Take every opportunity to reinforce the coping strategies your child learns. Having a life-threatening illness in the first year of life has many implications on both the child and her family. Our research on the topic revealed that exposure to chemicals meant to kill cancer cells also cause similar deficits. These learning problems- despite being permanent are considered a relatively small price to pay compared to saving a child’s life.
Nevertheless, these symptoms present a whole set of new challenges for both the child and her family. The more common learning difficulties observed among children who were exposed to extreme medical procedures include the following: Difficulty remaining on-task and maintaining focus, memory gaps, difficulty in understanding basic concepts and sustaining a coherent trains of thought, speech delays and lags in expressive language and difficulty being flexible, preferring rigid ideas and evaluations. When we say that learning disabilities are lifelong conditions, we mean that there is no cure. But there are educational interventions that teach that child how to manage and cope with her condition.
