Parenting Education: Special Education – Mental Retardation
posted September 6, 2009 - 4:15pm
Knowing how to help your child succeed in life can be the most challenging role you will face, you need answers, advice, and most of all you need parenting education. Helping your child to succeed in life becomes infinitely more complex for children with exceptionalities or disabilities.
This three part series will provide parenting education for helping children that have special education needs for those with mental retardation.
Understanding the Mental Retardation Diagnosis:
Children with mental retardation have a cognitive disability that interferes with their ability to think, process information, and retrieve information that is stored in their brains. Children with mental retardation still have the potential to do and accomplish much in his or her life; however, these children have specialized needs and abilities that parents need to ensure are met.
These are the top three ways that you can help your child with mental retardation.
- Advocate for your child. As a child with special education needs, your child is eligible to receive specialized services to meet his or her special needs. This includes a host of services that your child is eligible through The Department of Developmental Disabilities.
The Department of Developmental Disabilities offer services to help your child develop his or her skills and abilities. Through the Department of Developmental Disabilities, your child can qualify for habilitation service that can help him or her develop adaptive, cognitive, and life skills. Adaptive skills work to help your child learn skills such as hand washing and toileting. Cognitive goals teach your child academic skills; such as, learning to read, telling time, language development, and math. Life skills teach your child import lessons that they will need in life; such as, cooking and money.
Many times through the Department of Developmental Disabilities, your child can qualify to receive additional speech and occupational therapy services. This can be very helpful because most of the time school’s only provide approximately ½ hour of speech and occupational services to a student per week. Like all skills, the more opportunities that your child has to receive specialized speech lesson and occupational therapy the better he or she will be able to develop these skills.
- Teach your child that he or she can be independent. Many times parents of children with mental retardation will do many tasks for their child due to them thinking that they are helping their child, who is unable to do this task for him or herself. The truth is that all individuals with mental retardation can learn to become independent. It is important for parents to foster the attitude of helping their child to become as independent as possible.
Instead of doing things for your child, parents should help their children learn the task for him or herself. One great strategy to use for helping your child to learn a skill or task is to break the skill down into small parts. Consider hand washing, you have the following steps 1) turn on water, 2) get soap, 3) rub hands together, 4) rinse hands under the water, 5) turn off water, and 6) dry hands. You can start by teaching your child to do one small part of the task and helping them with the other parts; then once they become proficient at one part of the task you can teach them the next step in the task. You can start with teaching them either the first or the last step of the task. Using the hand-washing example, you can have your child turn on the water (first step) and help them with the other steps. Continuing with the hand washing example, you can help your child with all the steps until you get to drying hands (the last step), which you will prompt your child to do for him or herself. Generally, teaching the last step and going backwards in teaching the task to the child results in the task being more motivating for your child to learn.
Teachers can be a great resource in providing guidance in teaching students a task. Many of the tasks that parents would like their child to learn can be incorporated into their Individualized Education Plans or Individualized Service Plans for those receiving in-home habilitation services. Then the child will be working on learning the skill at school and home. Shoe tying is a very common skills that student’s need to learn, and this goal can be incorporated into a child’s Occupational Therapy goals in their Individualized Education Plan.
- Set high, but attainable goals for your child. Children with mental retardation are capable of doing many amazing things. As parents, you should set high, but attainable goals. Everyone needs to be challenged to meet their full potential and children with special education needs are no different. If you do not challenge your child; then he or she will never learn. Furthermore, your child will miss important learning experiences. A good rule is to set goals that are within your child’s ability to meet with regular practice of the skill.
We have covered three ways that you can help your child with mental retardation. Please check back soon for part two, and part three of parenting education on helping your child with special education needs.
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Comments
Great post
I fully support this I have been around mentally challenged children my whole life and I believe they want to be independent and not babied. My best friend who is mentally challenged has made great stride because she was given the chance to learn and do for herself. My mother has been a special ed teacher my entire life and thats why after having many years of getting to observe children with different conditions they many need help but they also want to think for themselves. Thanks for writing a great artical.
Wild Dreamer
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