Mental retardation is a permanent defect, which is neither a disease nor a psychological disease, nor can it be cured by drugs. I have collected relevant contents about children with mental retardation, welcome to refer to them!
Characteristics of emotional and behavioral development of mentally retarded children
As one of the basic psychological processes of human beings, emotion occupies a certain position in individual psychological activities. It is of great value to the survival and life activities of organisms. Emotional problems affect the way of individual cognitive activities and the choice of behavior, involving the formation of personality and the handling of interpersonal relationships.
1. The level of emotional and behavioral development is low.
The emotional and behavioral development of mentally retarded children has remained at a low level for a long time, which shows obvious immaturity compared with normal children of the same age. They have emotional experiences at the sensory level, such as disgust brought by stench and comfort brought by fresh air; The emotional experience at the cognitive level is relatively slow, such as the joy of success, the frustration of failure, and the fear when facing threats. In behavioral development, they are obviously not as good as normal children of the same age, tend to be younger, and often give people the impression of childish behavior.
2. Poor emotional control ability
Children with mental retardation are emotionally unstable and easily dominated by external situations. Their emotions and behaviors are often dominated by physical needs and passions, and they are not as good as normal children in controlling their emotions and behaviors. It is difficult for them to adjust and control their emotions and behaviors according to social morality and behavior norms. Once their needs are not met, there may be obvious emotions and behaviors, such as crying and making a scene, and it is difficult to control themselves. Even after entering school, their emotional and behavioral control ability is far less than that of normal children. For example, king of the children, a moderately mentally retarded student in our school, has a bad habit of taking other people's textbooks and putting them in his crotch. It is difficult to get them back. Once, he took another classmate's book, and before he could put it in his crotch, the teacher found it and took it back from him. So he lay on the ground crying and making noise, and no one could stop him until he cried enough.
Psychological characteristics of mentally retarded children
The intellectual development of mentally retarded children has something in common with normal children. Both of them develop with age, but children with mental retardation develop more slowly than normal children, mainly in three aspects: the starting point of development is late; Slow growth rate; The level reached is low.
Emotional characteristics.
(1) is unstable and not deep. Children with mental retardation are emotionally unstable and have no profound experience. It shows that their emotions are changeable and impulsive, and they are easily dominated by external situations, such as "breaking tears into laughter" and "turning anger into joy". Their emotions are exposed, and their inner experience is not profound, monotonous and extreme. They are only happy and sad or satisfied and dissatisfied, and time can easily change their emotions and reactions.
② Emotional reaction is inconsistent with the external action that causes emotions. For example, the content that is not funny in the teacher's lecture will cause them to burst into laughter, but they will not laugh at the really funny content.
Poor ability to control and adjust emotions. Their ability to control and adjust their emotions is poor, and it is difficult to control their emotions according to the standards of moral behavior required by society. For example, when their needs are not met, they will make a scene regardless of the occasion.
(4) Have a morbid feeling. In children with mental retardation, we sometimes see some morbid emotions, such as exciting reactions caused by small stimuli; Lost children's hobbies, indifferent feelings, indifferent to life and people.
Behavioral characteristics.
(1) lack of initiative. The initiative of mentally retarded children is generally poor. Most of them don't do housework at home and most of them don't finish their homework at school.
(2) irresistible impulse. Because of poor self-control, mentally retarded children often can't recognize, understand and reasonably respond to external stimuli, and even react to external stimuli very primitive. This primitive reaction is dominated by passion and impulse, without judgment and right and wrong thinking, regardless of the consequences, directly into action. If children with mental retardation are not satisfied, they will break their beloved toys or valuable things at home.
Impressionable and stubborn. On the one hand, children with mental retardation are easily hinted to do what others deliberately instigate him to do, but on the other hand, they cannot accept reasonable suggestions from others and appear stubborn.
psychic characteristic
1, feeling dull and slow
In life, they can only feel the stimulus when it is very eye-catching, bright, large and long-lasting, so they receive less external information per unit time than normal children.
2. Lack of concentration
They are often attracted by other sounds and bright colors, so they can't concentrate, which often means they can't concentrate on listening.
3. Mechanical memory is acceptable.
This is the best psychological ability of mentally retarded children, and many things need to be thought about before they can learn. They rely on mechanical memory mechanics.
4. Weak language ability
Language problems are relatively large, 80% have language barriers, pronunciation difficulties, and only know a few very simple commands. Even if a few children with mild mental retardation can speak, they speak very simple sentence patterns and the content is extremely poor, so they often can't express themselves.
5. Poor abstract thinking ability
Children with mental retardation can't really learn abstract concepts, such as colors, shapes and numbers. They often learn by conditioned reflex and memory, and their imagination is not rich. If you change the position they know, it will be difficult to identify.
Step 6 get excited more easily
Children with mental retardation move a lot, never stop, and their behavior is unorganized; Resistant children are shrinking, timid and unsociable. These two types of children have poor adaptability to the environment and interpersonal skills.
7. Poor willpower
I will cry or go to the teacher when I encounter small difficulties. They can't work hard to do difficult studies alone, such as folding a dart and sticking a cut apple figure in the middle of a piece of white paper. They have no perseverance.
8. Emotions change quickly
They will cry for a while, then they will smile through tears, and it is easy to cause inappropriate emotional reactions because of one thing.
9. Poor ability to live independently
Some parents are very concerned about their babies and are unwilling to cultivate their self-care ability. Therefore, many children with mild to moderate mental retardation aged four or five will not eat with a spoon, take off their clothes or go to the toilet to relieve themselves.
10, a little curious.
Interested in strangers, easy to approach, like to surround guests; Things you haven't played, such as mobile phones and small flashlights, can't stop playing.
1 1, rigid behavior and language
He likes climbing stairs and often does so. Once other children come to play, he makes a hullabaloo about or pushes other children away. Some children who can talk a little will always say something, such as you go away.
12, like music
As soon as I listen to a song, I can't help listening, getting close to it and even dancing.
Causes of mental retardation
There are many reasons for mental retardation, which can be divided into congenital factors and acquired factors:
Congenital factor
Chromosome abnormalities, such as Down syndrome, and the combination of genetic factors; There is something wrong with the metabolic system. It is easier for close relatives to get married or for older women to give birth to such babies.
(2) Acquired factors
Pregnancy: During pregnancy, the mother may be infected by germs (such as measles and diabetes), take medicine by mistake, fall down, suffer from malnutrition, drink alcohol, smoke, take drugs or be infected by X-ray radiation. It may lead to mental retardation of the born baby.
During childbirth: premature delivery, dystocia, infant hypoxia, bacterial infection or underweight lead to poor brain development or damage of children, leading to mental retardation.
Infants and young children: neonatal spasm, hypoglycemia, bacterial infection (such as meningitis and jaundice), malnutrition or accidental brain injury will all affect intelligence.
Acquired cultivation: Acquired environmental cultivation also affects the development of individual intelligence.
speciality
Learning aspect
Because of their limited ability, their learning persistence is short and their memory is poor; Low application ability; The motivation of learning is not spontaneous; Lack of abstract thinking, weak understanding and comprehension ability; Lack of learning transfer ability, unable to use the knowledge and skills flexibly.
Emotional
They are usually simple-minded and straightforward. As long as someone is willing to talk to them and care about them, they will be very happy.
Communication aspect
Their expressive ability, especially verbal expressive ability, is very poor, and they often can't express what they want to say. Poor abstraction and adaptability, and may not be able to handle problems independently.
Behavioral aspect
Some mentally retarded people may have behavioral problems (for example, losing their temper to attract others' attention), which is usually related to the methods of discipline and the attitudes and expectations of society towards them.
Learning characteristics
(1) Cognition:
The cognition and thinking mode of external things are the factors that affect behavior.
1, lack of integration ability
You can't completely integrate a thing, so you know that everything is a part, and each part is independent.
2. Poor short-term memory
Short-term memory is the ability to remember things immediately after knowing them, and it will be transformed into long-term memory after strengthening. The reason of poor short-term memory is that the speed of brain information processing is too slow.
3. Post-cognitive and abstract thinking disorder:
Post-cognition is to recall, supervise, review and improve after doing something. Children with mental retardation lack this ability because of their poor short-term memory, and they will immediately forget what they have just done. So there is no way to review and improve your behavior afterwards.
Children with mental retardation have poor abstract thinking ability. In fact, moderate and severe children don't even have abstract thinking, because abstract thinking requires the development of brain nerves to a fairly high degree.
4. Sequential processing is superior to parallel processing:
Sequential processing is to deal with things step by step in chronological order, while parallel processing is to deal with many things at the same time in a period of time. When teaching children, we should use sequential explanations as much as possible, so that they can finish things step by step.
5, lack of recognition ability:
Children's ability to distinguish the same event in different environments and scenes is insufficient. It is that children often can't tell when they can do it and when they can't.
Teaching and training
There are many aspects to be paid attention to in the education and rehabilitation training of children with mental retardation. Both educational methods and educational attitudes are "learning".
1. When teaching and training children with mental retardation, we should do everything possible to attract children's attention, stimulate their curiosity, cultivate their interest and mobilize their various senses to participate in the training.
2. Personal training, group training or collective training should be arranged during training. The design of training form and the determination of training content should be considered from the individual needs of trainees.
3. The decomposition steps of the training program should be fine and slow, which is easy for mentally retarded children to accept. Trainers should pay attention to the principle that each step is a small step and repeated cycles, so that mentally retarded children can master skills in repeated practice.
The most commonly used method in training is job analysis. That is, analyze a target task into several steps and train to complete the target in sequence. Generally, it is done in two forms: sequential method or reverse method.
Sequential method is also called forward chain method. According to the steps of the work, start training from the first step, and then train the second step after the first step is completed until the last step.
The reverse order method, also called the reverse chain method, starts from the last step according to the working steps, and then teaches the previous step backwards until the first step.
4. If a mentally retarded child encounters serious obstacles, the training takes a lot of time and the effect is not good, but the trainer should not worry, but should actively find ways to help him adopt auxiliary tools or improve the training environment to achieve the same effect.
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