If parents keep their child with a disability, they're afraid they'll get no support
and life will be very difficult for them and for the child.
When a child is born with difficulties or delays,
it's vital that parents know how to help their child develop effectively.
They need to focus on their child's strengths, not just the diagnosis.
Good Early Childhood Intervention should be a natural process.
It should happen any time, anywhere, any place.
Good early intervention is not a package, it's individualized.
Good early childhood intervention is an intervention that looks at the child,
looks at child's context, namely the family that is very very near that child.
Effective early childhood intervention is to make sure that the family and the child
get the services that they need to become as functional and competent and
happy as possible.
Effective early intervention can totally change a child's life,
and also change the family's life.
The first 3 years are incredibly important and the deviation from normal that we see
in children who are not nurtured who are not provided with the normal stimulation,
especially if they have disabilities, is just absolutely profound.
There's a great of what we call plasticity in development.
That is the ability to change.
Not that there isn't the ability to change later on,
but there's much more in the first 3 years.
By beginning early on we have the opportunity to really improve
the outcomes for those kids long term.
And I mean in how they can live their life, the satisfaction of doing well in school,
maybe even being prepared for some kind of work situation or living situation
and their health is also better.
There's a real concern everywhere about identifying children with delays as
early as possible, without scaring families, or even scaring
children.
You don't want to over-identify kids if you don't need to.
But I think generally speaking if you wait too long
and you don't identify that they have a delay, you may have waited too long
and not taken advantage of those critical first few months or first few years of life.
An effective early childhood intervention program begins with home visiting.
And home visiting is important because the early interventionist gets to met the family
and if there's other people in the household, and you get to see that child within the context
of where that child lives.
The most important source of children's' development is inside the family.
It's embedded in their daily routines.
You learn to play tennis by playing tennis.
You learn to play baseball by playing baseball.
You learn to read by reading.
So in early intervention, we incorporate those same principles,
incorporating our intervention into what children do all day every day
and are expected to do will increase the likelihood that they will
be able to learn the task.
Relationships between the early interventionist and the parent or primary caregivers
are the most important aspect of early intervention that you can focus on.
The family is the most powerful resource to that child.
That family is walking a life-long journey.
The key to being successful with families is, I think, to really listen to them.
And that means really having conversations about what they want.
And getting to know them as people, and not just as parents of a child with a
delay or a disability or some sort of issue which they want remediated.
One of the things that I've observed in some of my clinical work
is if there's a child who has a disability, it often creates a lot of tension in the family.
And if there's someone who can come in and help guide the parents through that,
it can make an enormous difference.
Early intervention prevents child abandonment and improves child-parent relations.
Early Childhood Intervention, particularly when it's high quality,
is the first step towards high quality inclusive education,
because we include those children from day one in our educational provision.
Early intervention helps children with disabilities get what other children get.
They have the opportunity to play, to communicate, and to be outside.
As children start to transition at age 3 or age 5,
it's critical that the early interventionist works with the receiving school
in order for the child to be successful in that classroom.
It is economically more viable for a society to keep its disabled children with their family
than it is to place them in an institution.
It's not real difficult to provide this care.
It's cheap, compared to what it costs in the future to rectify the problems
and to me it's a no-brainer because I see the effects of it everyday.
So many families that I see express the fact that
they have grown enormously from a child with a disability.
Watching their child overcome barriers that that's child's siblings didn't have to
overcome is in many ways a growth experience for the
entire family.
If you're going to immunize children, if you're going to provide nutritional counseling,
if you're going to provide good pre-natal care,
you're going to provide early intervention, because... it's inseparable.
Survival and development are inseparable.
You know, we cannot just invest in survival and then leave the ones that have survived
without the support that they need.