How to ensure young children to interact

All young blind children will find it very difficult to forget strong social links with their peers and others unless informed adults prepare the way for them. There is no doubt that for the most part, they will remain isolated unless they know they are part of a group and on-going help is available throughout each session. This will at least give them the opportunity to respond and interact with their peers. As we know, the whole process takes a lot of time and commitment from both teachers and careres. It is this extra input from adults, which constitutes the basic difference between socialization of blind and sighted very young children. So, such children need special education to become sociable and independent.

When parents find out that their child is blind or visually impaired, they often wonder how the child's eye condition will affect development and how the child will get an education. Too many times, the information they read about blindness and visual impairment is negative and depressing. They might hear, for instance, that 80% of learning is visual. Well, we're here to say that that is only true for fully sighted kids! For blind children, learning will come through touch and hearing and smell and taste and movement, as well as through any vision the child may have. Your child may be blind/visually impaired, but not all is lost. Blind children can do well in school, participate in sports and extracurricular activities, contribute to the community, go to college, and accomplish just about anything their sighted classmates can.

The parent is the child's first teacher. Follow-up studies on premature babies, for instance, show that the best indicators of how well the child will do later in life are not how much eyesight the child has or whether or not there is cognitive delay, but how able the parents are to intervene and how stimulating the home environment is.

Parents need to become good observers of their child in order to determine if the child's development is proceeding on target or if the child is " stuck" and needs intervention. They should get a developmental chart, figure out what your child is able to do now and what the next logical next step would be to work on. If there are delays in development, they are to learn the early intervention techniques that will help the baby progress. It's also vital to find out about the importance of early movement experiences and to discover the ways in which you can connect with your child and provide information and expences that do not require vision.

The goal of all education is to prepare students to participate in society, and for most people, vision is fundamental to learning. But what happens when a child has a visual impairment? Limitations on the ability to receive information from the world around us can have far-reaching effects, including an impact on a child's ability to understand concepts, learn language, move about freely with confidence, anddevelop in a variety of ways. For this reason, the families and teachers of children with visual impairments use alternative means and strategies for teaching them to read, write, interact socially, and perform various daily tasks. Currently, nearly 94, 000 children in the United States who are blind or visually impaired are being helped by some form of special education. These students are an extremely diverse group ranging from infants to young adults through age 21.

The nature and degree of their visual impairments are equally diverse, as are the ways they adapt to their vision loss. Some students have other disabilities in addition to visual impairment. Their level of academic functioning spans a great range. And in every way they are as disparate as any other group of individuals in terms of ethnic and racial background, religion, geographic location, and income. Given this diversity, it is important to remember that each child needs to be viewed as an individual with unique needs.

(J. Kagan. Temperament and the reaction to unfamiliarity. – Child development, 68(1), 1997. – P.131-143,.)