The excerpt below is from our webinar Challenging Behaviors of Children with DMD. Thank you to psychologist Dr. Natalie Truba of Nationwide Children’s Hospital for being our guest speaker. Click here to listen to the podcast episode.
The school setting can be incredibly overwhelming for kids with Duchenne. They’re just asked to do things that are really unrealistic at times…
The neurocognitive components of Duchenne impacts not only how they tolerate the environment, but also their executive functioning maturity and their ability to pay attention and do some of the cognitive things that are required of students.
It often seems like there’s a two year delay in acquiring these. So, if they’re facing the demands of 2nd grade, they might really be a couple years behind that from an emotional and functional standpoint. This also means that they are chronically behind their classmates.
Kids with Duchenne can learn the lessons, they just need it to be a little different. So that mismatch is occurring sometimes in those academic settings and it can paint a kid as looking like a different type of learner or an incapable learner… but they’re not.
Are kids with Duchenne capable of learning 2nd grade like their peers? Yes… but their ability to do that in a very overwhelming environment and at the same pace or in the same manner as peers is often a little delayed.
