Insights Part 2

A few more insights from my book--

-"Children with NLD generally have poor safety awareness because they don't anticipate the consequences of their actions. They are prone to frequent injuries."

-"Visual perception is another area of deficit. Spatial thinking develops in infancy from the information gained from exploration. Moving through the world, we learn to relate the sizes of objects to our own bodies to allow us to better understand our world. We use this information to know location, shape, quantity, direction, time and movement. We dorm visual memories of our environments. We make mental notes regarding the effort needed to move a ball or lift a glass successfully to our mouths or walk through a room of furniture. But children with NLD often lack this ability to gather, interpret, and understand information taken in through the sense of sight."

"When children have a decreased sense of self, a poor sense of where their bodies are in space, and a poor understanding of how to safely move and navigate in their environment, they tend to invent coping strategies that serve to control their environment. They often choose to adhere strictly to routines, because eliminating novel experiences helps them feel more confident and comfortable. They find that decreasing the number of changes decreases the number of new demands placed upon them. With this control in place, they have greater opportunity to succeed using their routines, their rote learning, and their past successful performances."

-"...play with others is full of challenges, changes, and unexpected events. This can be stressful and difficult for children who crave sameness as a way of coping. They can easily become anxious about play and try to avoid it. While they long for friends, they may be working so hard on trying to control play to ensure their success and limit their failures, and to limit the levels of anxiety they are experiencing, that the child they're attempting to play with feels controlled and considers the other child bossy. Of course, this breeds a new cycle. Avoiding opportunities decreases the chances for learning new play skills, learning to negotiate, share, and be with others in relaxing ways. As these kids frown older and experience increasing difficulty and frustration in academic and social situations, they are prone to anxiety and poor self-esteem."