The excerpt below is from our webinar Challenging Behaviors of Children with DMD. Thank you to our guest psychologist Dr. Natalie Truba of Nationwide Children’s Hospital. Click here to listen to the full podcast episode.
One of the main goals of school is to help support kids in learning what they need to learn and how they need to learn it. And the things that these kids with Duchenne need in order to succeed are going to look quite different from the other kids. If the kids are struggling to manage their emotions in the classroom setting…
a one-to-one aid will help.
The school setting can be incredibly overwhelming from a sensory standpoint for these kids. They’re just asked to do things that are really unrealistic at times. When you know how these boys’ brains are processing information and not really regulating well, and then we put them in a very overwhelming setting and they’re not learning at the same rate as other kids, it’s obvious that these kids are just overwhelmed by so many things…
Many schools offer one-to-one aides when there’s physical decline. But sometimes we get so fixated on the physical progression of the disease that we overlook some of the even more paralyzing aspects, like emotional instability, social exclusion, and environmental overwhelm.
Having a calm helpful adult available to them at all times can really be a game changer for the child, the teacher, and the other students in the classroom as well.
