The Corona crisis has caused environmental deprivation to become more widespread than usual (Pixels)
Psychological studies differentiate between children with autism and children with environmental deprivation. According to the American Mental Health and Community Welfare Code, autism is a neurological difference whose spectrum shapes the individual’s perception and interaction with the world around him, while environmental deprivation or poverty indicates a delay in comprehensive growth in achieving developmental milestones in children. Children, and although both affect children socially and cognitively, they are different.
In the first five years of a child’s life, physical and behavioral skills are supposed to be acquired, most of which are inspired by their parents’ interaction with them, showing love, affection, affection, and joint play. Thus, speech and language skills, fine motor skills, cognitive and analytical skills, and then social skills develop with the child. And emotional.
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Therefore, during the first years of a child’s life, if he is noticed to be delayed in two or more stages of these skills, this may become an indication of developmental disorder and environmental deprivation.
Delay in a set of basic skills at a child’s age is the most prominent symptom of environmental deprivation (Pixels)
The following factors are among the most prominent causes of environmental deprivation in children:
Isolated environment
Parental preoccupation
Relying on the mobile phone to entertain the child
The mother suffers from postpartum depression
The previous factors may appear in the form of symptoms that closely resemble autism, including linguistic delay, failure to respond to calls, distraction, and constant preoccupation with certain movements.
But the difference here, as the Development Blog points out, is that the environmentally deprived child is quicker to respond to treatment, which depends on changing the environment surrounding the child, integrating him more with the surrounding community, and the parents’ focus on continuous play and talk and creating joint activities with the child.
Environmental deprivation child is faster to respond to treatment (Shutterstock)
The most important steps of treatment
Nourhan Ghali (36 years old), who works as a freelance journalist in Egypt, says, “I was not expecting a shock when the kindergarten that my three-year-old child attends told me that he suffers from autism,” especially since she did not notice in him any of the signs of delay that she had previously read about children. Autism, and that she did not notice his delay in integrating with his peers or his linguistic delay, and she did not pay attention to the matter when she called her only child by his name and he did not respond to her. She thought that all of these things were normal because she was alone with him most of the time, and there were no neighbors or friends around them who could To integrate with them.
Nourhan set off looking for more than one doctor to accurately diagnose his condition. She then learned the term “environmental deprivation.” She added, “I did not expect that environmental poverty would affect my child to the extent of delayed mental abilities.”
For many days, Nourhan Ghaly blamed herself for being the cause of her child’s suffering, after the medical diagnosis she resorted to at the autism treatment center at Abbasiya Hospital in Cairo, which Nourhan says is “one of the most important autism centers in the Arab world,” adding that she learned through... Her experience is that environmental deprivation cannot be diagnosed and differentiated from autism except by a psychiatrist, because these centers are completely ineffective in the initial diagnosis of the disease and treatment methods.
Nourhan continued, "The beginning was to move away from the mobile phone and change the world around him. I started with his father to find a shared space for simple daily activities that were appropriate for his age, in addition to pressuring him to pronounce what he wanted without giving it to him directly. I was pressuring him to ask for water or food and to call things by their proper names." "In addition to stopping using a second language when dealing with him, according to doctors, bilingualism in that first stage of his life contributed greatly to his distraction."
Staying away from the mobile phone is the first step in treating environmental deprivation (Pixels)
Impact of Corona
“The Corona crisis has caused environmental deprivation to become more widespread than usual due to the long periods of isolation that children spent at home, the preoccupation of parents with remote work, and the absence of the idea of visits from family and friends. This has contributed in some way to an increase in the rates of environmental deprivation children in recent years,” according to Says Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist Dr. Osama Younis.
Younis told Al Jazeera Net that the common features between autism and environmental deprivation make the diagnosis most likely move towards autism, but the difference is clear between the two, especially if the child’s change is sudden, unlike his previous nature. An autistic child shows signs of autism from the beginning of his introduction to the outside world because it is a disease. Nervous.
On the other hand, environmental deprivation occurs - according to Younis - after the child’s initial interaction with movement and the first skills such as touch, walking, the beginnings of speech, and emotional responses to laughter and play, but suddenly, for reasons surrounding his environment, isolation occurs and interest in him declines, and the child turns to the mobile phone, which becomes his only companion, which helps To increase his distraction.
Consultant child psychiatrist, Dr. Osama Younis (Al Jazeera)
Dr. Osama Younis identifies the common characteristics between autism and environmental deprivation, which are “lack of visual contact, linguistic delay, and cessation of social interaction,” in addition to the possibility of the child suffering from some motor syndromes, but the difference here is that they are related to autism from its beginning, while in the child of environmental deprivation, these are often Movement syndromes stem from what the child follows on the mobile phone.
Regarding the treatment of environmental deprivation, the child psychiatry consultant explains to Al Jazeera Net that the largest part of it is borne by the mother because she is the person who is supposed to sit most with the child at that stage, and the participation of the father and the close environment is necessary, and the idea of isolation that some families practice recently may become a problem. Sometimes the harm is greater than the benefit, which is why the idea of social relations must be restored as a safety valve for many dangerous situations that families may go through for which they do not know solutions.
Source: Al Jazeera