Discussion forum for delayed kids

LPYdad1

For those who might know me, I will try to open a discussion forum for delayed kids to share my experience and opinion with parents if you are interested. Topics will be divided into:
1. Child brain development
2. ST, OT & PT
3. Sensory integration, attention, motoring & social matter
4. Medication & other treatments
5. Behavioral & emotional problem
6. Parenting & schooling

Sorry for it is being written in English, please excuse my Chinese wordprocessing is a mess. However, you could write me in Chinese in public or in PM as I am a typical Hongie.

As I promised to some parents to write about attention, let me also starts the writing in here.

About attention

I remembered I have written a small passage about the categories of attention in forum. Let me recall this as a brief introduction of attention before going ahead.

Generally our attention are divided into 5 area.
Consistent attention - the duration to be attentive to a topic or a task
Selective attention - the ability to select the right thing to be attentive. Saying like u are now paying attention to read my words, but u wont pay attention to the cloth u are wearing or the sound around your venue.
Convertible attention - the ability to change your attention to a right focus. Simply saying, when you cooked a dinner, your attention will probably change to how to serve the food, but not the preparation process you have done before.
Multi attention - the ability to be attentive to more than one thing. Now, I am thinking what I am writing, at the sam time, my finger is scratching my lips.
Group/joint attention - the ability to follow the group focus WITHOUT any third party recommendation. Saying like when you are walking in the street, there is a crowd in front looking up at the top of a building, you will easily follow their focus and look up at the same direction.

They are interdependent and inter-related.

To start the discussion, we need what is their primary factors affecting each parts and then found tactics to improved them if a kid has a deficiency in this area.

I chosed "Group/joint attention" to be the 1st item for discussion since i subjectively think it is the easiest part to understand and less misunderstood (unlike consistent attention). Also, I have recently read an article in a popular Chin-Eng parenting magazine about "Joint attention". I found the article quite disappointing since it is just saying "Your mother is a woman."

Ok. To understand the component of "Group/Joint attention", we need to go back to our animal and human nature...

Human is categorized as the monkey group in science. But God did give us a lot of intelligence above monkey. As a reflect, the cortex part of a human brain is a lot larger than monkey in actual sense. However, we did have some similarity to monkey. One thing is that we human like monkey are living together. This is the beginning of our group attention. Starting from infant, monkey is living in group. Female raised the infant, male going out for food hunting. Each is sharing their responsibility. This kind of lifestyle is instinctively stored or implanted in our brain since infancy. Where? mostly in our basal ganglia for social mind and cerebellum in terms of memory. That might already give you some hints why a  delayed kid has a deficiency over joint attention,seldom or never could follow group direction by themselves if these brainy parts had irregular development. What if the cortex part of a kid (which means most of receiving, expressing and execution part of a brain) has also its limitation or skewed development, of course, their joint attention will be low.

Going back to animal nature, monkey is not the only mammals living in group. Dogs, whales, horses, etc are mostly living in groups. It is funny that cats (except female lion) are living alone. Female lion are considered to be one of the most intelligent animals in cats category since they knew that they need to live together to share the food, raised their child, etc (Lion is a very special cat group animal since a male lion will RULE the whole group of female lions. Once a new male lion won the throne from the old "lion king", he will mate with all female and kill all the child lions, of course, the female will try to exile all their kids when they have a new "king". So, the female lions will need to share their husband and resources to raise their kids together) That means cats group mostly live alone since their limited intelligence lead them to have a life alone only. It comes to a reflects why many delayed kids trying to separate themselves from group activity or social integration when they have deficiency. When the brain found there is a difficulty in interacting a behaviour with a group, the brain will simply try to cut it out. Not only rejecting to try, the memory in brain will simply be short or even be trying to erased asap. That goes to why the group attention of a kid being weak is that their brain is actually rejecting to remember the need of joint attention when a kid's intelligence is limited.

Is intelligence the only main factor? There is another story. Crow is one of the most intelligent birds in wild nature. They could even use tools to open a nut to eat by themselves. However, the joint attention of a crow is relatively low compared with other birds. Each crow seems to work on their own, seeking food on their own, being alert against enemy on their own. Unlike pigeons, monsoon birds or vultures, they have a relatively group lives than crow. Most importantly, they are alert with each other against enemy. Why?

It means there must be another key component to our joint attention. Once a crow is matured, they will fly away from their home and seek for food and companion, etc, but alone, so does a crow. Their life will be hunting by their own, seeking a life with a companion on their own. Their lives are living in self-sustained once they left home. They do not need to rely on a third party or a group to fight against enemy or bad weather or hunger of food. They don have a social need unlike other birds. That's why their joint attention with each other will be relatively low when they don't  need to work with others for survival. When come to human infancy, of course, I am not saying that your kid has to beg for food to raise their joint attention. But the problem is that they need to have joint attention only if it is necessary to them deep down in their brain. That further goes to that a kid will have a better joint attention when they found once they are attentive as others to an issue, they will have some benefits.

The passage went too long already.
Talk more about components and tactics for joint attention next time.
Please excuse my rough grammar and feel free to write to me PEACEFULLY in public or in pm if you are interested.
I am happy to share with you gals.





.

LPYdad1

Joint Attention (Continued)

My another experience about joint attention. My son has average intelligence, average social skills and initiation. However, his joint attention is comparatively a bit below average as compared with kids in same age. Saying like his attention to lecturer in class wont exceed 10-15 mins, after that I need to remind him to pay attention to group focus every 10 mins. Mustn’t it be some other factors other than intelligence and social need.

Now, going back to my son's life experience in the beginning 4 years. He was fed with beast milk directly through body until 2 yrs. He was naturally born very cute and handsome (This is not a self-compliment and I said it coz it is relevant to this topic) He always has a smile in his face and not afraid of being taken by strangers, not afraid of unknown places or even darkness before 4, a natural born explorer with vast interest over many different things. Adults come to him voluntarily and he don’t even need to ask for people's attention for most of the time. School teachers & staff voluntarily assist him that I even need to remind them to stop since many of those tasks he could complete by himself. In a nutshell, his overall sense of security has been exceed average and having a vast interest over different issue also being ahead of other kids in same age.

Our sense of security & interest in our society provide us a fundamental platform for understanding task and group life. These two senses have developed in every kid since infancy. If these two components are under developed, it means a person has worried or even panic over the environment like an aniaml in wild life and/or a low self-esteem over the society. Of course, such person will no longer pay attention to the group both consciously and unconsciously since the environment or the people are actually endangered or hostile to him. He/she might even try method to escape from group or society or being busy to pay consistent and selective attention to those danger rather than paying attention to the group. In this case, his joint attention will be easily under developed. On the contrary, if a person has an over development in sense of security and interest, he will also easily not pay attention to group since return from group attention will not be treasured in his mind as he will get such return easily. He will be easily unconsciously pay not much attention to group direction. So, my son…

As I said before different components of attention is dependent to each other. More clearly, I should say they are interlocking with each other. Simply saying one goes up, others go up too and vice versa. Joint attention is also interlocking with other components of attention such as consistency, selectivity, convertibility, multiplicity of a person over a task especially on the part of consistency, selectivity and convertibility of a person over a focus. So, if you could help your kid to make improve on other areas, his joint attention would also be affected in the same direction generally.

It is funny that most people knew that our sensory integration plays an extremely vital role in our overall attention level. To be fair, our sensory integration did play a part in our joint attention, but compared with consistent, selective and convertible attention, the importance of our sensory integration to our joint attention may not be as significant as others. Perhaps let me explain the relationship between our sensory development and attention later if we have a chance.

Lastly, some minor issues over the development of our joint attention, such as speech ability, sickness, environment, age/timing, even motoring might also have some impact over the development of joint attention of a kid from time to time.

Perhaps let me get you a mathematical approach to calculate the level of joint attention of your kid out of these components in next passage since each component has its own weight over its development of a kid if u are interested. (For example, intelligence might be the most important part, followed by social need, etc) After that, we will move to share the ideas to improve your kid’s joint attention in later passages.

reb818

Thanks a lot for your sharing!

LPYdad1

Joint attention (Continued)

Here is the calculation matrix and 2 REAL cases for your reference including my son.

As I said, the 7 main factors (intelligence, social need, sense of security, interest, other attention, sensory integration & other minor factors) and its weights (importance) are listed below.

Originally, sensory integration should divide into somatic, frontal, touching, visual, auditoral, smell & taste. Since joint attention seems not having very high importance in sensory integration (unlike other attention bits), I believe an overall general score is good enough. So did other attention components (which should divide into conistency, convertibility, multi-task & selectivity)

	Weight	Sample 1 (My son)				Sample 2
		Score	E-score	A-factor	A-score	Score	E-score	A-factor	A-score
Intelligence	12	7	8.4	N/A(12)	8.4	1.5	1.8	500%(60)	9
Social need	8	7	5.6	N/A(8)	5.6	7	5.6	N/A(8)	5.6
Sense of security	4	5	2	N/A(4)	2	8	3.2	80%(3.2)	2.56
Interest	4	5	2	N/A(4)	2	4	1.6	200%(8)	3.2
Other attention	5	5	2.5	N/A(5)	2.5	4	1.6	200%(8)	3.2
Sensory integration	4	5	2	N/A(4)	2.5	5	2	N/A(5)	2
Other factors	3	7	2.1	N/A(3)	2.1	2	0.6	500%(15)	3
Total	40	41	24.6	N/A	25.1	31.5	16.4	N/A	26.8
Adjusted total/ Percentile				40	62.75%			108.2	24.8%

Score (Score):

It is range from 0 – 10.

If your kid has an overdevelopment of a category, please mark it LOWER and NOT HIGHEST since an overdevelopment should mean an obstacle rather than a gearing to the relevance of "joint attention". Of course, if there is an underdevelopment of a kid for a category, please just mark as it is accordingly.

Effective score (E-score):

Score X weight X 0.1

(Saying like my son’s intelligence E-score is 8.4 instead of 7 since it weight is 12)

Adjustment factor (A-factor):

There are 3 adjustment factors

1)If you mark any category a score >8 (out of 10), its importance should reduce to 80% since its excellence should be no longer relevant to “Joint attention” over certain level.

2)If you mark any category a score 3-5 (out of 10), its importance should increase to 200% since the delay in such category will burden the development in “Joint attention” to some extent.

3)If you mark any category a core <3 (out of 10), its importance should increase to 500% since the serious delay in such category will significantly burdent the development in “Joint attention” to a large extent.

The mark in blanket () under A-factor is the weight of a category X the adjustment factor (A-factor) if any. For example, in sample 2, its weight of intelligence should be 60 instead of 12 since the adjustment factor increased to 500%

Adjusted score (A-score):

E-score X A-factor (if any)

Adjusted total and Percentile

Sum up all adjusted total in blanket () and added up all A-score

Percentile = Total A-score/adjusted total

RESULTS and my opinion

Over 75%

Such kid reached the average level of joint attention of a kid. Not much work is necessary.

50-75%

Such kid's "joint attention" is below average but not serious. Attention and some work is necessary to improve.

30-50%

Such kid's joint attention is seriously below average. Fierce work should be carried quickly to bring him back the joint attention level and other category which he has delay asap.

<30%

Such kid is probably having a serious delay and doing a serious program for improvement. Joint attention, on the contrary, may not even a priority for him to improve.

Next passge we should probably share the tactics to improve a kid's joint attention , mostly probably unde categories 30-50% & 50-75% if you are interested.