Adaptive Abilities Special Education

Dunlap breaks down adaptive abilities in children into three primary categories: motivation, socio-emotional skills, and self-care or self-help skills. All of these skills are necessary for healthy and all around development in children. For children with special needs, developing these skills and maintaining them at moderate levels can be challenging, depending on the nature of the conditions that hamper their learning. This paper will consider these skills outlined by Dunlap with respect to problems children with special needs have and to suggest approaches to intervene with such difficulties.

Motivation, as Dunlap (2009) explains it, includes a number of activities. These activities may be intrinsic or extrinsic. Motivational activities include self-regulation with respect to behavior and choices. It also includes behaviors that demonstrate movement toward autonomy. One very fundamental objective of child rearing and education is to develop children who grow into self-reliant, independent, functioning adults. Therefore motivation is a very critical area in development. Children with special needs may have a few kinds of troubles in this area. They have the internal motivation for these activities, but if the nature of their special needs condition is physical, they may not have the physical...

If the special needs of the child includes intellectual or learning deficiencies or differences, the child may not be able to recognize how these activities are important. The child may not be able to generate these ideas or motivations intrinsically. The child may not be able to remember these behaviors if developed or taught as well as experience difficulty during the learning process of motivation behaviors.
Dunlap (2009) calls socio-emotional skills essential. To this author, these are some of the most important skills for a child to develop as their intensity affects the development of nearly all other skills. Socio-emotional skills include self-esteem, the development of empathy, the ability to take one and shift between perspectives, development of morality, prosocial behaviors, and the existence of interpersonal relationships. Self-esteem is necessary to survival, especially for children, whose formative experiences and their assimilation into their live experience dictate the kind of adults they will be and what kind of lives they will live overall. Empathy and prosocial behaviors are in great lack among those who are narcissistic, sociopathic, and psychopathic. Without these skills, children cannot develop a sense of morality and will not be able to…