The child with a learning disability

With more and more advances in the understanding of children with behavioural, mental and learning-related problems, it is becoming increasingly difficult to separate one disorder from the other. Thus, compartmentalising a child as one with, say, Attention Deficit, or, say, Dyslexia, is useful for classification, for stratifying data, and for planning individualised care, in reality, children often have a mixture of problems from more than one specific category of a disorder. 

This, on the one hand, complicates rendering simplified information to parents, and our ability to deliver specific modalities of therapy. On the other hand, it enables us to better deliver holistic care to the affected child, as many of the therapeutic modalities are dependent on simple but standardised principles. 

LD is the new compact form of addressing children with some or the other mental disability. This does not include the deficiencies resulting from acute illnesses that often causes complex mental problems and not just LD. However, it does include dyslexia, problems with maths, problems with praxis (the carrying out of tasks) - the latter being also called dyspraxia.

Often, children with minor epilepsies will seemingly not pay attention in class and we would mistakenly name them as dyslexics. In the same vein, dyslexics might get labelled as "retards"- a rather pejorative use of the expression. Thus, one can easily see why managing a child with a LD can be very challenging.