Do learning difficulties affect children's emotions?

Parents and teachers alike will agree that children who struggle at school usually feel bad about their academic abilities. Most of them will certainly have some emotional problem related to the learning difficulty.

While this is probably considered to be a ‘known fact’ amongst educators, another fact, gleaned from practical experience, is that the priority seems to be on the diagnosis and remediation of the learning difficulty or disability. The need to address the emotional aspects takes a backseat.

The way emotions and learning difficulties or disabilities interact is a complex subject and not always easy to unravel. Essentially, there are some guidelines to keep in mind:

Emotional distress may be caused by learning difficulties.Learners who fail to thrive at school may suffer from anxiety, depression, loneliness and low self-esteem – especially regarding their academic abilities
Learning difficulties may aggravate social and emotional functioning.If a child struggles with mental processing that is severe enough to cause a learning problem, they may experience problems in nonacademic areas as well. This typically shows itself in behaviours that don’t conform to the child’s social environment. The result is escalating emotional concerns such as feelings of being misunderstood, sadness and anxiety – all on which may already be present because of the learning problem.
Emotional issues can disguise a child’s learning disability. This may happen if the child resorts to defiant behaviours such as ‘acting-out,’ distracting behaviours such as being the ‘class clown’ or complaints about physical ailments.Adults’ focus might be on the undesired actions and the learning difficulty could be overlooked.
Emotional issues may aggravate learning difficulties.Constant failure to succeed at school may lead to stress or feelings of inferiority which can intensify the learning problem. A child who, for example, consistently struggles with certain academic tasks may decrease the child’s ability to pay attention and concentrate on the work.
On the other hand, a child with learning difficulties who enjoys good emotional health may find it easier to cope with challenges. This can enhance school performance.

This last finding emphasises the importance of ensuring that children with a learning difficulty or disability are well supported emotionally and socially. On the positive side, parents and teachers usually do try to understand the complexities of the interaction between emotional functioning and learning difficulties. Most do try to ensure that the help the child receives is not limited to academic remediation.

Content for this post was based on an article entitled ‘Understanding children’s hearts and minds: Emotional functioning and learning disabilities’ written by Jean Cheng Gormon and available at: www.idonline.org/article/626292/?theme=print.

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Martin Doherty, writing for The Conversation, says that at the age of about four, children reach important milestones in brain development.

One of these is a huge improvement in understanding others’ thoughts and feelings. This is the start of empathy. Another is in spatial thinking—understanding how objects are positioned and related. This is the beginning of the ability to read maps.

Martin and his colleague, Catherine Sayer, conducted a study with 175 two to five-year-olds to explore how children are able to use scale models to figure out where something is in the real world. At about four, children are able to use a scale model of a room to work out where something is. We thought that this might result from children’s understanding of how one thing can represent something else. But we actually found that four-year-olds’ ability to use scale models came from their spatial abilities.

At the same age, children start to understand that someone’s behaviour is due to what that person believes, not necessarily what is really the case. This has interesting consequences.

If you’ve played hide-and-seek with young children, you may have noticed that they aren’t always very good at it. They love the ritual of looking in all the wrong places first, but beforehand they may tell you where they are going to hide, hide in the same place every time, or not be especially hidden.

After their fourth birthday, they get much better at hide and seek. They understand that the seeker looks in the wrong places because they don’t know where the hider is.

At about three to four children also start to tell lies. They realize they can make someone believe something that isn’t true.

Understanding symbols

Martin’s earlier research with fellow psychologist Josef Perner suggests that four-year-olds don’t just start to understand how others’ minds work. Figuring this out is part of the development of an understanding of “representation”—that symbols, like thoughts, words, or pictures, can be used to stand for something else.

Children start to think about how words relate to objects. This means, for instance, knowing that “animal” can refer to something you already have a name for, such as “rabbit”. This might help children learn the new word.

Their ability to use a understand the components of pictures also improves around this age. Very young children use a lot of trial and error to complete a jigsaw, picking up random pieces to see if they fit. By the time they are about four years old, they start to use the picture as a guide, trying to connect lines and match bits of colour, while checking the guide picture on the box lid.

Developmental experiments

Another ability children develop at around four is using scale models. A classic set of developmental experiments involved a model of a regular household room. The real room had typical furniture—sofa, table, cupboard and so on—and the model had miniature versions laid out in the same way.

Children were shown where something was hidden in the model and told to find an object hidden in “the same place” in the room. Children of around four can find the object using the identical layouts. If shown a sticker under a particular chair in the model room, for example, they can go straight to the “same” chair in the other room. This is the fundamental understanding required to read maps.

Adults see scale models and maps as representations. Maps represent a town or a country. A scale model of, say, the Eiffel Tower represents the real thing. At first, Martin suspected children’s ability to use scale models is more evidence of understanding representation at this age.

He was wrong. Instead, the researchers found that this ability is based on a development in children’s spatial abilities that also occurs at about four. This is the ability to think about spaces and where objects are within them. Spatial abilities help with maths skills, and good spatial ability is linked to an interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Their experiment was simple. They compared the model room task with a test of understanding how representation works. The two abilities develop around the same age, but they found they were not related. Children who could do one task couldn’t necessarily do the other.

They also had a test of purely spatial ability. Children who passed the model room task also passed the spatial task. So it looks like the model room task relied on children‘s spatial thinking.

They don’t yet know why two important but apparently unrelated abilities arise at the same time. Perhaps it’s related to changes in the growing brain at this interesting age.

Provided by The Conversation.

Image supplied by Freepik.