this group of children is not a contagious disease, a terminal illness or a social ill that leads to humiliation. Other than those special needs that requires medical attention e.g. cerebral palsy, the rest of the special needs spectrum is just a situation or environment that the child is averse to and requires some adjustments or in certain cases, some intense modification of the situation and/or the environment. So why deprive the poor child from living life to its full capacity when there are available and accessible solutions?

Case in point of living life to full capacity, as parents, we can find ways and means to nurture, nourish, and inculcate certain habits deemed honourable in the so called normal society. Parents can even go that extra mile to add an extra tuition class, or extra-curricular activities just to add another expertise to the child. If that is the case, why can’t such time, effort and attention be given to the special needs children, too. The only difference is that the special needs child is not attending a maths or science or language class or training in sports that can bring honour that boost the ego of certain parents. The special needs children are attending therapy sessions, which has nothing to shout about. It just seems so unfair that these special needs children are attending therapy session just to conform to our “normal” society benchmark, just so that they can be deemed normal in the eyes of the society.

Since with time and patience, special needs children can be assisted, and in most cases, grow up to be productive adults, why deprive them of this opportunity? In fact, it should be deemed a form of abuse if a child is not given the fair opportunity to live life to its full capacity and capability, regardless normal or special needs children.

Having highlighted all the above, let’s not be too critical and start levelling all the blames to the parents who may genuinely not aware, uninitiated or uninformed of such special needs situation. Detecting special needs may not seem to be that straight-forward. For example, early detection is possible only if a child is born with obvious features and display moderate to severe disability. In many cases, a child may have normal looks or with mild disability and not noticeable until they start school. That is when the non-diagnosed special needs child faces stressful academic studies, the need to interact, follow instructions and rules. These are the triggers that will magnify their disability. Some of the common disabilities or multiple disabilities in children are visually impaired, hearing impaired, communication disorders, mentally retarded, learning disabilities, autism, ADHD, cerebral palsy, emotional and behavioural disorders, physical disability.

Therefore, before the parents are to be blamed, the government should take a more serious stance to include the requirement of all children to be continuously screened for special needs until a certain age. Similar to the existing health assessment already in place e.g. growth patterns monitoring, immunisation schedule, etc. This will take the pressure off from uninformed parents, and the child will have a fair chance to be detected early by professional therapist. Enforcement of ensuring the children are monitored of their growth and health progress, has to be proactively enforced. Where parents cannot bring their children to be assessed, then perhaps a mobile medical team reach out to them.

With this and such proactive efforts by the governments, early intervention can be made into a requirement and a duty of parents. It is a long term efforts and needs the joint efforts and participation of governments, parents, and medical personnel to ensure its success.